S2E8 Wind
Transcript
EV: Emma Vendetta
TH: Tori Hoover
TJ: Theo Jansen
ML: Maren Loveland
LK : Lutz Koepnick
JG: Jennifer Gutman
EV:
For as long as I can remember, I’ve loved the feeling of wind on my face. There’s something about it that pulls me into the present, demanding that I turn my attention to the natural world. And to the way in which I am a part of that world, not separate from it. When I learned to ride my bike as a kid, I would find the biggest hill to whiz down just to get the sense of speed that the wind rushing past me created. When I worked as a boat driver, I craved the sunrise runs with the fresh air whipping my hair behind me as I steered on the glassy water. That scene from Pride and Prejudice, the 2005 edition, of course. Where Lizzie stands on the edge of the English cliffs, arms outstretched, with the wind so strong it keeps her from falling into the sea, that’s the feeling I want. And now, every day when I walk my dog Potato on the beach, that’s kind of the feeling I have, or at least as close as I can get as I’ve been reflecting on my long love of wind, I’ve found myself trying to pin down its definition. Put simply, wind is air on the move. It’s this invisible yet tangible force that powers turbines, pushes sailboats, speeds up airplanes, and levitates kites. But wind is so much more than that. Sure, it’s jet streams and currents, but it’s also the chimes on my grandparents’ porch. It’s a rush, a relief on a scorching day, or a sting on a cold one. It’s a feeling, a moment, and a presence all at once. I know I’m not alone in my love of wind, and I’m also not the only one who’s struggled to define it. Wind has taunted many poets and songwriters. It’s frustrated and then freed many sailors. Because wind is paradoxical. It’s a blend of steadiness, consistent currents that have been mapped for trade routes since 1729, and unpredictability, entering our colloquial vocabulary in phrases like wherever the wind blows or the winds of change. Wind is a constant yet fickle companion, so perhaps what we need is a better question. Instead of what is wind, we could ask how does wind happen? In their article for Nature, Princeton scientists Zhenzong Zeng and his co authors tell us, wind is created by pressure gradients associated with uneven heating of Earth’s surface. Wind is the result, then, of heat, earth, water, and air interacting in a beautiful breezy alchemy. We could even say that wind is interference.
TH: This is Art of Interference. Today’s episode is hosted by Emma Vendetta and Tori Hoover.
TH:
Okay, so Emma, when you say that wind is interference, all I can think about is how whenever I’m talking on the phone outside and the wind blows, it just cuts straight through the mic and I cannot hear anything else.
EV:
Oh, yeah, for sure. Like, it doesn’t matter how much money I’ve spent on my AirPods Pro, they still can’t cancel out a strong breeze. My mom’s always like, why is it so loud where you are? It sounds like somebody’s screaming in the background.
TH:
Truly. I mean, as our resident audio editor, it is kind of the bane of my existence.
EV:
You mean you don’t just love all the audio clips of wind I send you?
TH:
I mean, look, wind can be heard and tuned out by the human ear quite easily, but microphones struggle to accommodate it. That’s why we have windscreens and filters, and yes, that means that capturing the sound of wind for, say, a podcast episode, is very difficult. And yet, in some ways, even the sounds we’re making right now, you know, the sounds of our voices, rely on a kind of wind. Right, because we take in air through breath, and then we move that air through our vocal cords.
EV:
Right. And obviously we talked about that in our episode on breath, but this came back up when I talked with today’s featured artist. Theo Jansen is a Dutch artist and engineer. He studied physics for a while at Delft University, where he made a flying saucer and a paint machine, among other art engineering combo projects. But since the 1990s, Jansen has been known for one particular creation, his Strand Beasts. These are large, sculptural creatures that are propelled down the beach by the wind alone. They’re so ubiquitous that they were even incorporated into an episode of The Simpsons. So today we’ll hear from Jansen about how Strand Beasts came to be through his artistic practice. How he thinks about wind, and how he stays optimistic in this ever-evolving world.
TJ:
My name is Theo Jansen, and since 1990, I tried to make new forms of life. And these forms of life are not based on a protein, like everything in our body is protein. No, I restricted myself to another material called PVC, a sort of skeleton, which walks on the beach, and they get the energy from the wind.
EV:
Even if you’ve never encountered one before, you’d know a strandbeest if you saw it. They’re dinosaur sized creations made of beige plastic pipes and white cloth sails. Ambling on the sand, they look otherworldly. Mythical. When you see a strandbeest, you feel like you’ve landed on a planet where non-organic animals roam the shore. They walk all on their own, moved by the wind. I wanted to get Tori’s live reaction to seeing a strand beast for the first time. Share my desktop here.
TH:
Okay, so these things are kind of hard to describe, right? But they, they look like somewhere between. the original Wright Brothers plane. They kind of resemble an enormous version of toothpick models that you might have made as a little kid. And yet they’re moving kind of like an insect, but it’s so smooth in the wind that it’s very alien. You’ve seen the big puppets of dragons during the Chinese New Year. Kind of like that. It’s like origami. And a parasail.
EV:
Those are great analogies. It totally does. That back part really looks like that Chinese dragon to me.
TH:
Okay, so looking at these videos, you can definitely see the way it looks like a kind of alien design and yet very organic at the same time. And it looks like he’s made a lot of these over the years.
EV:
Yeah, so Jansen actually releases a new Strandbeest into the wild each year, and he’s done that since 1990.
TJ:
Every spring I bring a new animal to the beach, and during the summer I do all these experiments. And in the fall I’m a little bit wiser how these animals could survive the storms or the water or the sand. There have been many generations of Strandbeests.
EV:
So I think we’re up to what, 34 Strandbeests at this point?
TH:
I don’t want to do that math because it’s too close to how old I am.
EV:
Fair enough. Jansen has categorized his Strandbeests into 12 periods, echoing the way geologists organize Earth time. You’ve got Gluton, the Tate period, Caladum, the Hot period, Cerebrum, the Brains period, And most recently, Volantum, the period in which Strand Beasts could fly.And so on. I was really struck by the way Jansen described these generations as a kind of evolution.
TJ:
The beginning I thought I was a short of a god.
TH:
Okay, wow. I know. Just wait.
TJ:
I only had to materialize my ingenious ideas to this beast, and then it turned out that of my ideas didn’t work in practice. But sometimes something happens coincidentally, and not by looking for it, but just bouncing on it, then became a sort of evolutionary process.You could see my ideas as a sort of mutations, and most mutations they don’t work, but sometimes something coincidentally happens and is determined by the circumstances on the beach and by the tubes.
TH:
It’s a very religious journey.
EV:
Right? So, Jansen no longer sees himself as a god,
TH:
which I guess we could say is his own evolution, right?
EV:
Right, right. So, he now sees himself more as a facilitator of the creation, a witness, if you will, to the evolving needs and emerging features of his Strandbeasts.
TJ:
All things are dictated by the tubes and by the circumstances on the beach. In the end, when the animal is finished. Then I declare it extinct, so they go to the boneyards.
TH:
This is interesting to me because it feels like he’s creating not just these pieces of art, but he’s creating a whole world, right? It’s kind of like what Tomás Saraceno did with his cloud cities, right? It reminds me of that. He’s creating this whole universe and a history and different geologic periods. And so he’s doing like all this artistic world building as well. So how does Janssen determine when a Strandbeest is actually finished? Like, obviously these don’t have an image that they’re meant to resemble in the first place. They’re not based on anything real. So how does he determine when an animal is fully evolved or when it’s extinct?
EV:
Yeah, that’s a great question. So my understanding is that his aim is for Strandbeest to survive the elements. So we could like boil down any animal’s survival to its ability to eat food. move in the environment and not be killed by its surroundings or by a predator. Obviously, the Strandbeests don’t have any, like, direct predators, since they’re essentially alone in their food chain. Um, but they still eat, right? They eat wind. They have what Jansen calls wind stomachs. And they move. They’re propelled by that wind energy from their wind food.
TH:
So then survival is essentially defined for them as Digesting wind. Using it to move on the beach successfully.
EV:
Right. Precisely. And this year, Theo put a twist on his usual strand beast evolution and qualifications for success.
TJ:
So, I brought a new animal this year to the beach. Was it a fact that there were four animals? Because it turns out that as individuals it’s hard to survive because they blow over by the winds. But if four animals are holding each other, then they are in fact a big animal, then they are a lot more stable.
TH:
Hmm. Okay. So I think I can already see why this got you so excited.
EV:
Yep. So. You’re probably thinking it’s because the Strandbeasts have to work together to survive. I mean, yas. Um, Jansen’s evolution to a small group of Strandbeasts gave me the sense that perhaps the survival of the individual has always been predicated on the survival of the collective.
TJ:
So I hope that this will be A new generation of animals which are holding each other and they just survive as a group, you could say, because the storms are quite aggressive here at the Dutch coast. And so I’m quite hopeful that at the end of the season, that I made a new step in the evolution. My utopia would be that there’s a new species on Earth which can survive on its own.
EV:
So maybe someday we’ll live in a world where strandbeasts just casually roam the coasts.
TH:
Or maybe we’ll live in a world where animals that consume things other than wind start to struggle, right? Like the impact of climate change could increasingly push us in a direction that is unsustainable for actual organic animals.As we’ve seen, the WWF Found that monitored wildlife populations, such as mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish, have decreased by 69 percent since 1970.
EV:
Their Living Planet Report estimated that between 0. 01 percent and 0. 1 percent of all species become extinct each year. And since you didn’t want to do the math earlier, I’ll do the math for us again. That means, essentially, that if we’ve got, let’s say, 2 million species on Earth, then between 200 and 2, 000 species go extinct annually.
TH:
Man, and if I’m thinking about the Strandbeests themselves as animals, in the same way that I think about, say, koalas or polar bears, then I have to wonder. Will their food source also run out eventually?
ML:
Okay, Lutz, can I weigh in here?
LK:
Of course, Maren. Thanks!
ML:
So, yes, of course human made climate change is impacting the food sources of organic animals, that is, not strandbeests, as fires devastate forests and waters become increasingly polluted. But climate change is also impacting the food source of the strandbeest, that is, the wind. Emma mentioned earlier the role of clearly mapped trade winds, but even those are becoming less reliable. Some scientists even think they’re slowing down. If they do, even the Strandbeest would lose their food source. The debate over whether climate change is making the world’s winds slow down, it’s a phenomenon called global stilling, or causing them to speed up has triggered so much research in recent years.
LK:
So called wind droughts have been on the rise since the 1970s. With speeds dropping over 2 percent per decade. Initially, theories suggested that winds had died down since the surface of Earth had been roughed up by skyscrapers and industrial plants. But then, a study published in Nature modelled wind speeds over these same decades and found a turning point in 2010. Instead of global stilling, all signs pointed to increasing wind speeds. Ocean atmosphere oscillations and not surface roughness are likely the cause of the trends of changing wind speed. So for the short term, the wind seems to have recovered. In fact, in some ways it’s faster than ever before. Jet streams in particular are causing concerns as our Earth warms.
ML:
Strong yet narrow jet streams are bands of wind about 30, 000 feet up from Earth’s surface that propel much of our weather systems. These powerful air currents run west to east, following temperature boundaries between hot and cold pockets of air. A recent study by the University of Chicago and the National Center for Atmospheric Research concludes that these rivers of air will likely increase in speed by about 2 percent for every degree of Celsius our Earth warms up.
LK:
Oh, so in the not so distant future, my flight from Nashville via New York to Frankfurt or Berlin could be much shorter.
ML:
But it will also be much more turbulent.
LK:
Ah, shoot. And then there’s the fact that ever faster jet streams also increase the potential of severe storms, right? Tornadoes, hail, and severe winds.
ML:
Yikes.
TH:
Okay. So, you know, Lutz and Maren have reminded me that most of the time when we talk about wind and climate change in the same sentence, people are probably thinking about wind power.
EV:
Right. And like the wind has been powering the movement of lots of things besides strand beasts.
TH:
Of course, you’ve got your classic sails and windmills. In the modern age, though, we typically harness wind energy through turbines to generate electricity. We think of that as clean energy, right?
EV:
Right. You’ve probably seen those giant towers with three blades spinning on a rotor. I remember seeing early models as a child on road trips across the California valley.
TH:
Wind power has steadily grown in popularity and impact. The energy think tank, Ember, has reported that as of 2022. Wind power supplies about 7 percent of the world’s electricity. The same year saw Denmark produce over half of its electricity from wind, and China became the world leader in wind generation, accounting for 70 percent of new wind turbine installation, although most of their energy does still come from coal.
EV:
Pretty impressive as far as progress goes, but unfortunately wind turbines aren’t unanimously loved.
TH:
Is this going to be about birds, I mean honestly, tell me it’s not about to be about birds.
EV:
Okay, no, I promise it’s not only about birds. In fact, the risk of losing birds and, you know, bats, to wind turbines is relatively low, especially compared to the benefits that wind turbines present.
TH:
Okay, so we’re not tilting at windmills on that front.
EV:
Correct.
TH:
Give me the bad news though.
EV:
Okay, so it’s not entirely bad news, it’s just complicated. So, to get the nuances of the pros and cons of wind turbines We first have to understand the types and locations of wind farms. So wind turbines, sometimes hundreds of them, are interconnected with a system of cables which leads to a transformer to connect to the power grid. There are two main types of wind farms. You got your onshore and your offshore. Pretty self explanatory. Right, so for onshore, the pros are that the land between the turbines can be used for agriculture or other purposes, and the turbines themselves are cheaper to maintain since they’re easier to access.
TH:
Whereas if you have to take a boat to the turbine to fix a part, that’s pretty difficult.
EV:
Right. Since wind farms are most effective when they’re constructed and maintained in far northern or far southern areas with consistent, predictable winds. Offshore wind farms are great because they don’t require land clearing and, well, there’s a lot more water than land, you know?
TH:
But …
EV:
But, kind of no matter where you put a wind turbine, people don’t like to look at them. Jansen said as much in our interview.
TJ:
I have a lot of, uh, wind turbines here on the sea. Some people are complaining, like, this is the pollution of the horizon. Of course, it is the pollution of the horizon. It’s not the ice. It’s the We have to do something, right? We cannot just sit and be glad what’s going to happen to us.
EV:
A decade ago, I was working in Hawaii on a clean energy project where my role was to liaise with the locals to understand their perspective on a near offshore wind farm. While the visual impact was certainly one concern, another was the underwater ecosystem of a historically sacred indigenous beach. So, sorry, Tori. Back to birds.
TH:
Huh.
EV:
So wind turbines are pretty unexpected if you’re a seagull who’s used to flying over the water. Not to mention that the installation process creates some serious noise and vibration that disturbs underwater habitats. And the cables that connect wind turbines together can devastate coral reefs and disrupt the behaviors of marine mammals.
TH:
Which is rough. But then the trade off still seems worthwhile, right? Even with its complications. Wind energy is significantly less detrimental to the environment than energy production options like coal or even nuclear. Wind turbines don’t use water and have near negligible rates of emissions, a massive improvement from fossil fuel and nuclear energy sources.
EV:
Agreed. Just as we may eventually see a world where strandbeests wander the beach, we’ll have to get used to a world where wind turbines dot our hills and oceans. That is, if we want to continue living to see those hills and oceans.
EV:
Okay, so, I want to circle back to Theo Jansen’s latest Strandbeests. Strandbeests, plural, okay. Yes, so his idea of the survival of the collective, it just seems so fitting for our discussion of wind and climate change, and it goes beyond the fact that there are multiple Strand Beasts this year.
TH:
Okay, how so?
EV:
Okay, so when Janssen talked about how he came up with the idea for Strandbeests, he described them as a kind of alien looking for a place to land, and that place was his brain. Okay. There’s a feeling that, uh, the swan bees were already existing before 1990, that they were in the air looking for brains to land in, and I was lucky that they landed in my brain and they used my brain to infect the rest of the world.
TH:
Yeah, the way he talks about his Strandbeests kind of reminds me of how a lot of authors talk about their characters, right? As these people who kind of come in fully formed and just knock on their brain until they let them in. People who have their own thoughts and motivations and the author, or in this case, the artist, is just a vessel.
EV:
Absolutely. It’s kind of Hive Mind. The Strandbeests, like any animal, survive by reproducing, right? And the way that they reproduce is not only through Jansen, but also through all of the people who have gone onto his website, seen his code or instructions, watched his videos, or made their own Strandbeests.
TH:
Oh, you can even buy a kit to build your own tiny Strandbeest. Adorable.
TJ:
So that’s why these students, they are infected. These new branches are evolutionary tree.
EV:
And here’s where we get to some really juicy media theory.
TJ:
We think we make the smartphone, but the smartphone forces us to make it. It’s new nature, you could say. It’s a new diversity is enormously increasing. If you define life as objects, which reproduce themselves, like a smartphone, then the biodiversity is not decreasing, no, it’s increasing. And it’s growing over us, in fact. You are able to learn to get along with your nature. I mean, we don’t have to be afraid for a lion or a tiger, no, because, no, we have to be afraid for cars, and for, uh, for this new Nature, which is coming out about and somehow we need to cut some pieces off, I think, to keep it in balance.
EV:
I hear you saying it’s a thing that’s outside of us that has some kind of agency, but there’s also this opportunity that we have to make choices about what we want to continue to allow to replicate through us.
TH:
Yeah, it’s very spooky and it’s very, the medium is the message, right?
EV:
Right.
TH:
And it’s also not far off. When we consider the ways that the kind of traditional idea of nature and biodiversity is decreasing, even as this new nature or mechanodiversity is increasing, as all these different mechanisms and all these different gadgets are creating more gadgets that we need every day. We are both the hosts and also the minds that are the sites of decision making and replication. And as both the creator of the problem and the one who has to solve it, we have some serious challenges to face.
EV:
Absolutely. So what does it look like for us as those hosts to think about, really critically, what ideas we’re allowing to replicate in and through us? Are we allowing Gas guzzling cars or wind turbines to take over. Mechanodiversity should be directly related to human diversity and potentially actually increase our ability to cooperate.
TH:
And if we’re going to survive this, like the Strandbeests, plural. It has to be together, through generations, across time, through the evolution of humans, to be better stewards of the more than human.
EV:
That’s exactly how Jansen sees it. Just like his Strandbeests have survived and evolved across their own generations, Taking an intergenerational perspective on human survival in this changing world can be helpful.
TJ:
For me, it’s the miracle of the world and more about the past generations, which brought us here. And in this situation that we can cooperate, I think, as a tribute to our parents and our grandparents and all these people before who built this all up, it would be shameless, in fact, to swallow it.
EV:
When we first connected, Theo shared with me a poem that he wrote about the phenomenon of wind, and the impossibility of capturing wind, especially via audio.
TJ:
While I read it in Dutch, but I’ll translate it simultaneously, I’ll read it for you. Are you ready?
EV:
Though he’s not primarily a poet as an artist, wind seems to inspire him to work in a number of mediums.
TJ:
wind’s, wind’s, wind’s. If you repeat the word wind often enough, then It will blow by itself. You must try it sometime. Just a little breeze, which leaves the mouth by pronouncing the word wind. Soon, the wind will breathe. In some cases, it will go to a storm. An atmosphere filled with hundreds of words of wind cannot survive. Avoid the meaning of those words, you must do it sometime, sooner or later, the wind will come.
TH:
Hundreds of words of wind, I like that.
EV:
Theo’s poem ends with this call to create wind by saying the word wind, the beauty of breath as wind, as movement.
JG:
Hey Emma, can I jump in for a minute? I know it might be a bit late to interfere, but Theo’s poem is making me think of some other wind inspired bards that I think deserve a call out.
EV:
All right, bring it on, Jen. As long as we keep this interference, shall we say, short winded.
JG:
Okay, I’ll try. I hadn’t really thought of it before, but have you noticed how often writers are captivated by wind? Oh, definitely. And the wind cries,
EV:
Frank Sinatra’s Summer Wind,
TH:
Bob Dylan’s Blowin in the Wind,
EV:
Dust in the Wind by Kansas.
JG:
Yes, yes, all of the above, but I was thinking too of Ted Hughes, Percy Buscelli, Robert Lewis Stevenson, Gwendolyn Bennett. Emily Dickinson alone has like 14 poems about wind. Here, let me read you my favorite:
The Wind – tapped like a tired Man –
And like a Host – “Come in”
I boldly answered – entered then
My Residence within
A Rapid – footless Guest –
To offer whom a Chair –
Were as impossible as hand
A Sofa to the Air –
No Bone had He to bind Him –
His Speech was like the Push
Of numerous Humming Birds at once
From a superior Bush –
His Countenance – a Billow –
His Fingers, as He passed
Let go a music – as of tunes
Blown tremulous in Glass –
He visited – still flitting –
Then like a timid Man
Again, He tapped – ’twas flurriedly –
And I became alone –
EV:
Ooh, yes, Miss Dickinson. Get it.
TH:
I love how the wind is personified there. It becomes a character to her.
JG:
Yes, wind is often given this personality inverse. It moves and makes noise, but it’s invisible. So the wind often becomes this kind of stealthy person with whom we all secretly interact.
TH:
I mean, just listening to all those S and F sounds in the poem is whispery and windy.
Like you can hear his voice through her word choice. And, of course, the classic em dash. It comes across as a kind of wind tail.
EV:
Yeah, this anthropomorphizing of air is really interesting to me. There’s something so intimate about wind, even though it’s technically an external and collective experience.
TH:
Yeah, I mean, wind is so ephemeral and hard to actually understand. As we’ve talked about already today, it’s hard to record it. So when we personify wind, it allows us to interact with it much more clearly. Honestly, you could even think about this in that new Twisters movie, where a tornado is essentially the villain.
EV:
A tornado, of course, being a massively disruptive air column moving at stunning speeds across the ground, or in really, really simple terms, concentrated wind.
TH:
Right. And Twisters describes its plot as being a disaster epic. And I mean, if you really want to get into epics, right? In the Odyssey, Odysseus has a favorable bag of wind and a bag in which the unfavorable winds are combined. So then, when his stupid companions open the bag, the winds escape and they send him backwards. Back to where he was before and basically set him back on his journey. In Twisters, for instance, it’s interesting because they continually talk about how the winds and the tornadoes are getting worse, the droughts are getting worse, but they never say the word climate change. So, really, if we think about it, it’s not necessarily the tornado that’s the bad guy here. In some ways, it’s us, again, just like human folly is the bad guy in the Odyssey.
EV:
Wind is invisible, yet its interactions are visible. Audible, tangible, the swaying of willow branches, the rustling of autumn leaves. Perhaps that’s what makes wind so personable to us. Interaction is, after all, a core characteristic of our lives as humans, and of life in general. I even use how other people interact with the wind as a kind of weathervane. From my porch, I watch the beachgoers. If the kayakers and the swimmers are out, the breeze is probably calmer. But if I spy kite surfers, you can bet it’s pretty gusty. Regardless, I’ll join them, embracing the wind in whatever way she shows up that day. Because that feeling of the wind on my face, it’s ultimately a reminder that the present is available to me. That I am, in fact, alive.
TJ:
Like you, I live at the coast here. I look over the sea right now, in fact. So in the evening I often go on my bicycle into the Jews and here’s a nature reserve. Wind for me means fresh air because I seem to be so much in very fresh wind. A feeling that I can really breathe when I’m on my bicycle in the dunes, especially around sunset. There’s nobody on the beach. I really feel contact. With the Cosmos, you could say, and when it’s very strong, it’s a fight, especially when you have to walk against the wind and sand is coming into your face, you really have to protect your face with my head. You feel on another planet, so far away from everything in society. I have the privilege, of course, to, to work in this environment. And even when it’s raining or when there’s clouds, I have this feeling that I exist with the animals. And it’s such a miracle that we exist, isn’t it? The fact that I landed in my body and you landed in yours, many times I Realizing the miracle we are living in, that’s also something to motivate us.
EV:
We mentioned at the beginning of this episode the ways in which wind has entered our common vocabulary as a sort of expression of both power and powerlessness. But there’s one phrase in particular that feels important for this moment in our climate crisis. Winds of change.
TH:
Yeah, I mean, as a phrase, right? Winds of change. It just kind of refers to these larger than us forces that have the power to change. It means that change is coming and that it is imminent.
EV:
Right. And at the risk of overdoing it on our wind inspired playlist You’ve got the song, Winds of Change,
TH:
by the Scorpions, which became associated with the fall of the Berlin Wall as a symbol of the fall of communism and the reunification of Germany.
EV:
This song and its titular refrain emphasize the paradox of wind perfectly. Wind is something we experience outside of us, a force beyond our power, but it’s also something that we can harness, capture, and direct.
TH:
So if we have this bigger than us force, right, and the winds of change are going to blow us one way or the other, do we still think that we have some control over which way it blows us? You know, can we hook our kite, hoist our sails?
EV:
As Theo Jansen reminded us in his Wind poem, wind is something that lives within us through breath. And perhaps with enough of us directing our wind in the same vector, we might be able to create the change we’d like to see in the world. Will we cease to view ourselves as gods, pure creators of possibility and instead pivot to understanding ourselves as stewards in the greater context of the planet? Are we up to the task of embracing our role in global evolution and allowing the winds of change to move through us toward a better future? The extent to which wind comes from within us or can be harnessed from outside us is a core question eagerly awaiting our answer. And, of course, the clock is ticking. Like Jansen’s Strandbeests, I imagine we will find that on both windy days and still ones, our survival requires the collective. After all, Wind is not something we can effectively separate out into pieces. It’s a moving whole. And you and I are included. So the next time you step out of the air conditioning of your home, into the world, and feel the breeze brush your cheek, the next time a gust billows through your jacket as summer turns to fall, receive the wind’s invitation to step into the present. To move and be moved. To go with and to direct. The winds of change.
