Peter Bunyard

Peter Bunyard
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Born	(1939-07-24) July 24, 1939 London
Nationality	English
Citizenship	England
Spouse(s)	Jimena Bunyard (married 2007 - present)

Peter Bunyard is an English scientist, environmental journalist, and author known for his work in the fields of ecology and sustainability. He has published books and numerous scientific papers and articles on topics ranging from nuclear power, biodiversity, to climate change.

Early Life and Education

Peter Bunyard was born on 24 July 1939 in London, England. He studied Natural Sciences at Cambridge University from 1958 to 1961 and Insect Physiology at Harvard University from 1961 to 1964. He was awarded his M.A. at Harvard in 1965. His research on the RNA metabolism of the Oak silkworm was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS, Vol 52, Dec 1964). Bunyard is a Fellow of the Linnean Society since 1995 and a member of the American Geophysical Union.

Career

In 1966, he began working as a scientific journalist for World Medicine, covering a wide range of issues related to environmental health. Three years later, he met Teddy Goldsmith and became a founding editor of The Ecologist which had its opening issue in July,1970. Aside from the many articles he published in The Ecologist , Bunyard also contributed articles to other publications, including Resurgence and New Scientist.

At the United Nations Conference on the Human Environment in Stockholm in 1972, Bunyard, together with The Ecologist team of Teddy Goldsmith, Robert Allen, Michael Allaby and the Sunday Times cartoonist, Richard Willson, plus Friends of the Earth team of Walt Patterson and Amory Lovins published The Stockholm Conference ECO, a daily newspaper for the delegates and NGOs, with a critical analysis of the conference and events surrounding it. In the same vein, The Ecologist was present at the FAO World Food Conference in 1974. That same year, in The Ecologist , Bunyard published ‘Brazil: the Way to Dusty Death’, in which he expressed his concern at the climate and environmental consequences of destroying the rain forest.

In 1983, the United Nations University invited Bunyard to a meeting in Brazil on the consequences for climate of deforestation. James Lovelock was present, as was Eneas Salati, Henderson-Sellars and many other distinguished scientists. In 1985, Bunyard was invited to a Pan-American conference on planning. It was in Bogotá and it took place shortly after the M-19 attack on the Palace of Justice and during the terrible disaster when the town of Armero was completely swamped with mud from the erupting volcano Nevado del Ruiz, killing more than 23,000 inhabitants.

During that time, Bunyard met Martin von Hildebrand who, when Virgilio Barco became president, took on the task as Colombia’s Director of Indigenous Affairs. Consequently, three years’ later, Bunyard invited Martin to the first of three conferences on Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis|Gaia Theory to talk about the traditional indigenous view of their relationship with the Colombian Amazon rainforest. According to Martin’s father-in-law, the anthropologist Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff the indigenous peoples of the Colombian Amazon were ‘traditionally, ecologists by culture’ and it was in that vein that Martin realised the importance of the surviving indigenous communities of the Amazon Basin, for the protection of its rainforests against the predations of cattle ranchers, miners, drug cartels and agro-industrialists.

Having organised and participated in the three meetings on Lovelock’s Gaia Thesis, Bunyard edited articles from all the meetings into a single volume, Gaia in Action: Science of the Living Earth, which was published by Floris Books of Edinburgh in 1996.

In 1989, Martin invited Bunyard to participate in a two-week long meeting of different ethnic chiefs and shamans of the Colombian Amazon to discuss their responsibilities following Barco’s declaration that, through the system of Resguardos, they now, as communities, had territorial rights to the land. Bunyard wrote up the issues discussed at the meeting in a report, to which Prince Charles referred when giving a talk of forest conservation at Kew Gardens on 6^th February, 1990.

In 1992, Bunyard led a follow-up expedition to the Colombian Amazon, to meet with indigenous leaders from different ethnic communities and discuss their newly-created civic and environmental responsibilities that had been granted them through Colombia’s new constitution. The report was published in 1993 under the title New Responsibilities: The Indigenous Peoples of the Colombian Amazon.

The Ecologist, in 1999, published its Climate Crisis report. Bunyard was author of a number of the published articles in which he voiced his concern that the climate models, to which the IPCC referred in its 1995 Assessment Report, did not take into account that climate and its overall regulation were the emergent property of life’s co-evolution with the Earth’s surface. As he stated:

“Up to now, modellers have failed to recognise in their models that climate is largely a construct of living processes and is therefore fundamentally affected by what happens to life …. If the climate models are going to get near to estimating the full impact of global warming in a hundred years’ time, let alone in twenty years, they will have to take life properly on board.”

His work with the biotic pump

In the same issue, Bunyard warned that Eradicating the Amazon Rainforests will Wreak Havoc on Climate. In 2008, while preparing a chapter on the Amazon for the book, Surviving the 21^st Century, he heard about the biotic pump theory of Anastassia Makarieva and Victor Gorshkov of St Petersburg’s Institute of Nuclear Physics. In discussing the theory with climatologists, he encountered almost unanimous scepticism if not downright dismissal. In Colombia, he became affiliated first to the Santo Tomás University and then to the Sergio Arboleda University in Bogotá. While there, he put his mind to devising a way to test the inherent notion in the biotic pump theory that condensation of water vapour would lead to circulating air flow.

With help from the Good Energies Foundation, he constructed a 5-metre square doughnut-like structure next to his home in Cornwall. Three-quarters the way up one of the vertically upright columns he installed two layers of copper cooling coils connected to an industrial fridge unit. With the doors shut, the structure enclosed some 20 kilograms of Cornish air.

Inside the lab – amid a maze of cables and sensors – he had rigged up some copper cooling coils from a refrigerator. When switched on, they chilled the air enough to cause a few grams of water vapour to condense out in the humid morning air, forming water droplets. He was mimicking the condensation you would get as moisture from transpiring trees rose above the forest canopy. About two metres above the coils, Bunyard had built a wide doughnut-shaped chimney, at the top of which was an anemometer – a device used by meteorologists to measure wind speed. (Fred Pearce in A Trillion Trees)

The results of more than 100 experiments carried out at different seasons, with different air temperatures and relative humidity, indicated that within 30 seconds of switching on the refrigeration unit (outside the structure), the air started to circulate around the 20 metres length of the horizontal and vertical columns. Measurements per second obtained through judiciously-placed hygrometers, thermocouples and barometers provided the means to employ classical physics to determine the rate of change in the partial pressure of water vapour at the cooling coils. The airflow velocity was measured by an ultrasonic 2-D anemometer, sited at the farthest distance from the cooling coils. Cycling the refrigerator on and off, with periods of ten minutes on and ten minutes off, resulted in the airflow increasing from zero and then fading away. The velocity of airflow, in metres per second, followed the curve of the rate of partial pressure change.

The underlying physics of the energies associated with water vapour condensation, indicated that changes in air density as the air, flowing over the cooling coils, cooled and lost vapour, was insufficient by a factor of more than ten to account for the airflow. Because of the experimental set-up, latent heat release on condensation was found not to be the cause of the airflow. That left one candidate, the implosion energy of the air surrounding a locus of condensation. In fact, the energy of implosion as air moved to fill the partial vacuum was found to be 1,000 times greater than the air density change.

By applying the same physical logic of the experiments to the formation of clouds over the Amazon Basin and knowing the average yearly rainfall, Bunyard could determine that the implosion energies associated with condensation were equivalent over the forested part of the Basin to the energy of hundreds of atomic bombs exploding per second. That energy would be sufficient to account for the flow of the Trade Winds from Africa to South America.

Bunyard suggested that the biotic pump theory was correct in connecting a high rate of evapotranspiration from a closed-canopy rainforest with a flow of humid air from the ocean to the same latitude continent. The biotic pump, he claimed, was a principle and not a theory. His journey to discover, describe and gather proof of the biotic pump was extensively described in The Ecologist in 2015.

His work in connection with the Gaia theory

Peter Bunyard has written extensively about the Gaia hypothesis, which proposes that the Earth is a self-regulating system capable of maintaining its own balance and stability. The Gaia hypothesis was developed in the 1970s by the British scientist James Lovelock and his collaborator Lynn Margulis, with whom he worked together on developing the theory further. According to the Gaia hypothesis, the Earth's living and non-living components interact in a way that creates and maintains a stable and hospitable environment for life. This feedback mechanism, known as homeostasis, helps to regulate the planet's temperature, atmospheric composition, and other important factors.

Environmental activism

Bunyard has also been involved in environmental activism, and he has worked with groups such as the U.K. Green Party, and the Soil Association. He has been a vocal advocate for sustainable living practices and has called for a radical shift in the way humans interact with the planet.. He is also critical of nuclear energy, arguing that the risks of accidents, nuclear waste storage, and the potential for nuclear weapons proliferation are too great to justify its use.[1] He also contends that nuclear power is not a sustainable solution to climate change, as it takes too long to build new reactors and the construction process itself generates significant carbon emissions.

South America and the Amazon

Peter Bunyard first visited Colombia in 1985 beginning a decades long association with South America. Applying his knowledge of the Gaia hyypothesis and the biotic pump Peter developed a deep concern for the impacts of mining and deforestation. He was an early advocate for the wisdom embodied in indigenous stewardship of the Amazon, and an early advocate of its vital importance.

Every day, over the 7 million square kilometres of the Amazon basin, the sun sends down the energy equivalent of many million atomic bombs. By transpiring water vapour, the forest not only recycles the rain, but causes clouds to form that cool the entire region. Without the forest the temperature rises by at least 10[o] centigrade, baking soils hard and making them impenetrable to rain, which then runs off in eroding streams to the nearest watercourse. Neither soya nor cattle pasture is capable of recharging the air with sufficient water vapour to maintain rainfall. Consequently, as the deforestation continues, there comes a point when the remaining forest no longer gets adequate rainfall. The forest further to the west of the destruction then begins to die and decompose. The forest then releases all the carbon that it has stored during its growth, as much as 200 tonnes burping in the atmosphere as greenhouse gases. All that adds significantly to global warming.

These concerns have been echoed by many.

Publications

Peter Bunyard has authored or co-authored a large number of books and scientific articles.

Books

• The Politics of Self-Sufficiency, 1980. (co-author Michael Allaby) ISBN 9780192176950
• Nuclear Britain, New English Library 1981 ISBN 978-0450051081
• The Green Alternative Guide to Good Living, 1987 (editor/main author) ISBN 9780413602800
• Health Guide for the Nuclear Age, 1988 ISBN 0333471237
• The Gaia Hypothesis: Thesis, Mechanism, and Implications (editor & contributor), The Proceedings of the Wadebridge Ecological Centre 1987 symposium on The Gaia Hypothesis, 1988.
• Imperilled Planet (5000 Days to Save the Planet). (Co-author), 1990 ISBN 0262570947
• The Colombian Amazon: Policies for its Indigenous Peoples,1990. ISBN 9780950411194
• Gaia in Action: Science of the Living Earth (Editor) 1996 ISBN 9780863152023
• Breakdown of Climate: Human Choice or Global Disaster? 1999. ISBN 9780863152962
• Extreme Weather, 2006. ISBN 0863155685

Articles

• A collection of Peter Bunyard's articles from The Ecologist.
• A collection of Peter Bunyards articles from Resurgence Magazine

Personal Life

Peter Bunyard is married with five children and currently resides in Cornwall the UK. In addition to his work as a scientist and author, he is also a musician and has played in several bands over the years.

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