BOOKBUSTER REVIEW
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
By James Lovelock
Published by Oxford University Press, 1979
REVIEW BY TIM BARTON
James Ephraim Lovelock was born in 1919 and died this July aged 103. A good innings, and it seems just in time to avoid the catastrophic ecological crisis he predicted in 2006 – the Revenge of Gaia.
Back in 1979 he published his classic work, taking his title Gaia from the Greek Earth goddess at the suggestion of his then neighbour, novelist William Golding. Whilst this choice elevated the book’s sales in the post-hippy West, it also was a factor in his metaphoric insights into global ecology being more or less dismissed by a highly siloed scientific establishment. One could say this failure of imagination was rooted in the divide described in C P Snow’s The Two Cultures & the Scientific Revolution. It also has seeds in the arrogant dismissal of ‘philosophy’ in our contemporary culture, most recently highlighted by Stephen Hawking’s profoundly ignorant The Grand Design, Michael Gove’s philistinism, and the recent assault on liberal arts at English universities.
Gaia itself was conceived as a metaphor for the perceived self-regulatory nature of the Earth’s climate. Lovelock had realised that the manner in which our atmospheric chemistry kept the climate within limits that allowed life to be maintained over millennia, despite a few serious knocks, and within a solar system whose extremes of temperature, both hot and cold, were inimical to most lifeforms.
LIFE IS ONE OF THE GEOLOGICAL FORCES
These ‘limits’ Lovelock saw as, in effect, a thermostatic mechanism, akin to our home heating and air-con systems, and he sought to discover how such a mechanism might work. In doing so, he discovered links between disparate elements of our biosphere, and posited testable hypothetical mechanisms since confirmed. His work was not sui generis: we have a long and intriguing history of intellectual insights into what we today call ‘ecology’, ‘biospherics’, and ‘planetary systems’.
These include Vladimir Vernadsky, who in 1926 popularised the concept of the ‘biosphere’ (a term coined in 1885 by Eduard Suess, who was also a geologist who first posited an early ‘supercontinent’, an idea that preceded the later discovery of plate tectonics). The ‘biosphere’ was a concept rooted in the hypothesis that life is one of the geological forces, acting globally and creating unique impacts.
Recently Patrick Nother reviewed George Monbiot’s Regenesis, a book that is rooted in Vernadsky’s view that the soil itself is ‘alive’ and all the biota in it, on its surface, and in the atmosphere above it constitute a ‘biosphere’. Thus Lovelock’s discovery of mechanisms that globally modulate temperature was predicated on Vernadsky’s insights.
TELEOLOGY IS NOT FOUND IN THE NATURAL WORLD
It is shocking to me that today such concepts are still outside the consciousness of so many people. They are entirely fundamental and our immanent future requires we engage with them both urgently and deeply. As I wrote in the last review, on ‘Degrowth’, our current cultural, political, and economic models almost entirely ‘ignore our embeddedness in a complex yet increasingly unstable ecology’.
What Lovelock noted was that, barring extreme events – some of which were extra-terrestrial in origin (e.g. meteor and asteroid impacts), some of which were terrestrial (such as excessive volcanic activity) – the temperature variance was minimal enough to need further explanation, which he then hypothesised. This led him to postulate that the mechanism ‘Gaia’ would, through chemical and physical processes, eliminate creatures whose ecological niche exceeded their bounds, keeping the overall conditions for life more stable than Lovelock could conceive without it, or some other similar hypothesis.
At the time other scientists, including Richard Dawkins, rejected his ideas as ‘teleological’, a word that encompasses ‘directed’, ‘designed’, ‘purposive’, and ‘goal-oriented’. These criticisms were important as teleology is not found in the natural world, it is only imposed by our limited human imag-inations upon the world, through fable, religion, alchemy and other early (and thus, in their time, ‘valid’) attempts to understand our world by imposing patterns and explanations upon it.
A CREATIVE AND UNIQUE THINKER
Lovelock goes to some lengths to explain how his idea is far from teleological, which is useful as many since have over-interpreted his use of the name of the Greek Earth goddess for his hypothesis. I would argue strongly for his view on this, and note that Dawkins’ criticism can no less be applied (and no less incorrectly) to his ‘biomorphs’ in his last great work, The Blind Watchmaker (1986).
Lovelock’s view of what we now call the ‘anthropocene’ is that it represents humanity overshooting our niche, and that this has extremely dangerous consequences. Some of his later work fits my phrase from the ‘Degrowth’ review – ‘an existential scream as we bust tipping points throughout the system’.
However, he was not a pessimist, despite his clear-eyed view of the nature of our reality, and hoped we could still, despite everything, make meaningful choices to alter our currently locked-in dismal future. He, too, did ‘not spurn technology, or growth in necessary sectors of the economy to serve ecological ends’, indeed, controversially, he saw nuclear fuelled power supply as a positive contribution to helping kick the very nasty habit we have of, in effect, mainlining hydrocarbons.
It is hard to overstate the importance of his ideas, nor the cost of ignoring them. And they are still live today; see for example an article this February in the International Journal of Astrobiology on intelligence as a planetary scale process. He was a creative and unique thinker, who I for one will miss.
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