I was greatly anticipating this book. Back in Southern California growing up in the 1970's, I heard about the Theory or Concept of Gaia and it appealed to my nascent earth based philosophy. The Gaia Concept postulates that the Earth is a living organism with interdependent systems. Picture if you will, the atmosphere as Her lungs, the oceans as her circulatory system and you get the idea. This idea neatly dove tailed with my personal philosophy (still intact) that everything and everyone is related. The activities of nasty greedy humans with tunnel vision in gun-ho pursuit of short term profits have thrown all of this out of balance (all too true). We pack on her back a city the size of Pittsburgh every year seemingly without being aware that there is simply not enough food or materials to support a burgeoning population of this magnitude. Empowered by the Christian concept that we are stewards of the planet and it is our God given right to have dominion over the plants, and animals, the Earth has become a possession, ours to own and sell, mine, pollute and blast the tops off of mountains to get at deep coal. I never believed this and never believed in the private ownership of land. And, no I am not a Communist, the government shouldn't own the land, no one should. It is presumptuous in the extreme to think that man can presume to OWN a piece of the planet. We were born on the Earth and have a right to live on the Earth, but not to pollute and ruin the air, the oceans and the rivers and streams. Naturally, believing as I do, or did--I am just not sure anymore...I was looking forward, savoring reading the words of who I had perceived as an intellectual kindred soul. Instead, I found the ravings of a madman--psychotic at best, or worse--sociopathic. The book is chauvinistically Anglo-centric. Right away claxons sounded in my mind. He crows that his "Queen" opened the first nuclear power plant in the 1950's. How quaint. He then proceeds to divulge that there was a rather large radiation leak, but no worries, no cancer! This leak was kept secret and never told, until, presumably, now. Of course it would be difficult to perform retro-research after so many years to see if any bizarre cancers clustered downwind from the leak. But he assures us that there were none. Ok...The way I see it is that tribal thinking, short term greed, and fanatical patriotism put blinders on us and enhanced our tunnel vision. As long as MY TRIBE gets what it needs, gets the good stuff, has the best weapons arsenal, gets to the moon first and has AAA credit rating and we are a First World Nation, then if our acid rain or choking miasmas float over your village, too bad! And it is not just the USA with this world view. Every industrial country operates this way, starting with England's Colonialism and Industrial Revolution, and continuing on to this day with China. He lost me by page 97 and I started howling shortly after that. He debunks Rachel Carson and her seminal book ("The Silent Spring") on the adverse effect of DDT on bird eggs. He lamented the cessation of use of DDT on a limited basis as it was so "useful". Sure there is collateral damage to bird eggs, but not enough for Rachel Carson to write about. Ok...And I guess, today, it is ok that some bees are dying off? Lovelock advocates that the only way to save our planet is to generate electricity by nuclear power. What? Does he mean nuclear power plants built by the lowest bidder? Where to build them? Along the San Andreas Fault? Near shorelines where Tsunamis can strike? And where are we to dispose of nuclear waste? What about Three Mile Island and Chernobyl? Not that bad, he says. Ok...He justifies that low level radiation, the equivalent of Europe receiving x-rays only decreases our life span by a few days at best and aren't European Nations wondering how to pay pensions to "ancient citizens" anyway?He bristled that his beloved England was censored by the Nordic Nations over acid rain falling on their land in the 1970's, but then goes on a bizarre tangent and says that acid rain clouds stagnantly hovering over European cities is a good thing because the presence of these clouds cools the earth. Lovelock wants to recreate the disastrous Mt. Pinatubo eruption in the Philippine Islands in 1991. (I personally saw some of the displaced, the refugees, did you Mr. Lovelock?--Apparently not). He advocates requiring airliners to release sulphur as they fly to decrease global warming. (The atmosphere of Venus, anyone?). He finally states that as Gaia nears her end of being able to support the creatures (and yes, his compassion justifies my use of this term), that we synthesize our food. (Soylent Green, anyone?). Sure we will be tribal and the elite will eat real meat cooked with sauces, but hey, what the heck... right? In a bizarre atavistic conclusion to save his beloved England (which he thinks can survive the coming cataclysm) he advocates once again, dividing 'All of Gaul into Three Parts': 1. cities, roads and airports, 2. Farmland 3. Gaia Space--off limits to humans. I agree that the earth is reaching a point where it cannot sustain life as we know it any longer. But I think that humans . My compassion and humanism is too strong to be able to swallow his notion of shunting aside humans to save the earth at all costs. He is completely devoid of compassion and thinks nothing of saving the earth, at the expense of humans. Have we reached the point of no return? Judging by the political rhetoric coming from world leaders, the pessimist in me says absolutely; the romantic, naive Southern California 1970's beach chick surely hopes not. But what is a given is that our climate is changing, the earth is ailing and cannot continue to support the machinations of corporate greed, rampant consumerism, and untrammeled pollution, rape and pillage. We are all in this together, everyone and everything is related. The earth is not ours to own and exploit, it never was. But what to do, hopefully before it is too late? Nuclear power--is this REALLY OUR BEST solution? Beam me up Scotty....Or give me a Yurt to plunk down somewhere in the Arctic, the only place that may be able to support human life in the near future.
There are some surprises in the narrative. That the human race has done and is doing damage to its chances to survive on Planet Earth is well known. That Earth is a living system is also increasingly accepted and acknowledged. However, two points stood out for me as novel and thought provoking. One, the damage we are doing could be irreversible and could lead to Earth becoming a dead planet. Two, our understanding of what is harmful and whats not could be turned on its head e.g. are chemicals the villains of piece and organics the heroes? Are we missing the forests for the trees? Counter intuitive.
—Karthikeyan Iyer
I was vaguely aware of James Lovelock as one of the developers of the Gaia hypothesis, something I thought was cool but didn't know much about in action. At the end of our case study in climate change politics, my Global Environmental Politics professor showed us this video of James Lovelock speaking about his more recent book, the Vanishing Face of Gaia: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sRQ-Nq...In the video, Lovelock comes off as an eminently reasonable but quite cantankerous old British scientist, with all the charm that implies. His ideas, however, are extremely sensationalized (note the APOCALYPSE banner in the background), and I was curious to both spend more time with this charming old man and to see what his ideas were really like. James Lovelock's perspective is similar to that of Derrick Jensen in many ways, though the men and their personalities are vastly different. Both decry the mainstream environmentalist movement that tells us we can save the planet if we just change our lifestyles, or that "sustainable development" is a panacea that will allow us to have and eat our cake (the Earth). Lovelock goes even further, criticizing the environmental movement viciously for two crimes: putting human concerns in the short term over the long-term health of the planet (which is, of course, ironic) and for doing more harm than good in their lobbying for changed policies. He cites in the first case the irrational fear of nuclear energy that the green movement is championing, which prevents us from switching over much of our grid to nuclear as a way to quickly and feasibly reduce CO2 emissions. This makes sense to me. As a pragmatist, I understand that we aren't going to undergo a voluntary transition away from the over-energetic society of today. This means that in order to get off fossil fuels immediately, we need to implement all of the large-scale replacements we can. Nuclear has some disadvantages, of course, and plenty more than Lovelock believes it has, but they pale in comparison with accelerated climate change. In the latter example, I was quite a bit less convinced. For example, he argues that the banning of DDT by cancer-paranoid Westerners was a crime against the malaria-ridden third-world. This may have an element of truth to it, but it ignores the fact that pesticides are a Sisyphean, not cost-effective method of reducing pests that also happens to poison the environment.The differences are also striking, however. Lovelock is in every sense a civilizationist. He loves the boons of civilization, and thinks it has done great things (on a philosophical level) for Gaia (seeing herself from space, etc). Jensen thinks civilizations as he defines them are not merely unsustainable but inherently undesirable, for the oppression and class division they seem to breed inherently. Lovelock never espouses in this book the doomsday recklessness he is supposed to in that interview. He suggests that we may have passed the climate tipping point, but not that we already have, and in any case says that regardless, it is still in our interests to drastically reduce emissions at the same time as we prepare for the now-inevitable consequences of the GHGs we have released already. He is suggested what he calls a "powered landing," in which we use the resources of technology to carefully and intentionally reduce civilization to a sustainable, 1 billion member level. This is, again, similar to what Jensen argues, except that Jensen seeks "primitivism." Lovelock has an interesting perspective and an interesting personality, and it's far more realistic and credible than those of most environmentalists. His thesis is that the way humans are living today is disastrous for the Earth and its self-regulation regime, and that by fussing with it we are moving towards a new permanent hot state. He acknowledges that we have already set the ball rolling on this, and that it would be nearly impossible for us to hold it back now. We have failed to develop a land ethic, and our decisions are still motivated by profit and comfort in the short term.
—Adam
Lovelock brings Gaia theory up to date by explaining the positive feedback mechanisms that have led us into a runaway greenhouse effect. Best if you have some rudimentary familiarity with science, and earth science in particular -- but not necessary. Lovelock explains how the models work -- and concludes that it's likely too late to avoid the coming heat age. Gaia -- the effectively self-regulating quasi-organism/system that stretches from where the lithosphere meets the mantle to the very fringe of space, and includes volcanic gases, rock, oceans, biota, and the atmosphere -- will have her way with us. Still, he says, we must try. He's not down with the hippie stuff at this point. He thinks we need to go nuclear, because it (fission, for now, and soon, he says, fusion) is the only energy source capable of meeting humanity's needs while we wind down our 6 billion population to something the earth's resources can carry, and switch then to renewables like solar and wind. A note: He doesn't want windmills on the ridge near his cottage in the English countryside -- but he doesn't mind storing all the world's spent nuclear waste (a 16 meter cube each year versus a mountain twelve miles around and a mile high for all the CO2 we'd have to "sequester" in a carbon sequestration system for our current energy sources) in a concrete bunker in his backyard. Brilliant man. He suggests those who can move to the arctic and restart civilization from scratch while the billions who don't make it fight it out. The scariest part is, he's no crank.
—Richard
