We should talk about this ‘life force’. Because under the sawtooth graph of rises and falls in our actions and effects on the universe, and under the shifting template scoring those actions as good, bad or indifferent – other, bigger things seem to go on that we ignore. Energy: we never consider its source and we attribute all human agency to its management, and not its available power. And I wonder if owing to this we lose sight of a useful alternative view of our nature. To begin with an illustration, consider the following scenes:

Just before seven one Monday morning, the crew of the tuna boat , thirty-eight days out from Yaizu Port in Japan, watched the sky ignite with colour. It was the 1st of March, 1954, and the twenty-eight-metre craft with its crew of twenty-three was thought to be eighty miles east of Bikini Atoll. What they saw was the most violent release of