WHEN James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis first advanced the hypothesis of a self-regulating planet in the 1970s, they came under severe attack. Biologists disliked the idea of Earth being in any sense “alive”. It is misleading at best, they said: life is about Darwinian evolution taking place against a dead, inorganic background. Lovelock and Margulis’s notion of a self-regulating planet – christened “Gaia” by the novelist William Golding – seemed nonsensical.
How attitudes have changed. Today scientists accept that living things have a significant impact on the composition of the atmosphere and the oceans, and that they in turn respond to those changes. Self-organisation is no longer an alien concept, and we are comfortable with the idea that organic life and inorganic Earth mutually sustain each other through a vast web of feedback loops. This shift in popular thinking is immediately apparent in Lovelock’s new book: Gaia has been elevated from a hypothesis to a theory.
In this I am reminded of another revolutionary idea from my own field: general relativity. In Newton’s classical world, the laws of nature are played out against a backdrop of inert space and linearly moving time. Einstein, however, showed that the structure of space-time (read Earth) is curved and twisted by the presence of matter and energy (read life) and that in turn the motion of matter and light is affected by the curvature of space-time. Matter, energy and space-time are now players locked into the same game.
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Gaia is becoming as accepted as relativity. Yet it was not a new idea even when Lovelock championed it. Many native American groups have long seen the world in this way, as evinced by their prayer “All my relations”, in which the definition of relations starts with members of the tribe and then extends to other two-legged creatures, then to four-legged creatures, then to fish, birds, trees, rocks, thunder and “beings” under the earth.
The ecologist Stephan Harding, who is based at Schumacher College in Devon, UK, and has collaborated with Lovelock on creating computer models of Gaia theory, is very much in harmony with these views. His new book Animate Earth begins with a discussion of one of his first research projects, a study of the Reeves muntjac deer in a wood near Oxford, which involved a painstaking quantitative survey of the area’s vegetation. In the midst of this “mind-numbing number gathering”, Harding would relax and feel himself merge with the environment, until he came to realise that he was learning more in this way, as a “sensing organism”, than through factual analysis.
His conclusion is that a scientific approach to ecology must be tempered with a deep reverence that allows our powers of intuition to bring us into contact with the natural world. It is a move towards what the eco-theologian Thomas Berry calls “a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects”, and towards Goethe’s “active looking” and “deep questioning”. Harding’s book is a series of meditations designed to encourage an intuitive approach to our understanding of Gaia. However, these excursions are unlikely to produce an instantaneous religious awakening in the likes of Richard Dawkins and other neo-Darwinians.
Lovelock and Harding’s books complement each other and together provide an excellent account of the life of Gaia and the crisis she faces. Rising carbon dioxide levels are warming the planet, threatening to raise sea levels and disrupt ocean circulation. An even greater disaster, both authors point out, could be the release of frozen methane hydrates, since methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas. Lovelock also draws attention to an as yet unquantified factor: methane leakage from homes and industry, and the threat of sabotage of natural gas pipelines.
What is to be done? Lovelock and Harding agree that reducing carbon dioxide emissions is key, though they differ in their approach to how this should happen. Harding makes it personal: reduce heating in the home, turn off lights, walk or take public transport, drive a little slower, make fewer air trips, eat locally produced food, recycle and reuse.
For Lovelock, things need to happen on a grander scale. We simply do not have the time to wait for cheap solar energy, he says, and it is madness to use land to grow crops for biofuel, since Gaia needs its forests if it is to prosper. Likewise, he calls wind power “outrageously expensive and unreliable”. Lovelock’s answer – nuclear energy – has got him in hot water with his fellow environmentalists, yet he is sticking with it.
“We simply do not have the time to wait for cheap solar energy”
He argues for fission in the short term and fusion in the longer. Fission, he says, is a safe energy source, and disposing of nuclear waste is not as difficult as critics claim. Here I have some reservations because his assessment is based on the experience of a few highly developed nations with well-run infrastructures. The safety or otherwise of nuclear power resides not so much with the technology as with the governments, institutions and technicians that run it. And what of nuclear programmes in small nations where there is a tangible risk of terrorism, or where there are dangerous cross-border tensions?
Lovelock is thinking big – this is full-on Earth System Engineering – and he doesn’t stop at nuclear technology. He seriously entertains reducing solar radiation, and thereby global warming, using large sunshades in space. And while he acknowledges that sequestering frozen carbon dioxide underground is impractical – a year’s output would make a mountain one mile high – he says it is technically possible to convert it into magnesium carbonate and use it as a building material. He also suggests adding sulphur to aviation fuel to create sulphuric acid droplets in the stratosphere, which would reflect sunlight back into space and help reduce global warming. What’s more, he envisions high-tech sailing ships for emissions-free travel, and redesigned compact cities where people could walk to work and the shops. As he points out, 75 per cent of energy usage goes into transport and buildings.
What’s clear is that good ideas and good intentions on the part of an enlightened few will not be sufficient. In the annual David Hall lecture at the Law Society in London last year, writer George Monbiot drew attention to what he termed our “collective denial” in the face of climate change. It is easier to fly across the Atlantic and enjoy a hot summer holiday than face where we are going and change how we live. In this light, perhaps Harding and Lovelock are both right: we need to change our day-to-day behaviour, and we need to think big. Perhaps the only thing that will save us is a “bible” setting out how to live decently on Earth and why we should be concerned about its desecration. Gaia theory and a thought for “all our relations” would be a good place to start.
The Revenge of Gaia
Allen Lane
Animate Earth: Science, intuition and Gaia
Green Books
