Resonant Reading (Wednesday)-Amazon rainforest-Jabr
Ferris Jabr on his book Becoming Earth
Facilitators use a light hand, posting the reading in the chat and calling on whoever’s Zoom hand is up. Suggestions for readings* come from group members, who also take turns facilitating, if they want to try that role.
The reading for this session:
“More than 10 years ago, I learned this astonishing fact: That the Amazon rainforest doesn’t just receive the rain on which it depends. It generates about half of the rain that falls on its canopy each year. And the way this happens is so fascinating because it’s more than just trees and plants pulling water from the soil and releasing what they don’t need to the atmosphere. In addition to doing that, they’re also continually spewing these invisible plumes of tiny biological particles that are called bioaerosols. So these would be things like pollen grains, microbes, fungal spores, little bits and pieces of leaves, even little pieces of insect shells. All of these tiny biological particles get swept high into the atmosphere. And they give something for all that water vapor released by the forest to condense onto. And that’s how clouds form. Clouds form when water vapor condenses onto suspended particles in the atmosphere. And in places like the Amazon, and indeed wherever there is dense life, biological particles are the most important seeds for clouds in the atmosphere, not inert inanimate particles like dust and soot. So then some of these particles even seed ice crystals within the clouds. So as you were mentioning, there’s a particular bacterium, Pseudomonas syringae, and it has extremely effective ice nucleators on its cell surface. So these are proteins that can arrange free-flowing water molecules into a solid frozen crystal. So that microbe and other particles encourage water to freeze within clouds. That makes them heavier and larger and more likely to burst and fall as rain. And in fact, most of the rain that falls on land, even in tropical regions, begins as ice crystals in clouds and then melts on the way down. So microbes and other biological entities and biological detritus is hugely important for the water cycle, not just above the Amazon, but really around the world. So life really is creating the weather all the time, not just receiving or experiencing the weather.
—Ferris Jabr on his book Becoming Earth on Talks at Google”
How to join:
- Join this class from your Web browser: https://zoom.us/j/96865808923, passcode 227385
- Join this class using the Zoom app: Meeting ID: 968 6580 8923
- Join this class by phone: 669 900 6833 US (San Jose) Meeting ID: 968 6580 8923
- Join this class by one-tap on mobile phones: 6699006833,,96865808923# (San Jose)
- Phoning in, but not in the Bay Area? Find your local number: https://zoom.us/u/abL8clvIYT
This is the Zoom link for Wednesdays. For the Zoom link for Saturday, go to Calendar and click on a Saturday session.
Questions? Drop an e-mail to resonant-reading+owner@uucpa.org.
*This activity was formerly called “Sacred Text Reading.” That proved misleading–for one thing, more often than not our sources are secular–but it’s worth describing the qualities of a sacred text, which we still look for in the readings we choose. It is any reading that helps us to:
- connect to something of supreme importance to us
- feel more connected to other beings or to the universe
- feel more intensely alive
- align our lives with our values,
- perceive or feel more deeply
- be more fully and authentically ourselves.