Contents Figures vi Introduction by Callum Coats vii Sources xii 1. A DIFFERENT VIEW OF NATURAL PHENOMENA 1 Nature's Secrets Unveiled: In Transmutation Lies Eternity 1 Does an insuperable force of gravity actually exist? 4 Weightlessness prevails over gravity 6 Decomposive energy triggers cancer 6 Effect on Earth's orbit of weight of growing things 7 Distinguishing a genuine emulsion from one created by ultrasound 11 The creation of higher-quality products of emulsion 12 Conditions under which eggs, seeds and cells can engender 13 How is a bird able to become temporarily independent of the ground? 14 All life emerges from the Mr-form of the egg 17 How did originally aquatic plants escape from the medium of water? 18 What role does water, as a carrier, play in these formative and transformative processes? 19 What is to be understood by a biological vacuum? 20 What is planetary mass-motion? 22 Life is indestructible! 23 All growth must be preceded by decomposition 24 She half-pulled him down; he half-sank on her 24 How can the existence of these reciprocities actually be proven? 25 Distinguishing magnetically charged water from water with the opposite potential 26 The discovery of a new highly potent form of energy 29 A Small Difference — Decomposition or Life-Force? 32 A Different View of Atomic Fission 32 New Concepts of Electricity 35 How does lightning occur? 38 Electrolysis 39 iii 2. THE INFLUENCE OF TEMPERATURE AND WATER MOVEMENT (on Forestry, Water Resources Management and the Formation of Structures) 48 The Formation of Structures 48 The Dying Forest 50 Clear-felling 53 The Circulation of Water Inside the Earth and the Supply of Nutritive Matter 57 The Effects of Groundwater Removal 68 Incorrect Metabolism Destroys the Quality of Water 72 Postscript 75 The Secret of the Trout Motor 75 3. FORESTRY — AGRICULTURE — THE ENERGY INDUSTRY 91 The Forest 91 Agriculture 92 The Energy Industry 93 The First Doubts 93 The Timber Industry, Forestry and Wood Production 94 The Forest and its Significance 98 The Dying Forest — a Peril of Central Europe 108 The Dangerous Sinking of the Groundwater Table 108 Detrimental Technological Influences 109 1. THE DYING FOREST 112 Nature's Increasing Baldness 112 How the Farmer uses his Scythe and Sharpens it by Hammering 113 How the Cow Grazes 115 About the Wild Boar 115 Concerning Dew-Drops 116 How the Forest Sustains Itself 118 Concerning the Russian Cotton Industry 120 The Dying Forest (Part Two) 121 A Global Perspective 121 The Tree as a Water-Factory 122 Wooden or Copper-Plated Ploughs 124 The Effect of Iron Ploughs 126 The Heart of the Plant 126 5. TIMBER AND WATER IN THE BUILDING INDUSTRY Caution in the Use of Timber in the Building Industry 131 The Character of Water in the Building Industry 134 Constructional Defects and their Prevention 137 Lost Knowledge of Timber Growth and Quality 139 6. AGRICULTURE — SOIL FERTILISATION — INCREASED PRODUCTIVITY 142 Noble Fertilisation with the Aid of Planetary Motion 142 Bipolarity 143 The Planetary Movement of Mass 145 Bioecological Agriculture 148 Increase In Soil Productivity 157 Life Force and Natural Fertiliser 163 The Earthworm Sanatorium 166 Building Compost Heaps 168 White Juvenile Earth 175 Concerning the Treatment of the Soil 175 Natural Farm Husbandry 176 Some Pertinent References to 'Tonsingen' and the Use of Water Barrels 182 A Biological Hint 183 Copper Water 184 Re-enlivening Sick Fields 184 Experiments with Copper Implements in Agriculture 185 Field Trials at Farmleiten-Gut Heuberg 186 Results of 1949 Field Trials with Copper Attachments 189 Appendix: Austrian Patent Office — Description of Patent No. 166644 194 Glossary 196 Index 201 Figures The Repulsator. 27 Location of other +4°C isotherms in the atmosphere. 37 Annual ring variations in a 33-year-old plantation tree. 51 The combination of H2O and CO2 into H2CO3 (carbonic acid). 61 The Bio-Plough. 72 Cross-sections of naturally and artificially grown shade-demanding timbers. 104 Unequal growth due to one-sided illumination. 106 The copper-plated plough and harrow. 125 Radiant energies in inorganic (metal) and organic (tree) magnets. 128 The in-ground cistern of amniotic fluid (liquid manure transformer). 154 The subtler processes of growth. 164 The egg-shaped fermentation chamber. 165 The egg-shaped compost heap built around a tree. 170 Sun-ploughing. 179 Showing 15 cm (6 in.) long ears of rye with up to 104 grains per ear. 188 Potatoes grown on alpine farm at Kitzbiihel, Tyrol. 191 VI Introduction What is the essence of a tree? How does a blade of grass grow? What do we really understand of the internal events and forces responsible for their upward thrust towards the heavens, and on what conditions do these energies depend? Where do they come from and how do they interact? What inhibits their proper interaction, and what enhances it? As the pages in this book unfold the reader will not only come to appreciate the immense contribution to humanity of Viktor Schauberger's life-work, but also that humanity must now seize upon his enlightened, penetrating perception of the energetic phenomena underlying physical manifestation and apply them to safeguard its future. Through his deep understanding of the energies responsible for all organic growth and development, his writings in this volume focus on those domains of Nature which are at this time in the greatest need of massive rehabilitative intervention. These are the world's rapidly dwindling forests and the vast expanses of arable land, today increasingly threatened by drought, desertification, fire and flood. This wholesale eradication of the Earth's lungs simply cannot continue. Present systems of land and forest management are largely responsible for the present climatic instability. Mechanistic methods of regeneration and production, which have no truly long-term view and are wholly profit oriented, give no consideration either to the forest's true function or to a living soil's continuing ability to sustain future generations. As has already become evident, the current practice of over-clearing of forest for agriculture and subsequent tillage leads to soil erosion, desertification, mineral impoverishment and developing salination. The inadequacies in the management, or even the actual mismanagement, of the world's stocks of these important resources have now reached a point where the problems of providing an equitable and adequate supply of food to an expanding global population appear almost insuperable. Despite the fertiliser and pesticide industry's extravagant claims, it is becoming more and more apparent that these methods are no longer effective and are providing both timber and food of increasingly inferior quality. It is therefore time to consider fresh approaches. What is necessary is to employ many more people in developing and applying methods for improving food quality. With higher-quality food, Vll people would not only be healthier physically and in mind and spirit, but they would also require less food to maintain life. Far from seeing the present population explosion as a problem, Viktor Schauberger advocated it, posing the question: 'Is it therefore so illogical to recognise the Will of Nature in the rapid increase in the number of human beings? Surely several hundred million more people are needed, who with their energy and strength can help restore this ravished lump of excrement, the Earth, to its former glory!' It is here that Viktor Schauberger has a great deal to offer in the way of remedies and provides us with pioneering insights into what makes the world's forests and soils tick. While the restoration of these realms cannot be divorced from the management of water resources conducted in accordance with Nature's laws, these same laws also apply to the ways in which forestry and agriculture should be administered. That is to say, the emphasis should be on long-term continuity and sustainability using natural methods of regeneration and fertilisation, which requires deep knowledge of the interconnected energies that govern these subtle processes. This can only come with both an open mind and a willingness to comprehend the higher dimensional powers that order physical existence. In other words, we must learn to think one octave higher, as Viktor Schauberger often urges. Nature's formative and reproductive processes are extremely subtle, and are based on a delicate, easily upset balance in the intermixture of energies and materials on which they are founded. In our failure either to understand or perceive them, however, we have literally trodden them into the ground. Yet this is the same ground which is supposed to sustain and nourish us, and from which life itself evolves. The time has come for a long overdue and urgent reappraisal of what we are doing; indeed it has now become the imperative of the hour; more particularly, in terms of the fundamentals of forestry and agriculture. Instead of the former vibrant luxuriance of natural forests, where one species fosters the growth and development of another, in today's plantation forests, monocultures of single species of the same age are forced to compete with one another for their necessities of life. In other words, competition, with all its negative consequences, has been introduced into a long-standing, integrated harmony where it never existed before. Instead of smaller acreages and holdings, where produce was fertilised largely organically and crops were religiously rotated, in modern agri-businesses carbon- dioxide-trapping hedgerows were swept away and crops are grown without rotation on an increasingly barren heath. These have to be propped up with artificial fertiliser, which ultimately destroys the soil and its micro-organisms. All the important preconditions and parameters which ensure thriving growth have been altered arbitrarily with scant regard for Nature's essentials. The fundamental flaw in our appreciation of the world and of Nature, and the roots of our present predicament, lie in our unquestioning belief in the correctness of our competitive ideology. This we apply noz only to the treatment of our fellow human beings, but also to long-suffering Mother Nature who nurtures us. So thoroughly are we suffused with this inherently divisive philosophy almost from the day we are born, that we have great difficulty in divorcing ourselves from it and in considering any alternative approach. As its philosophical offshoot, present economic policy worldwide is driven by the perceived desirability of quantitative growth without limit, deemed to be the only solution to international economic stability. Such unlimited growth, however, is impossible on this finite planet, where there is an equally finite amount of raw material from which all else is derived. The only possible future for unlimited growth is therefore a growth in quality. This quantitative drive has resulted in the competitive manufacture and marketing of more and more sophisticated trivia, which have no real and lasting value in terms of natural upward evolutionary progress. Western society, which largely controls global events, has become fascinated with itself and its new toys, and concerns itself mainly with the next innovation. Coupled with this acquisitive urge, of which it is also the cause, there is a huge distortion in perceptions of what is of real worth, when millions are spent on the purchase of football clubs, entertainment facilities and other fantasia. This money should more properly have been spent on redressing the vastly more pressing problems of widespread famine, disease and the environment. However, in this world of economic rationalism, which treats humans merely as the means to an economic end, there is no immediate profit in such action. Material acquisition and the pursuit of pleasure seem to be uppermost in the minds of the majority in so-called 'civilised' countries, who, enclosed within their cities, are almost totally estranged from Nature. Into this invidious scheme of things, the so-called 'third world' countries are also being inexorably drawn in their quest for the same ephemerae. Worse than this, in the process they have lost their traditional values and practices, their natural interaction with their habitat, which hitherto had sustained them over aeons. Culture, in the truest meaning of the word, has become the almost universal victim of this malevolent philosophy. This single-minded preoccupation with mundanities and obliviousness to the gathering storm that looms will propel humanity into a disaster of hitherto unparalleled proportions. The mistaken belief that people can blithely continue to dissociate themselves from the demands of the natural world and continue to bask in the glories of technology, is a dangerous fallacy. Since all life is inextricably interconnected, the massive disruption that has been insensitively inflicted on the Earth and its life-giving waters must inevitably rebound in poetic measure on the perpetrators. Balancing precariously on its artificially contrived foundations, urbanised humanity has largely lost touch with its roots, and as Viktor Schauberger states elsewhere in this book, 'Masses without roots perish!' This is now beginning to happen — and at a rapidly accelerating pace! Competition, however, is totally at odds with Nature's ways. The dreadful irony of the whole scenario is that today attempts are being made to create a harmoniously integrated and co-operative world with the very philosophy that must inevitably destroy it. If ultimate survival is indeed what presently looms ahead, then the chances of real success in achieving it lie in the reversal of the present code, namely a return to co-operative activity, where the efforts of every individual are required for the ultimate well-being of the whole. In this context Viktor Schauberger conceived humanity's foreordained tasks to be threefold: 1. To make a small piece of the Earth fertile. 2. To evolve oneself to a higher level. 3. To preserve oneself and the species. Acting on this, we should focus our closest attention on Nature's modus operandi to secure a wholesome, healthy, long-term future for the Earth's inhabitants. Which brings me once more to the question at the beginning: How does a blade of grass grow? All organic and therefore animate growth in Nature arises from the processes of fusion, in which a given structure is built up incrementally through the mutual attraction of molecules. This attraction could be likened to an elementary form of love — a desire to unite in a fruitful way, when each individual component is necessary for the formation of the whole. Without this there would be no creative build-up of substance, no development of physical form. This combinant and recombinant activity is therefore synonymous with co-operative endeavour. Viewed in this light, it becomes clear that for the world to exist in all its physical majesty, Nature's ways must be far more co-operative than we have hitherto been led to believe. Her order is founded on co-operation and ethical fairness in the interaction between her countless organisms. In our approach towards the environment we could therefore not do better than to emulate the behaviour of the bees, who as Viktor Schauberger states, 'are known to dispense and to give whenever they take.' Trees too are extraordinarily selfless. They silently and consistently temper the climate, tame the tempests and supply us with oxygen to breathe and water to drink. In the light of this knowledge, we should therefore turn away from the present divisive competitive ideology and follow Nature's lead, for it is only in this way that the natural world can be truly restored to its former glory. All the above tasks demand a long-term appraisal and in-depth examination of the fundamentals of life and its continuance. This also involves a reinterpretation of the proper sphere and application of competition. Instead of its present emphasis on external action, competition should rightly be strictly applied to the internal assessment of one's own personal behaviour and performance; to how one's own talents and abilities and relationship with the outer world can continue to be improved, the better to co-operate, rather than compete, with others. The transference of this intent to the outer world, which would do so much to restore human relationships and the natural world to a universal state of harmony, was so ably expressed, though slightly paraphrased here, in President John F. Kennedy's famous exhortation: 'Do not ask what the world can do for you, but ask what you can do for the world!' Callum Coats — March 1999