Jane Cobbald - Viktor Schauberger: A Life of Learning from Nature

by Alick Bartholomew

Viktor Schauberger made an extraordinary contribution to knowledge of the natural world. He is celebrated for his discoveries in the water sciences, in agricultural techniques, and in the energy domain what enhances and what harms life. Schauberger provides us with a comprehensive and holistic approach to understanding Nature. Using Natures cool methods, he invented energy generation devices to release people from enslavement to destructive sources of energy. He developed agricultural methods to enhance the quality of soil and crops.

Schauberger showed that when the natural ecosystems are in balance and biodiversity rules, there is great creativity and evolution of higher and more complex life forms, but there is also order and stability. When humans walked lightly on the Earth, we cooperated with Nature. While still part of her, we now behave as though we are superior, dominating other species and abusing the Earths bounty. Viktor warned, eighty years ago, that if we continued to go against Nature, the Earths eco-systems would become sick, the climate destructive and human society would break down, with extreme violence, greed and pandemic illnesses.

This is a very special book. From Janes fascination with her subject comes a curiosity to discover how Schaubergers mind worked. For Viktor was an intuitive and a visionary an engineer more than a natural scientist, whose preoccupation was to understand Natures intriguing processes. Jane Cobbald has given us valuable insights into Viktors worldview. She has skilfully worked his voice into the text, quoting anecdotes that give a flavour of his personality.

Most researchers learn from books what they to expect to see, and then observe what they unconsciously anticipated. Viktor Schauberger did not have these expectations. He observed with fascination as does a child. Jane, with a womans intuition, communicates this sense of wonder.

Her explanations of the importance of the right kind of motion, the most beneficial type of temperature change and the importance of egg shapes are very helpful. Her description of Viktors insights into how plants grow, the subtle energies involved and the electromagnetic interactions in water and the soil help to demystify these processes.

After Viktors death, his son Walter set up the Schauberger research institute, the Pythagoras Kepler School. Janes conversation with his widow, Frau Ingeborg Schauberger, helps to bring alive the relationship between father and son.

Landscape healer and inventor of environment-friendly technology, Viktor Schauberger vividly described how our disdain for Natures ways will bring only environmental catastrophe. His vision of humanity working within Natures laws is the path we must rediscover, if we are to survive.

He had little ambition for himself, but with the understanding he acquired of how to live in harmony with our environment, he devoted his life to improving the lives of others. His insights are vital for us today when the prevailing scientific paradigm sees the Earth as inert matter and Nature is observed as a mechanical system, its resources exploited for humanitys benefit, contributing to the appalling desecration of the environment, and to climate change. Here, Jane Cobbald has produced a work that advances, at a very readable level, the understanding of the vastly important and relevant principles that Schauberger discovered.