American · 1928–1996
Christopher Bird (1928–1996) was an American writer and journalist, born in Boston, Massachusetts. Trained in biology and oriental studies, he served with the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1950s and later worked as a journalist before turning to books on the frontiers of science. He is best known for The Secret Life of Plants (1973), written with Peter Tompkins, which gathered experiments claiming that plants respond to music, thought and emotion; the book became an international bestseller and inspired a documentary with a soundtrack by Stevie Wonder. Bird's The Divining Hand (1979) traced the history of dowsing over five centuries, and with Tompkins he wrote Secrets of the Soil (1989), a survey of biodynamic, organic and other alternative approaches to farming. His later work defended the Canadian researcher Gaston Naessens. Mainstream scientists dismissed much of what he reported, but his books found a wide readership in the organic farming and alternative health movements.