keith’s new self

James Lovelock, of Gaia Hypothesis fame, thinks the earth is in big trouble:

… before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.

That’s, uh, pretty dire, James!

Our planet has kept itself healthy and fit for life, just like an animal does, for most of the more than three billion years of its existence. It was ill luck that we started polluting at a time when the sun is too hot for comfort. We have given Gaia a fever and soon her condition will worsen to a state like a coma. She has been there before and recovered, but it took more than 100,000 years.

Some might describe this viewpoint as “alarmist”. He doesn’t back it up with any facts in the article, so I guess I would have to read his new book, The Revenge Of Gaia (yikes), to get the gory details.

I’ve been reading Robert Kaplan’s excellent The Ends Of The Earth, a book that studies modern civilizations through the lens of environmental conditions, based on Kaplan’s first-hand observations during his travels. It suggests that as Earth’s resources become more scarce, and other environmental degradation becomes intolerable, there will be increasing pressure on all social systems. James Lovelock suggests the same thing:

We should be the heart and mind of the Earth, not its malady. So let us be brave and cease thinking of human needs and rights alone, and see that we have harmed the living Earth and need to make our peace with Gaia. We must do it while we are still strong enough to negotiate, and not a broken rabble led by brutal war lords. Most of all, we should remember that we are a part of it, and it is indeed our home.

OK - again that’s pretty dramatic, but is there any truth to this Hobbesian view, or is it just sensationalism for the sake of selling books? Kaplan puts forward a compelling metaphor, quoting Thomas Homer-Dixon:

“Think of a stretch limo in the potholed streets of New York City, where homeless beggars live. Inside the limo are the air-conditioned post-industrial regions of North America, Europe, the emerging Pacific Rim, and a few other isolated places, with their trade summitry and computer-information highways. Outside is the rest of mankind, going in a completely different direction.”

We are entering a bifurcated world. Part of the globe is inhabited by Hegel’s and Fukuyama’s Last Man, healthy, well fed, and pampered by technology. The other, larger, part is inhabited by Hobbes’s First Man, condemned to a life that is “poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Although both parts will be threatened by environmental stress, the Last Man will be able to master it; the First Man will not.

Indeed, the environmental stresses predicted by Lovelock are already happening in many places on earth (West Africa), and many other places appear to be on the brink of environmental disaster thanks to overfarming, overlogging, overpollution, etc. So surely some regions will be sooner to experience Gaia’s wrath than others.

Alas, throughout history, mankind has shown little ability to self-regulate its numbers and appetite for resources. These ideas are very late in coming, and are usually in reaction to mass physical discomfort, health problems, shortages or other calamities. Perhaps as a species, we are on the whole incapable of stewarding Earth, the ones willing and able to do so a very small minority, and cultures with traditions of stewardship having been long since muscled out by more aggressive cultures.

It’s obvious that there is a growing awareness of these issues, and I know there’s a lot happening at the grassroots level, which doesn’t make the news and isn’t reflected in the words and actions of the political and economic elite. Maybe that’s a reason to be a little optimistic. The endgame could be decided by how many people are able to wake up, get real and vibrate higher in the coming decades, while the flood waters rise all around.

No thanks to this Inhabitat article for making me even more aware of our dreadful situation.

tags: climate change, dieoff, ecology, energy descent, gaia, gaia hypothesis, hobbes, james lovelock, permaculture, politics, robert kaplan, science, spirituality

posted: 9:48 pm