I recently bought James Lovelock's most recent book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia. Lovelock's body of work revolves around the concept he calls the Gaia Hypothesis, which goes something like this (scientists in the crowd, please forgive me):
The earth as a whole behaves in the manner of a living organism. This is largely (if not totally) because of the existence of life on earth. Living creatures are the reason that there's a constant and consistent percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere; they're also the reason that the earth's overall temperature is maintained within certain boundaries which are optimal for life.
And this means that everything has consequences.
Anytime the balance changes, the entire system needs to be rebalanced. This can happen in many ways: temperature fluctuations, extinctions, epidemics.
Life on earth will go on. Human beings may or may not be part of it.
Lovelock is now ninety-one years old. He has been beating the drum for Gaia for decades; he has been written off as a hippie, a do-gooder, a tree-hugger, a mystic. Slowly, however, his theories have become mainstream. There's little doubt now that he is largely correct about the large-scale consequences of small-scale changes in life on earth.
But, according to his latest book, it's too late. We are doomed now to watch and wait - batten down the hatches and wait for the deluge. Lovelock says that, if there were a hundred million people on earth, it wouldn't matter one way or the other how we lived; there wouldn't be enough of us to make a real difference. But there are now seven billion of us, and we are living beyond our means. The ice is melting. The sea levels are rising. The storms are getting worse. The weather is far more unpredictable.
Lovelock loses some of his spark when he turns from climate science to predictive futurology. Some of us will survive, he says, and I tend to agree. But then he becomes more fanciful. He sees mass migrations to the more habitable parts of the world, and draconian governmental changes.
These recommendations and predictions may or may not be worth listening to.
But they won't be.
As I've said before in this space, I have at most twenty or thirty more years on earth at most, so I will probably be spared the worst of it; according to most climate scientists, the worst won't happen for another fifty years or more.
I make no predictions, because I'm far too gloomy about the general outlook, and I don't want to put a jinx on the whole affair. But I hope at least a few people survive. We can be really lovely at times, when we really want to be.
Sometimes even despite ourselves.
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