THE REVENGE OF GAIA by James Lovelock
29 January 2006The Sunday TimesRichard Mabey
Allen Lane £16.99 pp177
After Hurricane Katrina, a black Gaian joke went the rounds, couched in White House newspeak: "Successful mission against the Gulf of Mexico oilfields. Some collateral damage in New Orleans." The widespread hunch that we'll eventually get our comeuppance from a long-suffering nature has never been quite so precisely located, or quite that misanthropic. Nor is James Lovelock's book about the coming crisis of global heating. Although it reads at times like the Book of Revelation, his vision of the planet's "revenge" isn't one of a spiteful, smart attack against homo sapiens, but of a comprehensive collapse of the systems that have kept earth habitable for billions of years. If Gaia means the interdependence of all organisms on earth, then its breakdown implicates all organisms, though it is our fault, exclusively.
In that sense, The Revenge of Gaia doesn't represent any new thinking on the author's part so much as a deepening pessimism about climate change and our reluctance to confront it. Global heating was not much more than a rumour in 1979 when Lovelock launched the Gaia hypothesis, an audacious vision of the living earth as an organism, whose geology and life-forms had together evolved ways of maintaining a climate and an atmosphere congenial to life. He seemed confident that Gaia's intricate connections, linking forests and oceanic algae to cloud formation, would be able to counter the earth's warming from man-made carbon dioxide. Now, as global temperatures creep relentlessly higher and climatic disasters proliferate, he believes we may have already gone beyond the point of recovery.
His luminous insights into life's interconnectedness are the most effective part of his argument. Pondering how something like Gaia could have "evolved" according Darwinian laws (he's fond of metaphors), he asks "What has peeing to do with the selfish gene?" Getting rid of toxic urea is an extravagant use of water and energy, when it might much more easily be metabolised into gaseous nitrogen. But that would make nitrogen less available to many species of plant. Perhaps they co-evolved with urinating mammals, which benefited from their increased growth. Orthodox Darwinism didn't often consider that evolving organisms are part of each other's environments. Those that diminish the habitability of their shared environment reduce their chances of survival. Gaia can be seen as the sum of all these mutually dependent networks.
But the impending storm is the book's crux. What affects Lovelock profoundly is evidence that we may be approaching "tipping points", when heating suddenly escalates because of feedback. At the current rate, global temperatures will rise by nearly three degrees in the next 50 years. At this point, the rainforests begin to die, releasing vast new amounts of carbon dioxide. Algae fail in the ocean and stop generating cooling clouds and absorbing carbon. The Greenland glacier goes into meltdown, releasing enough water to flood many of the world's cities. Crop failures, human migrations, the emergence of "brutal war-lords" follow. We know the story, but not in our "real world" minds. Global heating is not yet part of our collective unconscious in the way the bomb was.
What can be done? Lovelock is a passionate advocate of the rapid expansion of nuclear power to cut fossil-fuel emissions, which has won him few friends among his natural constituents. He's dismissive of wind-power and biofuels as woefully inefficient and wasteful of wild land better reserved for Gaia's ancient arts of regulation. Too dismissive, perhaps, but he's right to berate our hubris in believing we have the knowledge to "manage" the planet. Biosphere II's modest experiment in creating a mini-earth the size of a football pitch ended in farcical collapse. But Lovelock isn't averse to technological fixes: giant reflectors in space, the solidification and burying of smoke emissions (the same result could be achieved by allowing huge areas of cultivated land to revert to forest, but oddly isn't mentioned), "sustainable retreat" into cities and synthetic foods to give the planet a chance to recover. If it came to the worst, the remnants of humanity could move to a newly balmy Arctic, where the rich could sail about in solar-powered yachts and the poor amuse themselves with virtual travel.
This is the familiar, no-holds-barred territory of apocalyptic science fiction, and I fear this is how The Revenge of Gaia may be read. It's a powerful book but disablingly depressing; although Lovelock is a scientist of brilliant prescience, he is not such a good psychologist, and his severe and spartan argument may not push the right buttons. As a tribal species we have ancient, visceral responses to trouble. Creditably, if unwisely, our compassion is stronger than our anxiety. We give generously to the victims of climate-change-driven disasters such as famines and tsunami, and do nothing to stop them happening again. We know that, on a finite planet, economic growth which involves non-renewable resources must soon come to a halt, but continue to regard it as a virtue. Would anyone dare to put on a rock concert with the slogan "Make poverty the future"? The clear and present wins over foresight, every time.
So, shackled by our reflexes, by craven and short-sighted governments, and by the hard fact that totalitarian planning simply doesn't work for complex living systems, we seem to be stymied. But perhaps Gaia's model of success, so eloquently described by Lovelock, might be a better spur than its impending demise. It's a federation not a monolith, and maybe an unplanned accretion of obdurate local communities, visionary businesses, and nations prepared to act on their own rather than wait for the lowest common consensus — something truer to our organic origins and our present psychologies — might just turn things around.
Energy gap
Lovelock is fierce in his insistence on the need to embrace nuclear energy: "Renewable energy sounds good, but so far it is inefficient and expensive. It has a future, but we have no time now to experiment with visionary energy sources: civilisation is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear energy now, or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet."
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