[.ca] Revenge Of Gaia (ISBN 0141025972)

Fire, or Ice, or ...?:
The Revenge of Gaia is an important book. Though perhaps bleaker than necessary. What Lovelock downplays is the fact that in the last million years whenever the temperature and carbon dioxide/methane levels started to rise out of the "good" zone an ice age resulted. Surely there is as good a chance of another ice age happening now as of the hot world Lovelock imagines. I never thought before reading "The Revenge of Gaia" that an ice age was a preferred solution but at least it would be a solution that saw higher life forms thrive again, whereas a hot world would preclude the existence of higher life forms perhaps for ever. Living in a world where Canada is covered in a mile of ice, living in a world of continents sinking under millions of cubic miles of ice, popping off volcanoes, a world of rebounding ocean beds, historically unprecedented earthquakes, tsunamis washing up a thousand feet or more, that all looks pretty good compared to no life at all. And eventually, typically a hundred thousand years or so, life will flourish again, though maybe not with humanity. However its hard to get enthusiastic about saving the world from fire, if ice is what we are left with.Obviously the question is, what are we going to do about avoiding both of these futures. And equally obviously the solution is for us humans to garden Gaia into eden, for by definition heaven on earth is neither too hot nor too cold. And we can do it too, why else would we be here. Or if that is too mystical then consider what we could do practically. 1) recognize that war is now a deadend and that there is no advantage to anyone in fighting to win (this saves from the waste dumps of landfills and graves an unbelievable amount of money and an inconceivable amount of time and talent and life that can immediately be steered towards garden costs and implementation) 2) enhance the gardening abilities of every human (ensuring that everybody gets what they need in terms of water, food, clothing, shelter, health care, education, energy etc. to be the best gardener they can be) 3) green the brown and gray areas (deserts, cities, etc.) 4) transmit power globally (human technology evolves by doing more with less... in terms of a transmission grid this suggests a highly efficient one, a minimally impacting one, and a LARGE capacity one) 5) mass produce solar panels (electricity from solar panels half a world away can be lighting up your night a mere .06 seconds after creation - how many terawatts if the sunny side of what humans have built was covered in solar panels?) 6) use nuclear fission if necessary (to eliminate carbon-dioxide producing energy generating facilities. After all if we garden Gaia into eden from that point on we're going to have to take responsibility for Gaia's temperature at least until the sun dies so what's the problem with hundreds of thousands of years of care for nuclear waste?) 7) create new political parties (that will get their countries going in manifesting a garden, eh...) Anyways. Read the book. Read it and weep. Give it to your enemies.

A Must Read:
Revenge of Gaia By James Lovelock Reviewed by Dashiell In his latest book James Lovelock reviews the history of his theory of Gaia, brings it up to date, and describes the terrible difficulties Gaia will undergo if the Earth continues to heat up. Can Gaia continue to manage the atmosphere with Man, a loose cannon on the deck, releasing carbon dioxide at the rate we do? The idea that life at the Earth's surface somehow regulated the chemistry of the atmosphere had been with him for a long time, when one day in the 1960s while looking at photographs from space, Lovelock realized that the planet Earth, unlike other planets, was alive, and that life on the surface could be considered one creature. Not long after, walking into his local village from his house in the English countryside, he fell in with his friend and neighbor, the novelist, William Golding, and outlined his hypothesis. Golding suggested that he call it Gaia, after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth. Gaia was taken up by New Agers, who saw her as the great Earth mother, embodiment of eastern religions, and comforter of feminists. Sir James - he has been knighted by the Queen for his many accomplishments and inventions - does not object to this as long as they make an effort to understand the theory; he believes there can be consilience between faith and Gaia. The oneness of life on Earth, the essence of the theory, can be explained by the concept of symbiosis, defined by the Oxford dictionary in1979 as "an association of two different organisms living attached to each other, or one with the other, to the advantage of both". Working with other scientists, Sir James has established that all life is in symbiosis. He gives an amusing example: If we were concerned only with our individual well being, the most efficient way for animals such as us to expel the nitrogen we ingest and cannot use, would be to exhale it. But instead we benefit Gaia by converting it into ammonia and peeing it out in a form that plants can use. The Gaia theory, for it has been accepted by the scientific community and is no longer merely a hypothesis, is now seen to embrace the Earth's surface minerals and the atmosphere as well as living things. But Gaia is about to make a radical adjustment to eliminate Man and most other forms of life will go with us. The sun is getting hotter and, left to itself, Gaia has another two billion years to go, but the process is being speeded up by the greenhouses gases, carbon dioxide and methane, which are being released in increasing quantity by our activities and we may have less than a hundred. Sir James considers the situation critical. He is a Green despite his dislike of environmentalism for its anthropocentricism, which makes Man, rather than Gaia, its focus. He is unpopular with many Greens for his support of nuclear power which he considers less dangerous than other sources of electric power (including hydro), and vastly preferable to burning hydrocarbons. As for the waste, he is confident that nuclear fusion will be the power source of the future and the waste from nuclear fission plants can be used as fuel. In the meantime he suggests storing it in ecologically sensitive areas to keep developers out! He says nature thrives in its vicinity and has pictures to prove it. He is opposed to windmills. He is unpopular with many greens for favoring genetically engineered crops. His position is that unless the world's human population is drastically reduced we must go with GE crops because they yield more food per acre. We already use half the Earth's land surface for agriculture. This reviewer finds his arguments convincing. The Guardian reported in April 2006 that with the aid of the World Bank, the Cargill Grain Company, and a number of European fast food chicken outlets including Macdonald's, some 40 square miles of Brazilian rain forest is currently being cleared for the express reason of growing non-genetically modified soy beans to be fed to squeamish Europeans who refuse to eat chickens that have been fed GE soy beans! O tempora, O mores. It seems that Man the predator has advanced beyond simply hunting animals to making Gaia herself his prey. One is tempted to sympathize with the protagonist of the recent novel, Ayesha, My Queendom Come, who believes in protecting Gaia by reverting to war, murder, even infanticide and cannibalism. Surely if people cared for Gaia they would simply eat the soy protein and skip the chicken stage? Lovelock says nothing about vegetarianism. But could the great man have underestimated his own discovery? For example, he explains how aerosols, the tiny particles that are mostly products of man's combustion of hydrocarbons, form a protective cover that reflects the sun's heat rays back into space, and points out that if we stop burning fossil fuels, these particles will not be replaced when they drop to Earth. Could not this be Gaia taking care of itself? And with global warming will there not be more evaporation from the world's oceans and lakes and hence more cloud cover? This is a thought-provoking book by a great scientist.

The Earth needs this book to shout the alarm:
At last a book about the Earth written so that the general public can understand the state the world is in. How many books have been written by the scientific community that people buy, read the first few pages find that it is completely beyond them, and then place it on a shelf where it is dusted for a few years before being given away? There are only 176 pages and it has been written as a book on how to survive and live on this planet. I would love to meet James Lovelock and shake him by the hand for having the courage to write this book and hope one day he will read my novel The House of Stones also about the environment but written in a lighter vein. The only problem I can see is that it is too late, I doubt whether China, India and other countries that were once poor or are still poor and are now becoming prosperous manufacturing cheap products for the rest of the world will back down from their lucrative market. Plus religious sects that believe in very large families will they quickly do a U turn and reduce the size of their families? The world will not work together for the good of the whole. England now has far too many people on it to survive without outside help. A world that should keep its people down to 1.5 billion now has 6.5billion and rising. The book is brilliant but when will the people wake up to just what is happening around them and start doing something about it before it is too late.

Important and thought-provoking.:
While the title of this book sounds like a sensationalist doomsday tale, this book is instead a factual and mostly objective (though not entirely) discussion about our Earth's current climatic trajectory. James Lovelock is an excellent author and I'll compare him to Stephen Hawking: both are brilliant scientists and both have an ability to explain mind-numbingly complex concepts with eloquence. In it, James Lovelock discusses Gaia which is, as he says, "a self-regulating system made up from the totality of organisms, the surface rocks, the ocean and the atmosphere tightly coupled as an evolving system" (Page 162). He speaks in detail about Gaia's history and her tendency to regulate her environment and he proposes many logical and sometimes astounding ways that humanity might prepare for impending catastrophe (global warming in this case). Lovelock also makes some rough predictions about how humanity might fare in the coming century and beyond as Gaia makes much-needed adjustments to the type and distribution of life on Earth. Mr. Lovelock speaks of Gaia with affection and concern; and it so happens he's very concerned now about Gaia's health and, like a physician discussing a patient, explains that Gaia is currently suffering the early symptoms of a terrible fever. This analogy is a logical one if you accept Gaian theory - the notion of a single Earth-system wherein all the living and non-living things are interconnected like the individual cells within our own bodies. This fever, Lovelock explains, will last a long time and Gaia might pull through it and recover; but we may not. Perhaps it is the language and tone which Lovelock writes or perhaps the simple ways he explains then illustrates the large-scale and scientific study of the global climate but after reading this text I am sufficiently convinced that this may be the most accurate of "predictions" yet to be published. (This brief review is a shortened version of this article at my website: http://www.davesabine.com/Thoughts/TheRevengeofGaia/tabid/184/Default.aspx)

disappointing:
Lovelock's career has been as an eminent scientist, inventor and original thinker. His most innovative and inspired work was in the formulation of Gaia theory, which he fought for, argued and modified, long and hard before gaining the widespread esteem and acceptance of his scientist peers, a status he quite clearly values highly. In seeing the earth as a self regulating system, with life in co-evolution with the environment, such that environmental conditions are regulated to support life, he has obviously provided a very significant perspective on earth's ecology. In the face of global warming Gaia theory seems most capable of giving us an insight into the complexities of the interactions and interdependencies of life and environment, and who better to present the information than Lovelock. The strength of the book is definitely in the well illustrated arguments showing how fluctuations in greenhouse gases beyond certain thresholds lead to the collapse of a host of regulating mechanisms. He gives specifics to explain how some disastrous (for humans and possibly all complex life forms) positive feedback effects work. It clearly illustrates that the problems of global warming go far beyond a mere rise in sea level. However collapses of stable mechanisms have happened before in the history of Gaia's life and it is truly difficult to predict the nature of new stabilities arising. Computer simulations may be our best hope if we wish to find a way to be included in these new stabilities. Thus the weakness of the book is that the reality of prediction with a systems theory of earth's biosphere beyond stability thresholds is somewhere between hard and impossible, and that Lovelock resorts to absolutes and statements of "fact" that are dubious and appear as prejudicial opinion. As the world's opinion polarises with the need for action in the face of global warming, decisiveness takes precedence over the acknowledgement of ignorance and tolerance for different viewpoints. The scientific humanist movement has taken an aggressive and evangelical stance against faith, religion, alternative therapies and "new ageism". Given that Lovelock sees himself primarily as a scientist, highly valuing his status and opinion amongst his scientist peers, it is hardly surprising that he distances himself from most greens and environmentalists whose championing of Gaia hypothesis served only to erode his credibiity in the scientific world. It is also not surprising that he aligns himself with some of the more reactionary and conservative viewpoints of the scientific community. My previously high opinion of Lovelock was that his capacity for innovation seemed to be based on an ability for independent thought not swayed by fashion or trends in any sphere. It is disappointing to see him present personal opinion and prejudices against other viewpoints with such scathing hubris and distortion of fact that it infringes on the credibility of the better argued areas with which he is fully conversant. I also feel that the anthropic presentation of "vengeful Gaia" does little to serve his argument. I've read all the reviews on amazon.com/.ca/.uk and it would seem that the wide ranging and sometimes opposing perceptions of the message in this book means that his meanderings have missed their mark. None the less his expertise in the presentation of the evidently valuable Gaia theory on global warming and an overview of the range of innovative ideas and solutions that climatologists are considering makes it well worth the read. But as other reviewers have mentioned there are some significant omissions eg an overview of permaculture. It has also caused me to begin a process of rethinking my opposition to nuclear energy. "The Self Organising Universe", Erich Jantsch is highly recommended by this reviewer, to extend a systems understanding of Gaia. Though outdated and not that accessible, both in terms of language and availability (It is out of print) it is truly inspiring.