ELECTRIC LIFE

From galaxies to grains of pollen, it’s electricity that connects everything in our universe.

Funneman argues his point convincingly in this ample graphic adaptation of 2020’s Electric Ecosystem—by weight of example if nothing else. He begins with bees, which not only see glowing electric fields around the flowers they visit but, their bodies being positively charged, actually attract negatively charged pollen when they land. They and the many other organisms he goes on to mention can detect and navigate by magnetic lines of force (thus explaining, for instance, why dogs tend to orient themselves north-south to poop), and they show measurable physical responses when exposed to different portions of the entire electromagnetic spectrum. The author cites research demonstrating that plants have nervous systems, that fungi and tree roots communicate using a distinct “electrochemical language,” and, startlingly, that many outbreaks of viral epidemics and pandemics coincide with solar cycles. On a broader scale yet, we are literally “plugged into the cosmos,” with the electrical fields of our planet, sun, and galaxy nested like matryoshka dolls and continually affecting each another in complex ways. When, as he writes in the course of all these big insights, “every raindrop, every snowflake…has an electric charge,” it hardly seems a stretch to characterize the penetration of eggs by sperm as an event governed by magnetic polarity or our own human consciousness as an electromagnetic field. Pausing for occasional flashbacks to introduce paradigm-changing scientists of the past, author and illustrator put most of this dense but easily absorbable barrage of established facts and suggestive research results into the mouths of a pair of modern tour guides who pop into view to lecture in various locales amid cleanly drawn images of flora, fauna, geophysical features, and dramatic electromagnetic manifestations.

A jolting perspective changer.