The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity

In this dour assessment, Lovelock has taken his original brilliant insight of Earth as a living organism and extrapolated it into the pessimism of an environmental disaster in the making. Until Lovelock, no one thought of all life on this planet as creating a unique living being in its own right. In retrospect, it's obvious; this is the nature of true genius. In a very scientific manner, backed by the finest research and impeccable data, Lovelock reached an understanding of the Earth that matches the basics of Native American philosophy. This book is a timely prediction that life on earth will collapse within the next century due to human activity. His reasoning is accurate, brilliant and based on a fundamental flaw; he fails to recognize that humans continue to change. The agricultural revolution that began 10,000 years ago made profound changes; the evolution of teosinte into corn is one of a myriad of amazing progress. Now the Industrial Revolution is changing human habitation from 95 percent rural to 95 percent urban; worldwide, 50 percent of people now live in cities, and this will be 70 percent within 50 years. It's the most profound population shift since hunter/gatherers became farmers; and, it's likely to have an ever greater impact on the natural world. Humans have evolved from gathering food to producing food to producing things to producing intangible ideas. An intengible idea has economic value, but it is not something you can drop on your foot. It's a product of brainpower, not natural resources. Two centuries ago, the wealth of nations was their natural resources; today, the natural resources of the US are 3 percent of its wealth while the intengible ideas are 82 percent. Lovelock ignores this ability of humans and wildlife to change. In Phoenix, the rich live in walled, guarded and video-camera'd enclaves such as Biltmore Estates; coyotes are also learning to live there and are making Shih Tzus, Sharpeis and other toys into their own fast food snacks. Coyotes once were limited to the Rocky Mountains; now, they're found in Central Park in New York and everywhere else they choose to adapt. Life changes. People are flocking into cities which became "the dark satanic mills" of Dickens' times. Now possible to build zero-carbon cities, as planned in Abu Dhabi. Humans change. Granted, change is often costly. Without forethought, millions may die. Without change, the toll will be even greater. But, change will occur. It always has, it is now, it always will be so. This book sets out the scenario of a potential disaster, based on the knowledge of a brilliant and innovative scientist. Neither Lovelock or any other individual will come up with all the answers; but, in reading it, every thoughtful person will be prompted to come up with their own solutions large, small and meaningful. Lovelock presents a beautiful concept of the world, a philosophy that reaches the levels of Native American w

I purchased this book after reading a long story about Lovelock and his recent predictions of catastrophic global warming in the Washington Post. What was amazing about the Post story was that it was in the "Style" section. It seems like such an urgent message would not be in the entertainment section of the paper. I am not an environmentalist and never took global warming all that seriously until I read this book. The most frightening part about his studies is that he predicts untold catastrophes in my lifetime (and I'm over 50) and that there is very little we can do about it. His analysis is that in the end only a few hundred million people (out of 6 billion + people) will survive and will need to flee to artic regions. A serious scientist, he iseems to have credibility since he is the one who discovered the hole in the ozone and designed many of the tests that the U.S. used in our Mars mission to analyze if there is life on Mars. He has gotten my attention.

One might complain about the reletively small amount of supporting detail, but, for a concise, readable introduction to the key problem, this book is very, very hard to ignore. And doubly so if one is aware of Lovelock's long history of sheer brilliance. For me the heart of the book was the set of three maps comparing the state of the world as it is now, as it was when average temperatures were five degrees Celsius colder (i.e. the last ice age), and what is likely if the world becomes five degrees warmer. These do not sound like big differences, but on a global scale such temperature changes make huge differences, and Lovelock's maps show just how massive the changes really are. Never mind a picture being worth a thousand words, these maps save a couple of million words. Looking at them will leave you wondering about real estate prices in Labrador. Lovelock also does a good job of explaining concisely the nature of positive feedback loops that are starting to come into play in the global climate changes. I happen to be fortunate in that I am an engineer with much previous experience dealing with control systems and feedback loops, so I was in a position to follow his argument fairly comfortably in the first place. Naturally, not every reader will have such a convenient background, but I encourage everyone who does read the book not to skip over these sections, since they explain why the climate change may be both much worse and much quickeer than one might expect. To use more ordinary terms, when Lovelock talks about "positive feedback" he is talking about a "vicious circle", in which each change for the worse makes it easier for the next change to make things even worse. Unfortunately it is not just one such circle, but half a dozen or more, all pushing the climate in the same unpleasant direction. I must say also that some of Lovelock's ideas will seem absurd at first glance, but don't let that stop you from finishing the book or taking it seriously. For the most part he sounds strange sometimes because he is looking at things from another point of view, so naturally the scene he describes will sound unfamiliar, and especially so because he does not waste very many words. He just describes what he sees, and then leaves it largely up to his readers to draw their own conclusions. That is to say, the book is not propaganda, but rather a cold-blooded analysis of the problem. Bear in mind that Lovelock has spent most of his career writing for other scientists, who can be expected to check the facts and the conclusions independently, and he is clearly trusting all of us to be smart enough to do the same.

In his latest book James Lovelock reviews the history of his theory of Gaia and describes the terrible difficulties Gaia will undergo if the Earth continues to heat up. Can Gaia continue to manage the planet 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 in the English countryside, he fell in with his friend and neighbour, 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 bt the New Agers, who saw her as the great Earth mother, embodiment of Eastern religions, and comforter of feminists. Lovelock does not object to this, rather welcomes it. As long as an effort is made to understand the theory, he believes there can be consilience between religious faith of all sorts 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 in 1979 as "an association of two different organisms living attached to each other, or one with the other, to the advantage of both". Working with American scientists, he has established that all life on Earth is in symbiosis. He gives an amusing example: If our species was concerned only with its own well-being, the most efficient way for animals such as us to expel the nitrogen we breath in 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 plants can use. The Gaia theory, for it has been accepted by the scientific community and is no longer merely an hypothesis, is now seen to embrace the Earth's surface minerals and 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. Left to itself, Gaia is estimated to have another two billion years to go, but the process is being speeded up by the greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide and methane, which are being released in increasing quantity by our activities and she may have less than a hundred. Unless she acts! Lovelock is a Green despite his dislike of environmentalism for its anthropocentricism, which makes Man the focus rather than Gaia. 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 wind power), 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

I'm still spooked by this book. The core message could have been written-up as a snappy pamphlet: we're doomed to the beautiful momentum of the Earth's response to our diseased presence and must take radical collective action to preserve the splinters of our civilization. But The Revenge of Gaia's sound and horrifying science, succinct explanations of Gaia's living ways, and sometimes difficult to accept advice to those of us able to act in Earth's favor act mostly as illuminations of a voice wild with a true Vision of the Living Whole that is life on Earth. James Lovelock seems to write from somewhere beyond individual human consciousness, and to read his words is to sense an echo of what any Earthling must already understand: this Way is no good, We must find another. I recommend this book because I would like the opportunity to perhaps discuss it with you someday, maybe even at a reasonably high latitude.