We had some good rain this spring and the lawn is growing well. So we were surprised that a single day of strong, steady, dry wind could put the plant in such jeopardy.
Northerners are quite familiar with the subject of humidity. Deeply cold weather creates a big difference between the humidity of the air outside and what is left of humidity after we heat our houses. The artificially dry air encourages breathing difficulties and can dry out furniture to the point of damaging it badly.
The incident reminded me of the book I listened to recently, "The Invention of Air" by Steven Johnson, as well as the book "Mayday" by Nelson DeMille and Thomas Block. The Steven Johnson book is non-fiction about real science and history while the DeMille and Block book is a novel.
Both are about the air we breathe and need all the time. Of all the body's needs, none is so constant and basic as that of air. We teach children still in elementary school that our atmosphere is made of several gases and that the most important one for us is oxygen. But as Johnson makes clear, people didn't know those basic facts as recently as the lifetime of Benjamin Franklin and the English scientist Joseph Priestley, in the late 1700's.
Priestley was actually a churchman but he had a deep interest in "natural philosopy', especially in areas of what we now call chemistry and biology.
The DeMille & Block book is about a large passenger airplane that is damaged mid-flight and what happens when a fast-moving plane high above the earth loses its seal. The atmosphere inside the plane is normally under artificial pressure to keep it in a state where people can breathe. The air pressure, temperature and elements of the air outside the plane five miles above the earth are not such that people can survive.
We are delicate creatures with quite specific needs, many of which we wouldn't know about if we didn't try to live in strange places, such as space ships and high-altitude planes. It's true that our kind has survived in all the climates of the earth and we have shown we can find ways to live under extreme and unusual circumstances. But the air, atmospheric pressure, humidity level, and wind speeds that we are naturally equipped to live with are just a few of variables that surround us and affect us all the time.
