Awhile back I read a fascinating book called Becoming Earth [1]. Conventional wisdom has it that our planet evolved through geological means until it was suitable for life. The theory presented in this book is that it was life itself that brought about the geological changes needed for life to thrive and evolve. For example before our atmosphere contained enough oxygen for air breathing life to evolve, more primitive life forms evolved to add oxygen to the atmosphere. >Life and its environment have coevolved for billions of years, transforming >a lump of orbiting rock into the cosmic oasis we call home. Life breathed >oxygen into the atmosphere, dyed the sky blue, concocted the modern oceans, >and converted barren crust into fertile soil. > It's a fascinating book and I encourage everyone to read it. Now comes news of a recent discovery [2] that certain fungi, using DNA that they appropriated from bacteria, can seed clouds and create rain. Basically the soil itself influencing the sky to send it some rain. Many years ago while walking through a Redwood forest in central California I had an illuminating experience I will never forget. It was drizzling rain. The ground was covered with moss and ferns and all the kinds of things that only grow and a cool wet environment. But then I came to a clearing and walked out into the dry sunshine. It was a clear day, not a cloud in the sky. Looking back at the forest I could see that it was holding in it's own fog like moisture layer. A few years later I moved to the Oregon Coast where I witnessed huge swaths of clearcuts. I could see the rain clouds coming in from the ocean would pass right over the clearcuts until they hit a standing forest which slowed them down so they could dump their rain. Years before climate change was a well understood phenomenon I could see how clearcut logging was upsetting the coastal environment. Planet Earth is one big interconnected organism. Our survival as a species depends on our ability to understand and work with the natural systems that makes life possible. [1] https://www.ferrisjabr.com/book [2] https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aed9652
I recently discovered that April 19th is Bicycle Day. [1] Now I've know for a long time that May is National Bike Month, [2] and within that there is a Ride Your Bike to Work Week, and a Ride Your Bike to Work Day, so I was a little confused as to why there would be a Bicycle Day outside of Bike Month. Well it turns out that Bicycle Day is only peripherally related to riding bicycles. The April 19 event commemorates the day in 1943 when Dr Albert Hofmann rode his bike home fro work after being the first human to ingest a does of LSD, which he invented. From this BBC article [3]: >After taking the drug, Hofmann began to feel unwell, and rode home >unsteadily on his bicycle through the streets of Basel. As the journey >progressed, things got weird. His vision distorted as if he was looking in a >fairground mirror. By the time he made it home, his sense of reality had >disintegrated. > Being both an avid bicycle rider and an old hippie one would think I would have known about Bike Day. Maybe that's because my hippie days were spent in the backwoods of Oregon and not in Haight-Ashbury. While I never did ride a bicycle while high on psychedelics, there was one time when I went surfing on mescaline. The most memorable part of that experience was how the water sparkled and the waves curled in slow motion. It was not scary but very peaceful and left me with an overwhelming sense of well being, much like a good bicycle ride. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicycle_Day_(psychedelic_holiday) [2] https://bikeleague.org/events/bike-month/ [3] https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20260410-the-bizarre-story-of-the-worlds-first-lsd-trip