Search Results

This chapter details physicist James Lovelock's lifelong work on the Gaia hypothesis. Gaia postulated that the Earth was a single living entity whose health was threatened by human-induced changes in atmospheric composition and planetary biodiversity. Arguing that humans had overstepped their ecological niche, Lovelock developed a planetary medicine by which humans would treat the planet as a doctor would a sick patient. Gaia, as well as Lovelock's diagnosis of the Earth as having a fever, found renewed life in the 1990s, as activist Bill McKibben called for drastic checks on the greenhouse-gas emissions threatening the health of the planet.

This introductory chapter discusses the Gaia hypothesis as well as two other competing hypotheses. Gaia, the idea that life moderates the global environment to make it more favorable for life, was first introduced in 1972 in an academic paper by James Lovelock titled “Gaia as Seen through the Atmosphere.” The Gaia hypothesis proposes planetary regulation by and for the biota, where the “biota” is the collection of all life. Lovelock suggests that life has had a hand on the tiller of environmental control, and the intervention of life in the regulation of the planet has been such as to promote stability and keep conditions comfortable. The chapter then looks at the geological hypothesis, which suggests that the nature of the Earth's environment is principally determined by a mixture of geological forces and astronomical processes, and the coevolutionary hypothesis, which asserts that life has had an enormous impact on the planetary environment.

After a career as a chemist and engineer, James Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s with Lynn Margulis, a biologist. The hypothesis highlights the important influence that living beings have on their geological environment to speculate about the possibility of a regulation of the planetary environment. From the beginning Lovelock saw Gaia as a grand idea, challenging the way biology and geology should be carried out, up to our very conception of nature. This chapter recalls the rich context in which the hypothesis was elaborated in the 1960s and 1970s. It then traces Gaia’s contrasted reception. Whereas evolutionary biologists ridiculed it as a pseudo-metaphor comparing the earth with an organism, Gaia has generated new research programs in the earth sciences and has been embraced by the environmental counterculture as a new conception of nature and of our relationships with the earth.

This chapter focuses on the implications and influence of general systems theory, which in the late sixties and early seventies clarified the theoretical underpinnings of ecological thinking. General systems theory, popularized by Ervin Laszlo, described how nested open systems governed by feedback loops had adaptive capacities that were tantamount to the workings of a mind. This made it reasonable to imagine animals, plants, and other natural systems as intelligent and sentient entities. Among the most referenced models of such intelligence was the process of coevolution. Supported by the new science of epigenetics, the theory of coevolution reimagined the workings of natural selection in a way that emphasized decision making rather than competition. Some people, inspired by Gregory Bateson and James Lovelock, envisioned the entire ecosystem as a single sentient and intelligent being, which Lovelock named Gaia.

Using James Lovelock’s Gaia theory and biblical exegesis, chapter 5 maintains that Earth is a sentient organism with its own moods, relational capacities, and vulnerability to suffering. This “living Earth” theme is further explored in case studies of two sacred land-sites in Northern Spain visited by the author: The Cape of the Crosses natural park, and the El Camino de Santiago pilgrimage route. Both sites are heralded as “thin places”—landscapes where divinity and materiality comfortably intersect—in which errant wandering and purposeful travel are valued equally. Currently, such sites are cruciform: as Jesus was sacrificed at Calvary, so today we crucify afresh God’s winged Spirit in nature through toxic impacts against plants, animals, and human beings. The scars of Golgotha mark the whole Earth. The chapter concludes with hope symbolized by the feral pigeon—the dovey cousin of Jesus’ baptismal bird—amidst the contemporary loss of embodied deity through ecocidal, even deicidal, practices.

Chapter 1 begins by stressing the severity of climate change (CC) and showing how, contrary to popular belief, atomic energy is not a viable solution to CC. Many scientists and most market proponents agree that renewable energy and energy efficiencies are better options. The chapter also shows that government subsidies for oil and nuclear power are the result of flawed science, poor ethics, short-term thinking, and special-interest influence. The chapter has 7 sections, the first of which surveys four major components of the energy crisis. These are oil addiction, non-CC-related deaths from fossil-fuel pollution, nuclear-weapons proliferation, and catastrophic CC. The second section summarizes some of the powerful evidence for global CC. The third section uses historical, ahistorical, Rawlsian, and utilitarian ethical principles to show how developed nations, especially the US, are most responsible for human-caused CC. The fourth section shows why climate-change skeptics, such as “deniers” who doubt CC is real, and “delayers” who say that it should not yet be addressed, have no valid objections. Instead, they all err scientifically and ethically. The fifth section illustrates that all modern scientific methods—and scientific consensus since at least 1995—confirm the reality of global CC. Essentially all expert-scientific analyses published in refereed, scientific-professional journals confirm the reality of global CC. The sixth section of the chapter shows how fossil-fuel special interests have contributed to the continued CC debate largely by paying non-experts to deny or challenge CC. The seventh section of the chapter provides an outline of each chapter in the book, noting that this book makes use of both scientific and ethical analyses to show why nuclear proponents’ arguments err, why CC deniers are wrong, and how scientific-methodological understanding can advance sound energy policy—including conservation, renewable energy, and energy efficiencies.