EIGHT

WATER CIRCULATION IN PLANTS

We may ask why all trees and bushes—or at least most of them—unfold a flower in a five-sided pattern, with five petals. Some botanist might well examine the sap of plants to see if any difference there corresponds to the shape of their flowers.

JOHANNES KEPLER,
ASTRONOMER AND MATHEMATICIAN

THE GREATEST MIRACLE

For all living organisms, hydration equals life; dehydration equals life withdrawn. As any cactus grower can tell you, the way to stimulate flowering is to let a plant dry out and then water it profusely.

Have you ever been in a desert environment after months of drought followed by a downpour of rain, when suddenly sprouts of new life start appearing all over the barren ground? Before long, if the rain continues, there is a verdant carpet of green. Or you may have seen this happen in a natural history movie. It happens in hot climates at the beginning of the rainy season.

It really is miraculous to think that there are many trillions of dormant seeds in the ground waiting—maybe for decades—for the chance to burst into life. Which ones will awaken? If they don’t now, will they awaken the next time? Maybe it’s similar to the billions of souls said to be waiting on the eternal planes for an opportunity to incarnate.

What if there are seeds of life all over the universe, like sleeping beauties waiting for the water prince to come and kiss them into life? There is always this potential for life, just as there is potential in all of our lives for new creativity to break forth when the time and circumstances are right, or when given the right stimulus.

When I was a child, there were tight flower buds made of paper (Japanese, I think), which, if you laid them on a water surface, would gradually open into a beautiful petaled flower. Nature works much more magically. The desert’s irrigating water carries information that reminds the sleeping potentiality that it can actually come to life according to its own template. The water’s kiss of life is a reminder to the seed of its potential to become a plant according to universal cosmic laws. (See chapter 13.)

The more primitive life-forms—bacteria, algae, and worms—were early colonizers of our planet and built the foundations for more complex life-forms. But it was the arrival of the plant kingdom late in Earth’s history that accelerated evolutionary development. Plants had the exceptional role of creating an oxygen-rich atmosphere and the base of the food chain that higher life-forms required.

The aristocrat of the plant kingdom is the tree. We hear much about the important role of the equatorial forests for storing CO₂, but their role in creating beneficial climates and fresh water are seldom acknowledged and little understood.

PHOTOSYNTHESIS

This was undoubtedly the most important process introduced by evolving Nature, for it allowed life to take an enormous stride toward greater complexity and higher levels of energy. Photosynthesis is the process by which organisms, higher plants as well as phytoplankton, algae, and bacteria, convert the sun’s energy into chemical energy. This respiration involves inhaling carbon dioxide, exhaling oxygen, and storing glucose.

This marvelous alchemy transforms the basic, plentiful substance of CO₂ into essential food. Water is the medium, or engine, for this process. The roots bring up water replete with mineral nourishment for the plant. Photosynthesis converts CO₂ and H_2O into carbohydrates and oxygen. The breaking down of carbohydrates produces water of greater volume and higher quality than the water that was taken up, to be transpired by the leaves.

In this way forests actually create water. Richard St. Barbe Baker, founder of Men of the Trees, an international movement to advance tree planting and conservation, demonstrated that planting the right kind of trees can transform desert landscapes into productive forests that both produce new water and attract rainfall.

There is another, more subtle way in which water mediates energy through trees. In order to evolve and sustain itself, life on earth depends on a balance between the positive energy of the sun and the negative energy of Earth. Water acts a bit like sperm, as the fertilizing agent in this process.*26 The tree, as the highest form of the plant, has the vital role of balancing this energy for the benefit of the whole biosphere.

EVOLUTION OF THE FOREST

Viktor Schauberger believed that only people who love the forest should be its caretakers. “Those who view the forest merely as an object of speculation do it and all other living creatures great harm,” he said, “for the forest is the cradle of water. If the forest dies, the springs will dry up, meadows will become barren, and many countries will inevitably be seized by unrest of such a kind that it will bode ill for every one of us.”1

Schauberger’s core belief was that healthy forests are the main source of high-quality water, but that they also ensure that rainfall is available in continental regions that would otherwise become arid. As equatorial deforestation has greatly accelerated since he died, it might be useful to summarize the effects of this devastation.

Plants have been around for 420 million years, which is only 9 percent of Earth’s history. Without plants there could have been no higher life, for plants are the essential link for converting the sun’s energy into food. Trees are the highest form of the plant and the most efficient exchangers of energy between Earth and the sun. The forests are the main source of oxygen, an essential building block of life; they are the planet’s “lungs” but also are vital to producing equable climates.

The establishment of forests was the essential prerequisite for the evolution of higher animals. Trees were also necessary to establish stable landscapes, allowing rivers to channel permanent watercourses and rivers instead of the chaotic migration of alluvial flows and mud delta meanders that had been the norm (and what is found on Mars).

There have been four periods when forests have flourished: in the Carboniferous age 350 million years ago, when land vertebrates became established; in the Jurassic age, the time of the dinosaurs, 170 million years ago; in the Eocene, 60 million years ago, when primitive mammals first appeared; and in the past 500,000 years, during which the cultures of modern Man developed (see figure 2.1). Perhaps in each case the forests delivered a boost in the oxygen content of the atmosphere, which may have been a trigger for an evolutionary explosion of life-forms.

These extensive forests developed in the equatorial regions where heat was plentiful to prime a remarkable engine for moderating extremes of temperature and often-chaotic climates. In the first case they were evergreen forests, interspersed with enormous swamps. In the Jurassic era they were more diverse. In the Eocene, when the current great mountain ranges were rising, there were large tropical jungles, perhaps not too different from our contemporary ones but with less biodiversity, that flourished on all the continents until the late nineteenth century.

Earth’s restless periods—volcanic eruptions and mountain building—often led to the establishment of forests, with mighty rivers providing nutrients for the plants. The forests built up a soil profile for the establishment of biodiversity, the essential conditions for evolutionary progress. Forests were the natural cover of probably three-quarters of the planet’s land surface during these periods of evolutionary expansion.

DESTRUCTION OF THE FOREST

Over the possibly half a million or so years of human history, our species has been responsible for reduction of the forest cover to about 25 percent of its optimum extent. Early agriculturists burned clearings to grow their crops, then moved on to allow replenishment of fertility. Early civilizations, some well documented and others passed down in story, felled vast tracts of forest.

Many of these lands became desertified, becoming the Gobi, Sind, Arabian, Mesopotamian, North African, and Kalahari Deserts—probably through a combination of deforestation and climate change. Whole societies were uprooted and forced to migrate in their search for subsistence. The same is likely to happen today where great swaths of rich equatorial forest have been cleared. In those days there was somewhere else for the displaced to go, because the world’s population was still relatively small. Today, however, because of overpopulation and an unsustainable birth rate, any climate changes that produce crop failure can mean only disease, starvation, and the decimation of life.

Ten thousand years ago the land bordering the Mediterranean was covered with forests, mainly oak and conifer. The forests of Lebanon provided timber for the Phoenician empire and their exploring ships in the third century BCE (see box). Two thousand years ago North Africa was so fertile that the Romans called it “the breadbasket” of the Mediterranean; a combination of deforestation and climate change have turned it into arid desert. A thousand years ago 80 percent of Europe was forested; today it is about 20 percent, much of which is monocultured industrial woodland, which lacks the biodiversity and energy of natural forest. In North America, before the arrival of European settlers, the forest extended from the Atlantic to beyond the Mississippi River, and of course west of the Rocky Mountains.

Deforestation Promotes Drought and Erosion

Writing 2,300 years ago in his Critias, Plato described how Attica’s mountains a century or two before had been covered in verdant forest, and her fertile plains had deep soil that, by his day, had become stony shingle. The rainfall and the soil had disappeared because the forests had been cut down.

Even then the forests were sometimes exploited to provide fast economic expansion, regardless of the cost to future generations. In order to outfit a navy capable of ruling the seas, in the early sixteenth century King Henry VIII ordered the felling of a million mature oak trees, virtually denuding England of its finest oaks.

The proportion of the world’s surface covered by forest was reduced from about 75 percent at its optimum to about 50 percent in medieval times. By 1900 it had dropped to about 35 percent. In the frantic rush to get rich quick, regardless of the consequences, the figure has dropped further to 25 percent, and every year we continue to lose equatorial forest the size of Belgium. It has been calculated that 20 percent of all global warming CO₂ emissions results from destruction of the equatorial forest.2

Today unstable social conditions worldwide and irresponsible political leadership favor greedy opportunists anxious to make their fortunes, often illegally, by logging many of the finest stands of prime forest on every continent. This destruction will be seen in the future as dangerous planetary vandalism, because it will bring more extreme weather, loss of soil, and increased desertification.

Crucially, though still little understood, forests create the environment for the propagation of water, the “firstborn” of the energies of life, as Schauberger put it; they moderate the climate, making it cooler in summer and warmer in winter. They are also responsible for the mineralization and fertilization of the surface soils, essential for the nutrition of higher life-forms. Most important of all, forests create rich humus and bacterial life, the foundation of a rich biodiversity, which stores and recycles vast amounts of rainfall, preventing floods on lower land.

Scientist James Lovelock believes recent deforestation to be the cause of global warming, because forests are the principal regulator of climate. In his book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, he puts the case that global warming is now unstoppable and that Earth’s capacity to sustain humanity by the end of this century could be as low as one billion people (see box). They would be limited to those environments remaining habitable, such as northern Europe, Siberia, Canada, Japan, and southern South America.

Chaos: Gateway to Evolution

Lovelock comments: “Over the last million years, several climatic events brought decimation of numbers of the human species, yet each trauma seemed to herald an evolutionary advance; e.g., between the ice ages, sea level rose 120 meters, flooding the plains, but Homo sapiens emerged.”3 (See chapter 11 for more about the way that chaos introduces higher energies.) Lovelock believes that humanity should benefit from the coming population collapse.

MONOCULTURE AND BIODIVERSITY

A typical conifer plantation is impenetrable, dark, and feels dead—a veritable green desert. No birds sing nor animals scurry, and there is little opportunity for any other plants to grow. Those that do are removed on the theory that they take away nourishment from the trees. In fact, their absence increases the competition. The individual trees are all of the same age and species; they vie with each other for space and nutrients, for all their roots go down to the same level, creating a hardpan of salts, which prevents access to the valuable minerals and energized groundwater below. There is only a certain amount of each element and chemical compound available that is suitable for that species, and all the trees whose existence is wholly dependent on them must compete to get it.

Plantations of young, fast-growing trees are thirsty and dry out the soil. These young trees are then clear-felled, leaving a scene of devastation with the valuable soil vulnerable to erosion. It is hardly surprising that the wood from such a plantation is of very poor quality.

A natural, undisturbed forest has rich diversity in color, form, and vitality that brings a sense of inner tranquillity and peace. In addition, old-growth forests with mature trees that have deep taproots and minimal growth are superb for water catchment. Water is central to the quality of life. By degrading the quality of water and limiting the conditions required for the evolution of biodiversity, we put at risk the health of the whole biosphere.

There is a threat of worldwide famine resulting from the wheat stem rust fungus, which is resistant to all fungicides. Wheat suffers, as does the potato, from genetic monoculture through agronomy’s plant-breeding techniques. There is a similar problem with rice. The urgent need is to restore the genetic diversity of native species of all basic foods in order to protect our future food supplies.

TROPICAL RAIN FORESTS

The Prince of Wales has proposed a new partnership with Brazil, Indonesia, and the Congo to launch better integrated rural development programs to halt deforestation. He has emphasized the irreplaceable roles of the rain forest in providing an air-conditioning system for the entire planet and producing 20 billion tons of fresh water every day.4

It would cost £50 (nearly $80) a ton to sequester carbon with new technologies being proposed. The rain forests do it for free and more effectively. The “Stern Review,” a 2006 report on the economics of climate change, put the cost of halving deforestation at $15–20 billion. Prince Charles estimated a cost of $30 billion to stop deforestation, less than 1 percent of worldwide annual insurance premiums. He is encouraging multinational businesses to commit funds to this purpose and has personally approached heads of governments with some promising results.

One huge obstacle is the collusion of government with international agribusiness: for ranching and to grow biofuels, mining, and logging interests. The latest madness—the creation of enormous plantations to grow biofuel crops that will satisfy modern Man’s insatiable dependence on the automobile—removes land from productive food production that is already down because of changes in rainfall patterns and increased costs of agriculture. Multinational corporations have cynically attacked and disabled courageous campaigns by Brazilian (and international) environmentalists over several decades.

One of the richest natural experiences is to visit a tropical rain forest, one of the priceless jewels of our ecosystem. They are vital not just for the incredible richness and variety of their fauna and flora (Amazonia contains about 30 percent of all terrestrial biological material) but in substantially modifying the world’s climate, making temperate regions more productive (see plate 12). They were formerly on four continents, but now cover only about half their extent of 500 years ago. The South American is the most complete, at about 75 percent of its original size; the Southeast Asian, from India to Indonesia and Australia, is about a third of what it was; and in Africa, it is about 40 percent of its original size. The Central American rain forest has been virtually eradicated.

More than twice as much of the sun’s energy reaches Earth’s surface at the tropics as in high latitudes, where the sun’s angle above the horizon is very low. The tropical rain forests of the world act as heat pumps, transferring to higher latitudes some of the enormous energy they generate, thus balancing the temperature difference. Without them, the equatorial regions would be much hotter and the higher latitudes much colder. The larger the mass of a tropical rain forest, the more effectively it functions as a heat pump.

A gigantic, irreplaceable water pump, the Amazon rain forest is an essential part of the planetary circulation system, whereby a drop of water evaporated from the Atlantic is recycled six times on its way to the Andes (see figure 8.1). Masses of humid air energy move from the Amazon basin to temperate and higher latitudes. The airflow then splits into three: the southern part is deflected as far as Patagonia; the central part flows over the Andes into the Pacific, continuing west as the trade winds; the northern airflow crosses the Caribbean and helps to drive the Gulf Stream northeastward to Europe. Argentina, thousands of miles from the Amazon, gets half its rainfall from the South American jet stream, powered by the Amazon water pump. The Midwest of the United States—the golden corn belt—depends on rain brought to it from the Amazon basin in spring and early summer.

Rain forests act as regulators and balancers of atmospheric and oceanic systems. A new theory, based on the concept of rain forests as organic rather than mechanistic thermodynamic systems, shows how they not only regulate the world’s climates but can also manage their own environment (see box).

Now that we have a study of the Amazon rain forest showing how the heat pump works, it is possible to conjecture that the African continent would not have been nearly as dry as it is today if its rain forest was large enough to pump moisture northward. In Southeast Asia rain forest destruction has reached cataclysmic proportions, with a free-for-all between corrupt local interests and greedy multinational companies, particularly in Borneo, where most of the virgin forests, theoretically protected, are likely to disappear within a decade. Courageous projects are being attempted. A conservation group trying to save the last remaining orangutans has replanted a parcel of the cleared forest and managed to increase the number of primates in that region.5

Forests Are Biotic Pumps

Two Russian physicists, Anastassia Makarieva and Victor Gorshkov, have challenged the prevailing mechanistic theory of a thermodynamic driver of air mass circulation with a new theory of a biotic pump driven by the prolific tropical vegetation. The enormous area of leaf coverage in the forest produces a prodigious amount of evaporation, condensation, and convection, which draws in saturated air from the ocean to give rise to the trade winds. If the natural forest is replaced by grassland or crops that cannot provide the high level of evapotranspiration necessary to draw in the moist sea air, a reverse air flow from land to sea will dry up the soil. Without the rain forest to recycle rain, precipitation will disappear from one coast to the other, creating a desert as dry as the Negev in Israel. Makarieva and Gorshkov’s thesis implies that the world cannot do without its rain forests. Instead of quibbling over how much should be conserved, we must ensure that no more forest is destroyed. Forests are not just carbon sinks or havens of biodiversity; they have an essential and irreplaceable hydrological role in Earth’s climate. They can even anticipate approaching drought by increasing evapotranspiration through advanced leaf production.

Makarieva and Gorshkov say that biotic regulation of the water cycle also takes place in undisturbed temperate and boreal forests in the spring and summer months when the pressure gradient runs from ocean to land. (See also Peter Bunyard, “The Real Importance of the Amazon rain Forest,” www.Schauberger.co.uk/articles.)

Figure 8.1. The Amazon heat engine transfers heat from the tropics to cooler latitudes, moderating the world’s climates. Intense evapotranspiration from the leaf surfaces sucks in the trade winds that bring the rain. Deforestation will cause these winds to falter, eventually reducing the forest to desert. Accelerated melting of the Greenland ice cap may cause the saltwater pumps that keep the Gulf Stream flowing to fail, causing rapid cooling of northwest Europe. (A. Bartholomew)

TEMPERATE RAIN FORESTS

Temperate forests, though a fraction of their former spread, still cover a large part of planet Earth, but temperate rain forests occur in only a few regions where there is abundant rainfall precipitated by onshore winds on coastal mountains.*27

The most prolific temperate rain forest, where in places the rainfall exceeds three meters (ten feet) a year, is the Great Bear Rainforest, which runs from Vancouver Island in British Columbia up through the Alaska panhandle. This magnificent virgin wilderness is richer in species than most tropical rain forests and is now the focus of an important conservation project by ForestEthics, Greenpeace, Sierra Club Canada, and British Columbian pressure groups.

This rain forest is very fertile. Its rivers are also the cleanest in the world, as the water is filtered by the tree roots and transpired by the trees in a cycle that produces the purest new water.

It is home to hundreds of species of mammals, including bear, wolves, and cougar, as well as various species of Pacific salmon, half a billion of which make the perilous journey every summer up the rivers of their birth to spawn. These salmon are the primary diet of the bears and dozens of other animals. They do not return to the ocean as Atlantic salmon do, but die where they spawn. They have not fed in the fresh water, so they bring the energy of the ocean up to the mountain pastures. Their rotting bodies also feed the trees, providing 80 percent of the nitrogen that helps the coast redwood, Douglas fir, Sitka spruce, western hemlock, and red cedar to grow so tall and prolifically.6

THE CREATION OF WATER

Through their transpiration, trees actually create water. Old-growth trees grow little but have deep tap roots that raise the water table and create a healthy water catchment area. Although same-age plantations in hotter countries may dry out the land, there is much evidence that even in arid or desert conditions, appropriate species’ tree planting brings an increase in rainfall. This may be due to chemicals produced by photosynthesis, which help to generate clouds.7

Only when the ground surface is colder than the air (that is, it has a positive temperature gradient) is rainwater able to penetrate the soil, a fact not generally recognized by mainstream science. Rainwater releases its free oxygen into the surrounding soil, activating microorganisms in the soil’s upper layers. Sinking deeper into the substrata, the rainwater continues to release surplus oxygen. As it cools toward the 4°C anomaly point (39°F), the remaining hydrogen combines with the now passive oxygen, creating new water molecules.

MATURATION OF WATER

Pure, immature water is created at the temperature when its density is highest, about 4°C (39°F). It sets out on a return journey from the deepest levels, becoming transformed from a hungry “taking” substance into a mature state that is ready to nourish living systems.

The water rises through strata from which it takes different subtle energies, becoming warmer and absorbing minerals and trace elements. These inorganic nutrients cannot be absorbed by plants and microorganisms, but on their upward journey the molecules become ionized; they take on an electric charge that allows them to recombine as organic, ionized elements, which the microorganisms and plants can absorb.

The water molecule carries the energy of the trace elements it absorbed in the roots right up into the tree’s crown. From the leaves’ minute stomata it is transpired into the atmosphere. On reaching its energy and temperature anomaly point at an altitude of about 3,000 meters (10,000 feet) above the earth, it is once more in receiving mode, ready to absorb the finer and more spiritual energies from the sun and the cosmos. Over time this continuous water cycle feeds the processes that drive evolution.

During the night the descending phloem plays another important role. It interacts with suspended positively charged xylem, and because of the prevailing positive temperature gradient (see figure 8.2 above) is drawn toward the exterior of the trunk. This produces new wood growth that becomes denser and harder with winter cold, forming an annual ring.

Figure 8.2. Tree metabolism. The vital exchange between yang solar and yin earth energies for the production of photosynthesis, chlorophyll, and carbohydrates and its role in the creation of water. (A. Bartholomew)

On a commercial plantation, a shade-demanding tree grows more branches in order to protect itself from direct sunlight. The sap is therefore diverted from its normal progress up the trunk to nourish the spurious branches, twisting around the extra knots in the trunk.

SOIL AND NUTRITION

Cooling was the key to water making its appearance on the surface of the earth. As the groundcover spread, the lowering temperature affected the deeper ground, allowing the water table to rise, bringing minerals, trace elements, and nutritional substances nearer to the surface. This created the conditions for higher quality plants to evolve. These higher plants had deeper root systems that brought up minerals from a different horizon.

The more evolved plants held the soil together, trapping moisture that helped to attract microbacterial activity to break down the mineral particles into finer dust, the first step toward the humus that is necessary for higher plant forms. The root systems became more complex, interweaving at different levels so that they could not easily be disentangled. Greater fertility brought a richer soil, too rich for the pioneer plants, which now disappeared. A more favorable microclimate in the higher soil levels increased the diversity of bacteria, which encouraged more complex root systems.

This process of soil formation took several million years before larger plants, such as small bushes and trees, were able to gain a hold; and they had to go through thousands of years of evolution before a forest could develop. The forest is the most productive environment for the accumulation of soil and fertile humus. It is self-fertilizing and self-sustaining. The great forests were able, over thousands of years, to build up twenty feet or more of soil depth. With our heedless disrespect for Nature’s bounty, in one century we have allowed these great soil banks to be eroded and destroyed, first through deforestation and then by careless tilling of the unprotected soil surface.

The web of life that evolves in a natural forest is so complex and sensitive that the removal of key species can cause a depletion of the energy and lead to a progressive decline of the system, as more species fail for want of the sustenance that was provided by the missing species. A hole is created in the complex root network that is the interconnecting link between deeper ground and surface. Because the root system raises the water table, the disappearance of a species creates a hole in the water system that supplies the nutrients. Over time, a shortage of nutrients puts more plants under stress, leading to more species extinction.

Figure 8.3. Energy exchange. Schauberger’s diagram illustrates the way in which a plant is a biocondenser of positive atmospheric and negative geospheric energies. (Callum Coats)

It is clear that there is much lacking in our present understanding of the needs of plants, especially trees. Our agricultural and forestry policies are extractive rather than sustaining. There is a close relationship between trees and growing food, the next stop on our journey.

Did the farmer know how important the forest is, he would cherish it as he would life itself.

VIKTOR SCHAUBERGER, FERTILE EARTH