Meeting Gaia
James Lovelock is a scientist who invented a device in 1958 to detect minute concentrations of chemicals. It was used to show that pesticides like DDT accumulate in animals a long way from where they are used. He used it himself a decade later to show that ChloroFlouroCarbons (CFCs) were present in large concentrations in the Antarctic.
Lovelock was hired by NASA to design instruments that could find life on Mars if it existed. Lovelock started designing very sensitive instruments. Then he realised that they would be unable to differentiate between the contamination brought to Mars on the space ship and any life already there on the red planet.
He started to focus on ways to tell from the outside if life existed. He reached the remarkable conclusion that there is a very simple indicator of life and that is activity, or more accurately, instability.
Life consumes nutrients, extracts what it needs and exhales what it does not. It reorganises the world around it. There is one very significant thing about that reorganisation. It is more complex as a result of life than it would be without it. Plants consume sunlight, dirt and water and create forests. Animals eat plants and drink water and create societies.
When you look at a living thing from the outside you see change happening that cannot be explained by simple chemical processes. We see the seething compost and we know the worms are well.
Lovelock reported to NASA that he had completed his experiments and had proven that there was no life on Mars. They sacked him and insisted that he did not report his findings.
He went one step further. He founded a movement, named after the Greek goddess of the Earth, Gaia, based on the principle that the planet is alive. It is not just covered in life, it is, itself, a living organism.
There is no doubt in my mind that it is a very useful way to understand the systems which operate on a global scale.
When we describe the rainforest as the lungs of the planet we are using exactly such an analogy. When we look at the ocean currents and their interaction with the life that depends on them, it is a circulatory system we describe. David Suzuki reports that the Nitrogen in the temperate rainforests that blanket the west coast of the USA and Canada has all come from the sea in the bodies of salmon. On a planetary scale, I see small, salmon-shaped cells carrying nutrients through that circulatory system to an organ that helps the planet breathe.
This is not a far-fetched notion, it is a practical tool.
Diagnosing Gaia
As an organism, our body can deal with a wide variety of external temperatures. It can also deal with wide fluctuations in internal temperature. The testicles, for example, shrink into the body cavity when it is cold, and hang low when the body is hot, to maintain an even temperature for their precious cargo. The temperature of our blood, however, rarely strays more than a fraction of a degree from 36.8 on the Celsius scale. The medical definition of a fever is an increase of half a degree Celsius.
Scientists have reached a broad consensus that an increase of four degrees in the earth’s temperature will be fatal to life on earth as we know it. Humans will not be able to live north of Melbourne or south of Paris, the seas will become acid and will inundate almost all the great fertile river deltas of the world. The earth as a planet will survive. Living things will survive, but in the great planetary illness this represents, human civilisation will be thrown aside like a fevered patient sweats out body fluids.
With the planet as our patient, it is possible to observe some alarming truths.
Almost one per cent of the patient’s lungs are eaten away. More than ten per cent of the lungs have been damaged in the last decade alone.
The immune system of the planet is the wide range of species that exist, ready to adapt to changes in the environment and fill new niches in ecosystems as they respond to change. Over 50,000 species of plants or animals disappear off the face of the earth each year, irreversibly weakening this immune system.
More than 6.66% of the freshwater on the planet is consumed every year. This is rising above the rate at which it is replenished by rain and snow. That rate of replenishment is falling while the rate of consumption is rising.
These are not the causes of the illness, they are the symptoms. The cause of the illness is a virus that has invaded the earth’s ecosystems and is affecting the vital organs. That virus is rearranging the natural flows of Gaia’s systems. The destruction of the forests, for example, leads to reduced rainfall that makes the forests drier and more vulnerable to fire. This indirect damage amplifies the damage caused directly.The nature of the virus is to grow more voracious as it develops. In those areas where it is most densely populated, it consumes resources from other parts of the planet, starving some areas and poisoning the immediate vicinity with its excretement.
For the good of the patient, the virus simply has to be brought under control. The supply of resources to those areas where the infection is most developed needs to be limited to give natural systems an opportunity to regain balance and to slow down the creation of toxic wastes. Those areas where the virus is multiplying rapidly need to be soothed to slow down the rate of infection. Mechanisms that encourage more benign strains of the virus to dominate need to be explored.
Evolution has favoured pathogens that are not too effective. The most effective pathogens kill their hosts before they have time to spread and are eliminated from the gene pool as a result.
With only one Gaia, we cannot afford to discover this law of evolution the hard way. We simply have to reduce our impact, quickly, or we destroy our civilisation.
There is no other choice.