Imagination is a uniquely human capacity closely allied with language that has contributed crucially to the success of our species and underwrites our highest potential for moral action. Understanding imagination is central to an understanding of ourselves. Attempts to reduce human nature to animal nature are logically uncompelling. While imagination operates in a “second universe” of the human mind, this human power has had and continues to have tangible effects on human society and history, not to mention global ecology. A crucial step toward meeting the moral challenges of our time is to discard the reductionist view of human nature as both impractical and at variance with a clear view of the world and of ourselves as a species.

This article discusses elemental air in twentieth-century French poetry and American nature writing, focusing on a comparison of human breathing to wind. Beginning with an overview of Pre-Socratic philosopher Anaximines, it examines select French poets’ expressions about wind. It turns to American nature writers' extensive experiences in the air outdoors. It looks at wind in the desert, prairie, forest, and Alaskan Sierra. Gaston Bachelard’s observations of air in motion serve as a segue to a discussion of elemental phenomenology. Building on the written expressions and experiences of French poets and American nature writers, the section on elemental phenomenology presents the importance of elemental air in philosophy but also in how one feels the many faces of wind and lives with and enjoys it.