Conversations under the Tree

Even in the most ordinary experience of life, energy never appears as a concept. It first manifests itself as a sensation: the momentum running through a body in motion, the vigour of a plant breaking through the soil in spring, the power of the wind turning a mill wheel or the heat of the sun making the air shimmer. It is what animates, connects and transforms. Even before the sciences took hold of it to determine its sources and measure its effects, energy belonged to human experience. It is at once physical force, biological power and cosmic principle, an immediate way of feeling that we belong to the living world. To speak of the prodigious energy of nature is thus to examine its manifestations: how it stimulates bodies, irrigates environments, runs through cultures and nourishes the imagination. But this energy does not concern living beings alone. It also manifests itself in the great dynamics of the Earth: the circulation of the oceans, the movements of the atmosphere, the slow transformations of matter. At every scale, from the mineral to the plant and the animal, it is what makes change and metamorphosis possible.