SFU GRADUATE LIBERAL STUDIES SEPT 09-MAY 10

SELECTED READINGS AND COMMENTS FOR MY SFU COURSE JOURNAL

Poetry: The Wasteland (Elliot), Howl (Ginsberg), Selected Poems (Sexton)

I am looking forward to hearing Michaels reasons behind his poetry choices this week. I cant imagine choosing just 3 poems to encompass the theme of poetry myself, so I am keen to hear what is the reason for these three choices? Obviously important works, but apart from that what else. The only theme I see so far is misery and disquiet. Howl is deeply disturbing and I had to read the introduction and other matter, then go back and read it again. Wasteland is way less raw, but I didnt somehow enjoy it as much as some of Elliot’s other pieces. Sexton was a new author for me, and I did enjoy some of her poems a lot.

After the class: I really enjoyed the way Ted and Jo presented Howl. Great performance by both. Makes me reflect on the power of musical accompaniment, to enhance a piece. Something I am very aware of in film making. It is interesting the order of our perception/ senses and what leads. In program making picture always leads, because of the audiences senses. ie if sound and picture are competing or conflicting the image wins out in the viewers head, because subconsciously they pay the most attention to it. This means practically that sound must compliment. Then words and music likewise may fight and conflict and music often over rides words c/o rythem and beat, which takes precedence over lecture in the viewers brains All this means in program making that if you have something important to say you better be very careful where and how you say it, and what it is said with, if you want it to be absorbed at all. So Howl I think as a poem in class benefitted from the drumming a lot. I think both Spike Lee and Q Tarrentino have demonstrated the power of music to improve an artistic piece. Wasteland did nothing much for me read aloud I must say. Sexton, so so again. In reflection I would have liked to have seen some variety in the poetry, maybe Ogden Nash in there, or Wendy Cope, light but pertinent, or Leonard Cohen, or an old Fave like Coleridge or Wordsworth, or even Hardy who has done some amazing pieces, or even more ancient still stuff. I guess I felt rather overpowered by the sameness of mood of the poetry.

Place: A Room of One’s Own , Jacob’s Room (Woolf)

Jacobs room

I was interested to hear what people had to say at class re this book as I read it first of the two and was affected I am sure of my nerveousness of Woolf’s fiction from past experience reading Orlando and others. I find I like Woolfs ideas, but not always her actual writing which I find a little inaccessible. Jacob’s room was fragmentary for some, with its swapping narratives. For me this wasn’t an issue I am at ease with this and streams of consciousness stuff. I did find it a bit hard to care however, or really identify much with any of the characters. I found it hard to be drawn in, as I do with much of her work. It rather leaves me cold and unengaged.

A Room of my own as a piece of factual writing was easier to engage with. I could agree with much of what she said here. And I reflected with a recent interview with Germaine Greere on similar subject matter that I had heard. see http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/womanshour/02/2010_12_thu.shtml

about the real room of ones own. Interesting reflections of the time and now. For eg this quote: “I told you in the course of this paper that Shakespeare had a sister; but do not look for her in Sir Sidney Lee’s life of the poet. She died young–alas, she never wrote a word. She lies buried where the omnibuses now stop, opposite the Elephant and Castle. Now my belief is that this poet who never wrote a word and was buried at the crossroads still lives. She lives in you and in me, and in many other women who are not here tonight, for they are washing up the dishes and putting the children to bed. But she lives; for great poets do not die; they are continuing presences; they need only the opportunity to walk among us in the flesh.” I went to an all girls grammar school in the 80’s in the town of Hastings (near Brighton) in the UK. This was a streamed school system then,  we sat an exam at 11, and those that passed went into a different system. I was in a top level stream and our school was extremely nurturing to girls education we were really really pushed and encouraged to succeed. Anyways I would say I was around middle of the class in terms of intelligence, maximum in the top third. Well 10 years ago some girls organised a class reunion. I was disapointed to find out what the various girls, Miss Brodie’s Creme de la creme, had gone on to do career wise. Basically there was one doctor (her dad was too) and that was pretty much it in terms of exciting or challenging careers. The girl that had been a real high flyer and got 99% in her Latin O level was a nurse, my old best friend was working in a pub, another in a bank, many were not working at all. These were the top 10% of the girls in the town academically in 1984. Some of them, not me,  were probably oxbridge standard. What had “held them back”? Why were they so dissapointing in terms of achievements? I would say almost completely their sex. Expectations in the 80’s in a South East England town of the female sex had been the single biggest factor why so few of these very bright academic young things had done so little with their lives, I believe, and I am not sure how much things have changed. Women are still under performing massively in society. For all the reasons Woolf and Greer have discussed. Plus the fact that society is organised against women working and mothering at the same time (in terms of working hours that make it possible to do mothering well) and against men working and fathering at the same time by and large, with the exception of scandanavia, who seems to realise that womens rights, mean changing mens rights (proper parternity leave) too. Good lord! I have a working mother myself I know the deal, my mother had to work such long hours to compete for the same jobs as her male counterparts I hardly saw her as a child (she was a surgeon). And from her stories I know things haven’t changed enough even now, for women. As a working mum myself I was on a project for the BBC when my second child was born. I took 3 days off, and was back at my desk part time (at home) by day 4. 3 weeks after the birth the exec producer rang me to complain that the script wasn’t progressing fast enough and if things didn’t improve I would be sacked off my own project. Yeah, things are great for women, really great they were in 2004! No wonder why so many women train, compared to men, but so few practice their skill/art as they mature. The work place is horribly skewed against working mothers. I had to give up my career for my children, it couldn’t be done part time enough to make home life decent for us all. Well I will rephrase that, it could have been possible, IF my senior staff had wanted it so. But the reality there is little will amongst senior staff and bosses (largely male) to make the workplace a fit place for working women (or men). As a result families suffer, children suffer, women suffer, and as Wollstonecraft pointed out in her piece ultimately men suffer. For is it in anyones interests for families to have one, or both parents working such long hours they cannot properly partake in child-rearing and a generation of middle class latchkey children result? If mum stays at home she is frustrated by the curtailing of her stimulating career (why cant she do it part time?), and dad works long long hours to make up for the lack of second income, so the parents and kids see each other little. If mum works the kids see both parents little and even if they have an au pair its not the same. The scandanavian solution – both parents working part time-ish after a years maternity/paternity leave (can be split/combined), is the only true answer for decent family life in my opinion, and I don’t understand why we rather opt for a scenario that is adding to family breakup and childhood psychological illnesses as a result of not choosing it. And I feel well able to speak here as a child that had two working career parents and have been one myself.

Faith: The Varieties of Religious Experience & The Will to Believe (James), The Language of God (Collins)

Language of God. I couldn’t forgive Collins here for producing both such a poorly researched book and a badly argued piece in favor of religion. As I said in my contributions to the gls google group I don’t have a problem with some one arguing in favor of God per se, but to take such advantage of one’s position of prominence in a different field to gain a platform, and then produce such a poor piece of work and blatantly abuse ones power/ media prominence seems rather shameful to me. Ive read enough theological philosophy, pro and anti, to understands the extremely poor job Collins is making in this book, and find his attempts both scary and laughable at the same time. God save our souls surely, if this is the best that can be cooked up as an argument for belief. I can only refer to an excellent book on the area of religious philosophy – by Stuart Brown called Destiny Purpose and Faith, which deals with all of these issues, and more, around the subject infinitely better than Collins. And yes I do agree with Harris’s book review of the Collins book, as below. I also agree Harris is inflametory and pretty acerbic, maybe even goes too far in some respects, esp in terms of language used, but he is factually pretty accurate, which is more than you can say for Collins, who embarrasses himself horribly, and brings into question his judgement in a whole host of other areas as a result of this publication. The redeeming feature of this book is that I have gone onto read lots more Harris and other religious philosophy and indeed build much of my essay this term in the area as a response.

Language of Ignorance By Sam Harris

In this essay, the bestselling secularist author of “The End of Faith” delivers a scathing review of “The Language of God,” a new book by Human Genome Project head Francis Collins that attempts to demonstrate a harmony between science and evangelical Christianity.

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Francis Collins—physical chemist, medical geneticist and head of the Human Genome Project—has written a book entitled “The Language of God.” In it, he attempts to demonstrate that there is “a consistent and profoundly satisfying harmony” between 21st-century science and evangelical Christianity. To say that he fails at his task does not quite get at the inadequacy of his efforts. He fails the way a surgeon would fail if he attempted to operate using only his toes. His failure is predictable, spectacular and vile. “The Language of God” reads like a hoax text, and the knowledge that it is not a hoax should be disturbing to anyone who cares about the future of intellectual and political discourse in the United States.

Most reviewers of “The Language of God” seem quite overawed by its author’s scientific credentials. This is understandable. As director of the Human Genome Project, Collins participated in one of the greatest scientific achievements in human history. His book, however, reveals that a stellar career in science offers no guarantee of a scientific frame of mind. Lest we think that one man can do no lasting harm to our discourse, consider the fact that the year is 2006, half of the American population believes that the universe is 6,000 years old, our president has just used his first veto to block federal funding of embryonic stem-cell research on religious grounds, and one of the foremost scientists in the land has this to say, straight from the heart (if not the brain):

As believers, you are right to hold fast to the concept of God as Creator; you are right to hold fast to the truths of the Bible; you are right to hold fast to the conclusion that science offers no answers to the most pressing questions of human existence; and you are right to hold fast to the certainty that the claims of atheistic materialism must be steadfastly resisted….

God, who is not limited to space and time, created the universe and established natural laws that govern it. Seeking to populate this otherwise sterile universe with living creatures, God chose the elegant mechanism of evolution to create microbes, plants, and animals of all sorts. Most remarkably, God intentionally chose the same mechanism to give rise to special creatures who would have intelligence, a knowledge of right and wrong, free will, and a desire to seek fellowship with Him. He also knew these creatures would ultimately choose to disobey the Moral Law.

According to Collins, belief in the God of Abraham is the most rational response to the data of physics and biology, while “of all the possible worldviews, atheism is the least rational.” Taken at face value, these claims suggest that “The Language of God” will mark an unprecedented breakthrough in the history of ideas. Once Collins gets going, however, we realize that the book represents a breakthrough of another kind.

After finding himself powerless to detect any errors in the philosophizing of C.S. Lewis (a truly ominous sign), Collins describes the moment that he, as a scientist, finally became convinced of the divinity of Jesus Christ:

On a beautiful fall day, as I was hiking in the Cascade Mountains … the majesty and beauty of God’s creation overwhelmed my resistance. As I rounded a corner and saw a beautiful and unexpected frozen waterfall, hundreds of feet high, I knew the search was over. The next morning, I knelt in the dewy grass as the sun rose and surrendered to Jesus Christ.

If this account of field research seems a little thin, don’t worry—a recent profile of Collins in Time magazine offers supplementary data. Here, we learn that the waterfall was frozen in three streams, which put the good doctor in mind of the Trinity…
It is at this point that thoughts of suicide might occur to any reader who has placed undue trust in the intellectual integrity of his fellow human beings. One would hope that it would be immediately obvious to Collins that there is nothing about seeing a frozen waterfall (no matter how frozen) that offers the slightest corroboration of the doctrine of Christianity. But it was not obvious to him as he “knelt in the dewy grass,” and it is not obvious to him now. Indeed, I fear that it will not be obvious to many of his readers.

If the beauty of nature can mean that Jesus really is the son of God, then anything can mean anything. Let us say that I saw the same waterfall, and its three streams reminded me of Romulus, Remus and the She-wolf, the mythical founders of Rome. How reasonable would it be for me to know, from that moment forward, that Italy would one day win the World Cup? This epiphany, while perfectly psychotic, would actually put me on firmer ground than Collins—because Italy did win the World Cup. Collins’ alpine conversion would be a ludicrous non sequitur even if Jesus does return to Earth trailing clouds of glory.

While the mere sighting of a waterfall appears to have been sufficient to answer all important questions of theology for Collins, he imagines himself to be in possession of further evidence attesting to the divinity of Jesus, the omnipotence of God and the divine origin of the Bible. The most compelling of these data, in his view, is the fact that human beings have a sense of right and wrong. Collins follows Lewis here, as faithfully as if he were on a leash, and declares that the “moral law” is so inscrutable a thing as to admit of only a supernatural explanation. According to Collins, the moral law applies exclusively to human beings:

Though other animals may at times appear to show glimmerings of a moral sense, they are certainly not widespread, and in many instances other species’ behavior seems to be in dramatic contrast to any sense of universal rightness.

One wonders if the author has ever read a newspaper. The behavior of humans offers no such “dramatic contrast.” How badly must human beings behave to put this “sense of universal rightness” in doubt? And just how widespread must “glimmerings” of morality be among other animals before Collins—who, after all, knows a thing or two about genes—begins to wonder whether our moral sense has evolutionary precursors in the natural world? What if mice showed greater distress at the suffering of familiar mice than unfamiliar ones? (They do.) What if monkeys will starve themselves to prevent their cage-mates from receiving painful shocks? (They will.) What if chimps have a demonstrable sense of fairness when receiving food rewards? (They have.) Wouldn’t these be precisely the sorts of findings one would expect if our morality were the product of evolution?

Collins’ case for the supernatural origin of morality rests on the further assertion that there can be no evolutionary explanation for genuine altruism. Because self-sacrifice cannot increase the likelihood that an individual creature will survive and reproduce, truly self-sacrificing behavior stands as a primordial rejoinder to any biological account of morality. In Collins’ view, therefore, the mere existence of altruism offers compelling evidence of a personal God. (Here, Collins performs a risible sprint past ideas in biology like “kin selection” that plausibly explain altruism and self-sacrifice in evolutionary terms.) A moment’s thought reveals, however, that if we were to accept this neutered biology, almost everything about us would be bathed in the warm glow of religious mystery. Forget morality—how did nature select for the ability to write sonnets, solder circuit boards or swing a golf club? Clearly, such abilities could never be the product of evolution. Might they have been placed in us by God? Smoking cigarettes isn’t a healthy habit and is unlikely to offer an adaptive advantage—and there were no cigarettes in the Paleolithic—but this habit is very widespread and compelling. Is God, by any chance, a tobacco farmer? Collins can’t seem to see that human morality and selfless love may be derivative of more basic biological and psychological traits,  which were themselves products of evolution. It is hard to interpret this oversight in light of his scientific training. If one didn’t know better, one might be tempted to conclude that religious dogmatism presents an obstacle to scientific reasoning.

Having established that our moral sensitivities are God-given, Collins finds himself in a position to infer the nature of our Creator:

And if that were so, what kind of God would this be? Would this be a deist God, who invented physics and mathematics and started the universe in motion about 14 billion years ago, then wandered off to deal with other, more important matters, as Einstein thought? No, this God, if I was perceiving him at all, must be a theist God, who desires some kind of relationship with those special creatures called human beings, and has therefore instilled this special glimpse of Himself into each one of us. This might be the God of Abraham, but it was certainly not the God of Einstein…. Judging by the incredibly high standards of the Moral Law … this was a God who was holy and righteous. He would have to be the embodiment of goodness…. Faith in God now seemed more rational than disbelief.

I hope the reader will share my amazement that passages like this have come from one of the most celebrated scientists in the United States. I find that my own sense of the moral law requires that I provide a few more examples of Collins’ skill as a philosopher and theologian…

Next page: How does Collins settle the problem of theodicy—the mystery of why there is evil and misfortune in a world created by an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly benevolent God? He takes it very much in stride….

On the question of why God simply doesn’t provide better evidence for his existence:

If the case in favor of belief in God were utterly airtight, then the world would be full of confident practitioners of a single faith. But imagine such a world, where the opportunity to make a free choice about belief was taken away by the certainty of the evidence. How interesting would that be?

One is tempted to say that it might be more “interesting” than a world unnecessarily shattered by competing religious orthodoxies and religious war, only to be followed by an eternity in hell for all those who believe the wrong things about God. But, to each his own.

How does Collins settle the problem of theodicy—the mystery of why there is evil and misfortune in a world created by an omniscient, omnipotent and perfectly benevolent God? He takes it very much in stride:

Science reveals that the universe, our own planet, and life itself are engaged in an evolutionary process. The consequences of that can include the unpredictability of the weather, the slippage of a tectonic plate, or the misspelling of a cancer gene in the normal process of cell division. If at the beginning of time God chose to use these forces to create human beings, then the inevitability of these other painful consequences was also assured. Frequent miraculous interventions would be at least as chaotic in the physical realm as they would be in interfering with human acts of free will.

But why was God obliged to make cell division susceptible to the perversity of cancer? And why couldn’t an all-powerful, all-knowing, perfectly benevolent God perform as many miracles as He wanted? There isn’t time to entertain such questions, however, as Collins must solve all outstanding problems in the science of cosmology:

The Big Bang cries out for a divine explanation. It forces the conclusion that nature had a defined beginning. I cannot see how nature could have created itself. Only a supernatural force that is outside of space and time could have done that.

It is worth pointing out the term “supernatural,” which Collins uses freely throughout his book, is semantically indistinguishable from the term “magical.” Reading his text with this substitution in mind is rather instructive. In any case, even if we accepted that our universe simply had to be created by an intelligent being, this would not suggest that this being is the God of the Bible, or even particularly magical.  If intelligently designed, our universe could be running as a simulation on an alien supercomputer. As many critics of religion have pointed out, the notion of a Creator poses an immediate problem of an infinite regress. If God created the universe, what created God? To insert an inscrutable God at the origin of the universe explains absolutely nothing. And to say that God, by definition, is uncreated, simply begs the question. (Why can’t I say that the universe, by definition, is uncreated?) Any being capable of creating our world promises to be very complex himself.  As the biologist Richard Dawkins has observed with untiring eloquence, the only natural process we know of that could produce a being capable of designing things is evolution.

Any intellectually honest person must admit that he does not know why the universe exists. Secular scientists, of course, readily admit their ignorance on this point. Believers like Collins do not.

The major and inescapable flaw of … [the] claim that science demands of atheism is that it goes beyond the evidence. If God is outside of nature, then science can neither prove nor disprove His existence. Atheism itself must therefore be considered a form of blind faith, in that it adopts a belief system that cannot be defended on the basis of pure reason.

Is disbelief in Zeus or Thor also a form of “blind faith”? Must we really “disprove” the existence of every imaginary friend? The burden of producing evidence falls on those making extravagant claims about miracles and invisible realities. What is more, there is an enormous difference between acquiring a picture of the world through dispassionate, scientific study and acquiring it through patent emotionality and wishful thinking—and only then looking to see if it can survive contact with science.

Consider the following fact: Ninety-nine percent of the species that have ever lived on Earth are now extinct. There are two very different questions one could ask about a fact of this sort, if one wanted to assess the reasonableness of believing in God. One could ask, “Is this fact compatible with the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient and compassionate God?” Or, one could ask, “Does this fact, alone or in combination with other facts, suggest that an omnipotent, omniscient and compassionate God exists?” The answer to the first question is always, “Well, yes—provided you add that God’s will is utterly mysterious.” (In the present case, He may have wanted to destroy 99% of his creatures for some very good reason that surpasses our understanding.) The answer to the second question is “absolutely not.” The problem for Collins is that only the second question is relevant to our arriving at a rational understanding of the universe. The fact that a bowdlerized evangelical Christianity can still be rendered compatible with science (because of the gaps in science and the elasticity of religious thinking) does not mean that there are scientific reasons for being an evangelical Christian.

Collins’ sins against reasonableness do not end here. Somewhere during the course of his scientific career, he acquired the revolting habit of quoting eminent scientists out of context to give an entirely false impression of their religious beliefs. Misappropriation of Einstein and Hawking, while common enough in popular religious discourse, rises to level of intellectual misconduct when perpetrated by a scientist like Collins. Where either of these physicists uses the term “God”—as in Einstein’s famous “God does not play dice…”—he uses it metaphorically. Any honest engagement with their work reveals that both Einstein and Hawking reject the notion of Collins’ God as fully as any atheist. Collins suggests otherwise at every opportunity.

In his role as Christian apologist, Collins also makes the repellent claim that “the traditional lore about Galileo’s persecutions by the Church is overblown.” Lest we forget: Galileo, the greatest scientist of his time, was forced to his knees under threat of torture and death, obliged to recant his understanding of the Earth’s motion, and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life by steely-eyed religious maniacs. He worked at a time when every European intellectual lived in the grip of a Church that thought nothing of burning scholars alive for merely speculating about the nature of the stars. As Collins notes, this is the same Church that did not absolve Galileo of heresy for 350 years (in 1992). When it did, it ascribed his genius to God, “who, stirring in the depths of his spirit, stimulated him, anticipating and assisting his intuitions.” Collins clearly approves of this sordid appropriation, and goes on to say that all the fuss about Galileo was, in the end, unnecessary, because “the claims that heliocentricity contradicted the Bible are now seen to have been overstated….” (And what if they weren’t overstated? What then?) It is simply astonishing that a scientist has produced such a pious glossing of the centuries of religious barbarism that were visited upon generations of other scientists.

If one wonders how beguiled, self-deceived and carefree in the service of fallacy a scientist can be in the United States in the 21st century, “The Language of God” provides the answer. The only thing that mitigates the harm this book will do to the stature of science in the United States is that it will be mostly read by people for whom science has little stature already. Viewed from abroad, “The Language of God” will be seen as another reason to wonder about the fate of American society. Indeed, it is rare that one sees the thumbprint of historical contingency so visible on the lens of intellectual discourse. This is an American book, attesting to American ignorance, written for Americans who believe that ignorance is stronger than death. Reading it should provoke feelings of collective guilt in any sensitive secularist. We should be ashamed that this book was written in our own time.

Sam Harris is the author of the New York Times bestseller, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason and Letter to a Christian Nation. He is a graduate in philosophy from Stanford University and has studied both Eastern and Western religious traditions, along with a variety of contemplative disciplines, for twenty years. Mr. Harris is now completing a doctorate in neuroscience. His work has been discussed in The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, The Chicago Tribune, The Economist, The Guardian, The Independent, The Globe and Mail,  New Scientist, SEED Magazine, and many other journals. Mr. Harris makes regular appearances on television and radio to discuss the danger that religion now poses to modern societies. The End of Faith won the 2005 PEN Award for Nonfiction. Several foreign editions are in press. Mr. Harris lives in New York City.

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James, Varieties. Well of course James is talking lots of sense in many ways here. He does self reference a lot, to almost circular argument  proportions, but his general observations and findings are solid and interesting. I enjoyed reading about where Steve Reiss was taking his work more recently.  http://researchnews.osu.edu/archive/religdes.htm  In terms of style of writing I didnt find James very accessible, but at least the subheadings were good. Not sure what more to say about this piece. Its solid stuff, presented in a not desperately exciting way to me now, though at the time I am sure it would have raised a few eyebrows. I guess I should also reference in a couple of books here Campbell “Sociology of Irreligion” and Harris “The End of Faith” in the same area.

Hierarchy: Hard Times (Dickens), The Communist Manifesto (Marx & Engels)

Hard Times

OK I wasn’t looking forward to this, having previously struggled with Dickens, finding him dry. However to my surprise I really did enjoy this, and was amused to hear the class responses. It seemed quite divided between those that had read lots of Dickens and thought this not one of his better pieces, and those that had read little and really enjoyed this. Needless to say I fell into the latter camp. I wonder why it was so divided. As for the piece in detail, well yes it was sad and rather depressing, and yes I agreed it was a written piece that had a distinct separation between the slow start and faster pace of the end revelation. Not being much of an expert on Dickens I cant really comment much re the structure. In terms of the story-line and what it said about hierarchy in life I guess I am lucky in respect that I not only come from the UK, but also have worked in research on a piece on the industrial revolution. I have visited many of these “dark satanic mills” or at least the towns that still exist. I have designed and dressed sets, as well as working in re-enactment museums like Ironbridge that depict the slave labour conditions of the time, and the poverty of the lower classes as well as the luxury of the better off mill owners. Coming from a culture still steeped in class issues, I can understand the nature of what Dickens was talking about and the people he described.  Dickens’ arguments are ones I am familiar with. On more specifics I was particularly struck by the characters of the travelling horse people and the argument that everyone needed a little relaxation at times. I must admit I thought their argument seemed to most convincingly win the day all round, and the compassion shown as they assisted in the final escape was to me a mark of their high character. I am a firm believer that ones behavior should be a sign of ones own quality of character, not the quality of character that ones behavior is directed towards.  Class and good breeding are unattached to rank in my mind.

Communist Manufesto

A week of surprises! I really enjoyed this also! I am enjoying my intros immensely at present, and found the much recommended one here a great addition to the text.

In terms of the manifesto itself I am not sure I found much to buy into in some ways (though in others it was quite convincing). Sorry that sounds confused. I guess what I mean is I found myself nodding along a lot, and thinking heres a good point often, but at the end I wasn’t really moved towards communism. Was I, to mirror Marx, just not ready, or was it not the right time? I am not sure. I could see some good ideas but also some huge flaws that it seemed would be impossible to implement, and I couldn’t see how Marx would practically deal with a lot of the ideas he had. I guess that was my main gripe. That it seemed to much an idea, fine in theory, but impossible to achieve in practice. Just too ambitious , too hopeful, that human weaknesses could be overcome by this method. I visited Russia in 1990 I should add, for 5 days. My parents joined an ‘intourist’ trip to Leningrad and Moscow and I went too, immediately splitting off to hang with various friends of friends in the film world of Lenin Film studio. It was fascinating to see a snap shot of the break up of the Soviet Union at close quarters. In the streets the economic situation and food shortages were biting hard, shops were almost empty of supplies, people were pimping their few precious possessions on street corners (I was offered precious icons and all sorts illegally – their desperate owners were legitimate but there were no export papers) Hard currency (US dollars – how amusing to remember in todays world!) was everything and everyone wanted it. I remember riding the subway – incidentally amazing, but needing such small change to get through the turnstiles. With the russian currency in free-fall it was hard to find the coins needed to get in so we had to trade dollars worth hundreds of the local currency value to get these small coins to use the underground. Restaurant eating was austere, there was nothing anywhere, even for tourists it was bleak living. Despite this all there seemed to be amazing hope for the future, and what the west and free market would bring. Black market trading was on the up, people wanted what the west had to offer, what they thought it had to offer. Of course that (democracy, open markets etc) has turned out to be in many ways just as much a failure as communism! Maybe we are all guilty of idealistic wishful thinking, as much as Marx.

Progress: Politics and the Arts (Rousseau), The Wild Boy of Aveyron (Itard)

Oh Mr Rousseau, you make yourself so unlikeable at times! I liked you much better as a philosopher reading about negative and more importantly positive freedom, before things got so much more personal. Now I understand why people claimed you were responsible for such actions and abuses of your ideas. They are expressed so smugly, so arrogantly. As a woman its hard to forgive your uber-patronising stance on woman’s rights and situation. Now its the turn of the arts. Ok so I can see your points, but the problem seems just this, they are your points. You seem to be outside of the controls. Its a kind of do as I say, not as I do, policy most of the time. Theatre will be corrupting for the masses you say, so don’t let them see it, keep them nieve and safe. But will this really work? Don’t we need to educate them to make their own decisions, as we educate our children , not to hide the decisions from them? Coming to the weeks theme of progress though, this is a problematic area. Many have tried to stop it, to return to a bygone age. Was it Lovelock who talked about the golden age of our forefathers? A ‘we have never had it so good’ idea. I prefer to think of life as changing, rather than either improving or deconstructing.

Wild Boy. Interesting this, as I had seen the Truffaut film a couple of times before, incl once when quite young, and it had made a strong impression on me from back then. I watched it again and read the book and was intrigued to see how closely on the whole it followed the books written word. However as it became clear in class liberties of artistic liscence had to be, and were, taken in the making of the piece. For example the switching of a few locations that mattered little. But also the visual description of certain things that were made (the rocking motion akin to Autism) that I didn’t find specific mention of in the wording of the book. As someone mentioned (Ted I believe) Trauffaut had himself a traumatic childhood and was obsessed with this area. This made it all the more interesting a film, esp casting himself as the doctor Itard! I myself spent several hours on a website for wild children reading about specific cases, from kids supposedly brought up by animals to kids isolated from speech and/or human contact. The effects  were not surprisingly awful and negative. http://www.feralchildren.com/en/index.php

I also began thinking about an iranian case, upon which The Apple film was based.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Apple_(1998_film)

Government: Second Treatise on Government (Locke), Analects (Confucius)

OOOOOh didn’t Locke get a bad press in class this week. How unfair! I have found him a reasonable philosopher and couldn’t really say I dissagreed so much with his Treatise as others seemed to. All about materialism, and capitalism, maybe (that was the criticism) . But put it into context please. I find Locke, for his time very sensible and fairly progressive. After all he was famous for his views on religious tolerance and liberalism, and also self and the identity (Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)). He was also famous for separating church and state. He is hardly the thoughtless inflexible materialist he seemed to be deemed in class tonight. Of course Locke also inspired both Hume and the American constitution. Considering the time in which he was writing, thats no mean feat.

Confucius. Again I found this enjoyable thoughtful reading too. Lots of filial devotion, as per Mencius, but I have come to realise that this is part of the Chinese culture, or at least now it is! America is big time into its independence (to bear arms, speak out, succeed in career etc), China is into respecting ones elders and custom. I guess one can start considering how much this is a nature v nurture situation. Hard to ever know for sure. But lots to think about here as well. Very different in many ways to Locke. They both have their pros and cons as far as I can see.

Ecology: Walden (Thoreau), Gaia (Lovelock)

Walden

Well I found I had quite a lot of mixed emotions re this piece. On one hand , as Havi said, I couldn’t help admiring the man, and the minimalist lifestyle he advocated, on the other hand I found parts of the book intensely irritating! When Havi told us (I wish I had known this before I read the book!) that Thoreau went home to his mum at weekends for cookies and dirty washing help, I was quite taken a back. I didn’t see that hypocrisy coming!! I must admit Thoreau reminded me very much of my ex uncle in law, a great man (now in his 60’s) who lives in South Africa and has opted for a minimalist life,  lived in touch with nature , with few possessions and needs, and therefore a minimal need for money to finace his life. With this ‘need to earn’ reduced he has time to do the things he enjoys, walking in the mountains, climbing, etc. He has been living in a similar way for 20 years or more now, doesn’t go home to mum to do the cookie/washing thing, but he does have the change of scenery of regular visits to friends, of which he has a great many, which I am sure helps soften his more austere home life a little. Anyways back to Walden. I enjoyed the general idea, but I found his detail quite tedious at times, and also found his comments re minimalism a little far fetched also, and his preachy tone grated a little. I did enjoy the passages about the pond in the second half and the ice very evocative mind. I will look up Bretts video of the Alaska guy too.

Gaia

Where to start?! I presented this piece and got rather passionate over it to say the least! Its hard not to given the circumstances, and at least it got the class talking, and some lively debate! I am including my questions, more themes, here, as well as my Lovelock biog and the links to urls. As an add on to these in the general discussion I was interested that Nash gave it such a good go, it obviously touched a raw nerve.  I guess for me I dont necessarily believe Lovelock has all the answers, but I think it does us all a lot of good to have someone who is so prepared to be so outspoken over a number of important issues, and who is not afraid to say some pretty difficult , and shocking things. I like that in Lovelock, I am happy to consider things from a very different perspective, it shakes me up.

http://www.vidoemo.com/yvideo.php?i=ZEJVdlpEcWuRpU1kyRDA&james-lovelock-population-reduction-max-1-billion=

13mins

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/video/2009/apr/22/james-lovelock-gaia-space-biochar

25 mins

GAIA by James Lovelock

Themes & Questions

1. Impact Past and Present.

As a concept Gaia was disliked intensely by many scientists (Gould, Dawkins, Doolittle, et al ) when first published for a number or reasons (teleological implications, anti-evolutionary tones, new age pseudo-science concerns, over holistic view, too populist an approach). Some of these concerns were addressed (teleological and evolutionary ones by the Daisyworld models), (pseudo science and populist ones by the publication of a more scientific book). Some of Lovelocks predictions in Gaia have since been born out. Some concerns have remained. Lovelock himself has gone on to rework and add to many of the ideas within this book in later writings (see end).

Lovelock states that major new concepts take between 40-50 years to become generally accepted. Thirty years on it is fair to say that Earth System Science (as some scientists prefer to call a form of Gaia) is certainly more accepted as a concept than it initially was, has caused us to re-look at the earth and its atmosphere (as well as other planetary systems) in a different way and has added to the dialogue regarding climate change challenges. Is Lovelock right – that we need a substantial amount of time to take on a new idea of this magnitude, if so why is this?  What do we feel are the most challenging parts of the Gaia theory to accept?

As background it took approx 20-30 years for the general scientific community to accept the idea of evolution after the Origin of Species was published (the general subject had been discussed a number of years before Origin of Species was published).

2. The independent polymath.

Lovelock has been adamant in maintaining independence as a scientist, akin to an artist or novelist’s way of working (see below).  He has also drawn parallels with the creative processes of discovery and inventing, and those of creating art.

“Any artist or novelist would understand—some of us do not produce their best when directed. We expect the artist, the novelist and the composer to lead solitary lives, often working at home. While a few of these creative individuals exist in institutions or universities, the idea of a majority of established novelists or painters working at the ‘National Institute for Painting and Fine Art’ or a university ‘Department of Creative Composition’ seems mildly amusing. By contrast, alarm greets the idea of a creative scientist working at home. A lone scientist is as unusual as a solitary termite and regarded as irresponsible or worse.”

James Lovelock Homage to Gala: The Life of an Independent Scholar (2000), 2.

“I am a 90-year-old scientist and consequently old-fashioned. As did scientists two or more centuries ago, I work in my own laboratory, make my own expeditions and almost never seek or take funds. It would help to be wealthy, but instead I pay for my research in the way an artist does, by selling advice or small pieces of hardware. Such a way of life has left me free to exercise my curiosity and work on topics, such as the Gaia theory and the abundance of CFCs and other gases in the atmosphere, at a time when such research was unpopular. For the past 32 years I have worked from my home laboratory in rural West Devon.”         American Scientist Interview, Nightstand, Greg Ross

“I hope that I have shown that science can still be a vocation, not just a career. Something that can even be done at home, in the way an artist or novelist works.”

When asked why he chose not be attached to an institution he replied “ because I am an obstinate sod and could not bear the thought of the tramlines of security in a steady job carrying me to retirement and the grave”

Would Lovelock have achieved the same results had he worked within institutions, and accepted systems, more? Has his reputation suffered, or been enhanced, by being a maverick / outsider?

Is he right to compare his inventing inspiration to the artistic process ? Is Lovelock, like Da Vinci, a polymath? How much does society benefit from interdisciplinary people of this type, and is this an argument against specialisation?

3. Who are the Bad Guys? (and why do we find it hard to tell?)

In Chapter 2 (and later Ch 5) Lovelock heralds oxygen, when it arrived on the scene 2 aeons ago, as the most dangerous pollutant the planet had ever known. In Chapters 3 & 5 he discusses the pros and cons of carbon dioxide and other gases. Chapter 7 is dedicated to pollution , natural and manmade, and their associated risks. Lovelock finally proposes that the human race, in terms of sheer numbers, is the biggest pollutant of all, and the risk that our growing population presents to the earth system of Gaia is likely to outweigh all the other dangers of pollutants.

As a species humans are notoriously bad at perceiving and responding to risk (see table below comparing the historic risk of a number of different energy systems , including the nuclear industry (much maligned according to Lovelock)). This failing has often been influenced by the manner in which dangers are presented to the public and the politicisation of these dangers. Emotions can blind us to the facts, that’s for sure. Why is this so, and does emotional input of this nature ever work in our favour? Should a better way to assess risk and respond to danger be found, or be taught in schools?

Deaths in energy industry (reassessed figures per twy of energy produced ) between 1970 and 1992

Coal                                    6400                    (342)

Natural Gas                  1200                    (85)

Hydro                                    4000                    (883)

Nuclear                                    31                    (8)

From The Revenge of Gaia. 2006. Lovelock, James

4. Co-operation not Competition

According to Lovelock, in his preface to the 2000 edition of Gaia, science nowadays is too adversarial, too competitive. To win the argument, rather than to uncover the truth, has become all-important and this is having a negative impact on uncovering the facts. Truth is said to be the first casualty of war (Aeschylus, Greek tragic dramatist (525 BC – 456 BC)). As a new era of potential global catastrophe approaches should we be teaching co-operation, not competition, in our schools if we are to better enable future generations, and the human species as a whole, to survive? As a potentially unconnected aside Lovelock sent his son to a Steiner School (noted for its pro-cooperation stance).

It has been noted by many how, in the second world-war, there was great pulling together and self sacrifice. If Lovelock is right and resources have to be pooled globally across the earth, humans will need to focus on the bigger picture beyond family, tribe, even species, alone. Are we capable of working together in this way to save our species, or is our tribal side destined to dominate as we battle over precious land, water and power?

And are we willing to sacrifice our species to save Gaia if necessary? To quote Hardin “We can’t win, we are sure to lose, we cant get out of the game” rephrased by Lovelock as “mortality is the price of identity”. Is there something to be gained from gracefully learning how to play a game of life that we cannot possibly win? Each of us after all ultimately faces death, and without death there would not be life. If the ultimate sacrifice of our species is need to save the earth system, Gaia, of which we are, according to Lovelock all a part, will we commit to this end?

As the deep ecologist Freya Matthew said “What is wrong with our culture is that it offers us an inaccurate conception of the self. It depicts the personal self as existing in competition with and in opposition to nature. [We fail to realise that] if we destroy our environment, we are destroying what is in fact our larger self.”

5. Digging our way out

According to Lovelock (Chapter 8) humankind ‘going back to nature’ will not solve Gaia’s current problems, we cannot just jump ship now we have come this far. Technology must be our ally, and Lovelock has a number of suggestions for how in books and articles following. Despite these attempts, and their successes and failures, Lovelock predicts that the quality of future human life will be by necessity very different from today’s heady existence. How much are we prepared to sacrifice now in terms of lifestyle degradation, to ensure a better life for our children? What proofs would we need that it would help?

6. Beyond Gaia

Lovelock has conceded his views have changed since he wrote this original  book in 1976. He now thinks that Gaia is not necessarily such “a tough old bitch” and that global warming is a far larger threat to planet earth, as well as mankind, than he ever imagined.  In his book The Revenge of Gaia he discusses the future prospects of life on earth in terms of sustainable retreat, as below:

For years our society has focused on growth at all costs. Even now in the depths of financial recession we talk about economic growth levels starting to recover, and we aspire to the boom years again. But according to Lovelock and many others the idea of sustainable growth in our present situation is a crazy headed fallacy, we should be looking at sustainable retreat if we are to achieve survival for our species as a whole. The future earth is unlikely to be able to support more than 1 billion people with a reasonable quality of life says Lovelock. The lifestyle of those 1 billion will by necessity be very different from today’s. With vast areas of the world arid deserts, only useful for solar power generation, we will need to cluster in extremely dense urban areas within the viable land areas so as to free the maximum remaining space for intensive agricultural practices. Organic and meat farming will be inefficient and non-viable in the future, synthesised food may be common for our children. Energy consumption will be tightly regulated, and will be based on nuclear or hydro power. Much of our world may be virtual.

This is Lovelock’s best scenario IF we can bring the population down from 6 ½ billion to 1 billion soon. If we cant implement such a reduction Lovelock predicts an involuntary cull will be the likely result, care of a pandemic of global wars when nations beginning fighting over increasingly scarce resources and usable land. China will be forced to invade Siberia to escape desertification and the citizens of the US will flood into Canada. Northern Europe and Great Britain will be over burdened with desperate refugees from the rest of Europe. Countless lives will be lost in the chaos that ensues. Many others will perish locally.

Assuming Lovelock is right are we capable of bringing down our population from 6-7 billion to 1 billion voluntarily? How could we go about doing this?

Bibilography of Lovelock’s major work

Lovelock, James (2000) [1979]. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (3rd ed. ed.). Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-286218-9.

Lovelock, James; Michael Allaby (1983). Great Extinction. Doubleday. ISBN 0-385-18011-X.

Lovelock, James; Michael Allaby (1984). The Greening of Mars. Warner Books. ISBN 0-446-32967-3.

Lovelock, James (1995) [1988]. Ages of Gaia. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-393-31239-9.

Lovelock, James (2001) [Gaia Books 1991]. Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine. Oxford University Press US. ISBN 0-19-521674-1.

Lovelock, James (1991). Scientists on Gaia. Cambridge, Mass., USA: MIT Press. ISBN 0-262-19310-8.

Lovelock, James (2005). Gaia: Medicine for an Ailing Planet. Gaia Books. ISBN 1-85675-231-3.

Lovelock, James (2000). Homage to Gaia: The Life of an Independent Scientist. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-860429-7. (Lovelock’s autobiography)

Lovelock, James (2006). The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back – and How We Can Still Save Humanity. Santa Barbara (California): Allen Lane. ISBN 0-7139-9914-4.

Lovelock, James (2009). The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning: Enjoy It While You Can. Allen Lane. ISBN 978-1846141850.

James Lovelock Gaia

Intro to the Man

Early days:

Born in 1919 in Letchworth Garden City he was initially raised by a very loving Grandmother there and has fond countryside memories. From age of 5 he grew up in Brixton, south London, similar area to Commercial Drive here now but then ‘still’ a wealthy area. His family were working class ‘shop keepers’ but with aspirations and abilities beyond their training. His intelligent mum esp. regretted her lack of education (she was awarded an Islington scholarship as a child but was unable to take it up as she was needed as a breadwinner for the family). His dad worked for the gasworks. On the side the couple opened an art gallery (not a  success) in Brixton and put James into the posh local school where most kids were from middle class b/gs. He hated school but from a very early age wanted to become a scientist so he set his mind to finishing school to achieve this. His miserable inner city childhood was lightened by countryside outings with his loving grandparents and visits to an array of aunts. Back at school he got by with the bare minimum, he wouldn’t do homework or sports preferring instead to ‘home educate’ himself in organic chemistry and biology at the Brixton Library at weekends and evenings.

Early career:

He left school after A levels and went to work in a chemistry lab as an apprentice. The lab manager, insisting there was no future at the lab, stipulated he take evening classes at the London University. He credits the lab with teaching him sound scientific practices and accuracy.  He left the lab around the start of the war and went to Manchester to study chemistry. He was a contentious objector during the war, but converted in 1940. In 1948 he achieved his PhD in medicine from London School of Hygiene. In 1959 he was awarded a Post Doc in Biophysics form eth London University. Between 1941 and 1951 he worked for the Nat Inst Medical Research and the Common Cold Research Unit.

Main career:

Since 1951 he has worked for a number of people and institutes, inc. Harvard, Yale, Baylor, NASA Jet Propulsion Lab. From 1964 he has remained largely an independent scientist working out of his home lab. He responded to the question of why he hadn’t taken tenancy somewhere with the answer “because I am an obstinate sod and could not bear the thought of the tramlines of security in a steady job carrying me to retirement and the grave”

He invented the electron capture detector amongst other things (he has 50 other patents), which facilitated Rachel Carson in the writing of her book “Silent Spring” by highlighting the danger of stratospheric pollutants, and so by aided the environmental movement.

During his time at Nasa (trying to formulate a way to detect life on Mars) he came up with the proposal that the gases within a planet’s atmosphere could reveal the presence of life (past and present) or lack of life. This led on to his Gaia hypothesis for life on earth.

Broadly speaking this hypothesis, now a theory, proposes that earth is a self-regulatory system, named gaia, which includes the planet, its oceans and its atmosphere, and optimises itself for general ‘life’ on earth.

For many aeons, says Lovelock, Gaia was fighting to keep the earth warm enough for life. Now that (for various reasons) the sun’s influence is hotting up the earth Gaia’s system is fighting to keep things cool enough for life. In Lovelocks view this fight of Gaia’s will eventually fail, as the suns influence becomes too great to resist and the earth becomes lifeless again. Man in his opinion is interfering, and so disabling, the balance of this self-regulatory system of Gaia to such a degree that it will fail, long before its natural timeline. How much before depends on what we do in the next 50 years or so.

GAIA The Concept

We now see that the air, the ocean and the soil are much more than a mere environment for life; they are a part of life itself. Thus the air is to life just as is the fur to a cat or the nest for a bird. Not living but something made by living things to protect against an otherwise hostile world. For life on Earth the air is our protection against the cold depths and fierce radiations of space.

There is nothing unusual in the idea of life on Earth interacting with the air, sea and rocks, but it took a view from outside to glimpse the possibility that this combination might consist of a single giant living system and one with the capacity to keep the Earth always at a state most favorable for the life upon it.

An entity comprising a whole planet and with a powerful capacity to regulate the climate needs a name to match. It was the novelist William Golding who proposed the name Gaia. Gladly we accepted his suggestion and Gaia is also the name of the hypothesis of science which postulates that the climate and the composition of the Earth always are close to an optimum for whatever life inhabits it.

The evidence gathered in support of Gaia is now considerable but as is often the way of science, this is less important than is its use as a kind of looking glass for seeing the world differently, and which makes us ask new questions about the nature of Earth.

If we are “all creatures great and small,” from bacteria to whales, part of Gaia then we are all of us potentially important to her well being. We knew in our hearts that the destruction of a whole ranges of other species was wrong but now we know why. No longer can we merely regret the passing of one of the great whales, or the blue butterfly, nor even the smallpox virus. When we eliminate one of these from Earth, we may have destroyed a part of ourselves, for we also are a part of Gaia.

There are many possibilities for comfort as there are for dismay in contemplating the consequences of our membership in this great commonwealth of living things. It may be that one role we play is as the senses and nervous system for Gaia. Through our eyes she has for the first time seen her very fair face and in our minds become aware of herself. We do indeed belong here. The earth is more than just a home, it’s a living system and we are part of it.

GAIA The Book Summary

Preface:

His discovery that the biosphere regulated the planet.

Difference between pleasing scientists and the populace

Science is too adversarial – to win, rather than to uncover the truth, has become all-important

Chapter 1 Introduction (p1-11):

Explanation of how to define Life

What the atmosphere tells us about life

His understanding that something was maintaining the system

Chapter 2 In the Beginning (p12-29)

The earth as a stable planet over 3 ½ aeons. No chance, without some extra controls maintaining it.

The problem of changing Carbon Dioxide levels

Keeping the earth cool

Dangers of oxygen – the first pollutant – 2 aeons ago

Chapter 3 – The Recognition of Gaia (p30-43)

The ‘natural’ life-supporting atmosphere and surface of Earth

Threats to life, incl the dangers of Co2, and crossing thresholds of no return

Chapter 4 – Cybernetics (p44-58)

The earth as an oven or heater with a thermostat to regulate it.

We shiver and sweat to regulate our body temp, so too does the earth use methods to regulate itself.

How do we recognise an auto-control device?

How should we best understand control systems – observe in lab or in a natural state (as with natural history)?

Do we place too much weight on what has gone before and past performance rather than what is happening now and in the future?

Chapter 5 – The Contemporary Atmosphere (p59-77)

Oxygen percentages in the atmosphere in the past, its dangers (fire ignition factors), and what controlled its past levels

Has the atmosphere been somehow regulated to support life?

Role played by nitrous oxide and methane

Acidity and Salt tolerance

Chapter 6 – The Sea (p78 – 99)

Salt and life in the oceans

Salinity levels that life can tolerate, how it is regulated past and present.

The value of the continental shelves

Chapter 7 – Gaia and Man, the problem of pollution (p100-114)

Pesticides and pollution are natural, i.e. exist all the time in nature.

E.g. pyrethrum, oxygen, and can be exceedingly dangerous to some. As a concept pollution is anthropocentric.

Pollution as a threat to Gaia is over played. Levels of pollution matter to us, but not necessarily to other species. For example wildlife in general flourishes around Chernobyl, post accident and radioactive release.

Where we pollute matters more than what. We must protect vulnerable areas, such as the Amazon equatorial basin and continental shelves.

Pollution is not the biggest threat to life or Gaia. The sheer numbers of our species are.

Chapter 8 – Living within Gaia (p115-132)

“We can’t win. We are sure to lose. We can’t get out of the game” Garrett Hardin or, as Lovelock says, “Mortality is the price of identity”. We have a finite time to exist, but we can do a lot in that time, and (hopefully) at the end of our time the earth will go on.

Which of the earth’s regions are vital to maintaining the planets stability for life.

The implications of taking over doing this huge regulation task ourselves if we ruin the planets ability to do it.

The negative outcome of being informed by experts that have no direct experience of life in the real world, is a disconnect between theory and practice.

Going back to nature is not an option for us now. We have come too far down the technological path to abandon ship.

Information technology may help us.

Chapter 9 – Epilogue (p133-142)

Are we programmed to want to live in a balanced way within Gaia? Is that why we regret habitat destruction and wish to live in harmony?

Mankind must realise that we are not in charge, or even necessarily vitally important, to the whole Gaia system.

We should add to the Gaia system, not take away, or Gaia may not sustain us.

Vanishing face of Gaia

THE financial crash may help sales of James Lovelock‘s second volume on Gaia. If it happened to the economy, why not to climate? Both systems are “complex and non-linear and can change suddenly and unexpectedly”, he writes. He lacks confidence in climate models with their smoothly rising curves of global temperature up to 2100, and instead anticipates a sudden flip to a state 5°C as hot.

Since it is too late to prevent this, we must think about how to adapt and act fast. The best chapters concern survival strategies, such as energy and food options for the UK, which will become a “lifeboat” for environmental refugees.

Published simultaneously, He Knew He Was Right, an authorised biography of Lovelock by John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin, demonstrates well how Gaia has overcome its main critics to become part of a distinguished historical tradition of serious if controversial science.

New Scientist Global Warming

How to survive the coming century

25 February 2009 by Gaia Vince

Magazine issue 2697. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.

For similar stories, visit the Climate Change Topic Guide

As deserts encroach on fertile land, as it has near Dunhuang, China, people will be forced to move towards the poles (Image: George Steinmetz/Corbis)

1 more image

Explore an interactive map of the world warmed by 4 °C

ALLIGATORS basking off the English coast; a vast Brazilian desert; the mythical lost cities of Saigon, New Orleans, Venice and Mumbai; and 90 per cent of humanity vanished. Welcome to the world warmed by 4 °C.

Clearly this is a vision of the future that no one wants, but it might happen. Fearing that the best efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions may fail, or that planetary climate feedback mechanisms will accelerate warming, some scientists and economists are considering not only what this world of the future might be like, but how it could sustain a growing human population. They argue that surviving in the kinds of numbers that exist today, or even more, will be possible, but only if we use our uniquely human ingenuity to cooperate as a species to radically reorganise our world.

The good news is that the survival of humankind itself is not at stake: the species could continue if only a couple of hundred individuals remained. But maintaining the current global population of nearly 7 billion, or more, is going to require serious planning.

Four degrees may not sound like much – after all, it is less than a typical temperature change between night and day. It might sound quite pleasant, like moving to Florida from Boston, say, or retiring from the UK to southern Spain. An average warming of the entire globe by 4 °C is a very different matter, however, and would render the planet unrecognisable from anything humans have ever experienced. Indeed, human activity has and will have such a great impact that some have proposed describing the time from the 18th century onward as a new geological era, marked by human activity. “It can be considered the Anthropocene,” says Nobel prizewinning atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Mainz, Germany.

A 4 °C rise could easily occur. The 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, whose conclusions are generally accepted as conservative, predicted a rise of anywhere between 2 °C and 6.4 °C this century. And in August 2008, Bob Watson, former chair of the IPCC, warned that the world should work on mitigation and adaptation strategies to “prepare for 4 °C of warming”.

A key factor in how well we deal with a warmer world is how much time we have to adapt. When, and if, we get this hot depends not only on how much greenhouse gas we pump into the atmosphere and how quickly, but how sensitive the world’s climate is to these gases. It also depends whether “tipping points” are reached, in which climate feedback mechanisms rapidly speed warming. According to models, we could cook the planet by 4 °C by 2100. Some scientists fear that we may get there as soon as 2050.

If this happens, the ramifications for life on Earth are so terrifying that many scientists contacted for this article preferred not to contemplate them, saying only that we should concentrate on reducing emissions to a level where such a rise is known only in nightmares.

“Climatologists tend to fall into two camps: there are the cautious ones who say we need to cut emissions and won’t even think about high global temperatures; and there are the ones who tell us to run for the hills because we’re all doomed,” says Peter Cox, who studies the dynamics of climate systems at the University of Exeter, UK. “I prefer a middle ground. We have to accept that changes are inevitable and start to adapt now.”

Bearing in mind that a generation alive today might experience the scary side of these climate predictions, let us head bravely into this hotter world and consider whether and how we could survive it with most of our population intact. What might this future hold?

The last time the world experienced temperature rises of this magnitude was 55 million years ago, after the so-called Palaeocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum event. Then, the culprits were clathrates – large areas of frozen, chemically caged methane – which were released from the deep ocean in explosive belches that filled the atmosphere with around 5 gigatonnes of carbon. The already warm planet rocketed by 5 or 6 °C, tropical forests sprang up in ice-free polar regions, and the oceans turned so acidic from dissolved carbon dioxide that there was a vast die-off of sea life. Sea levels rose to 100 metres higher than today’s and desert stretched from southern Africa into Europe.

While the exact changes would depend on how quickly the temperature rose and how much polar ice melted, we can expect similar scenarios to unfold this time around. The first problem would be that many of the places where people live and grow food would no longer be suitable for either. Rising sea levels – from thermal expansion of the oceans, melting glaciers and storm surges – would drown today’s coastal regions in up to 2 metres of water initially, and possibly much more if the Greenland ice sheet and parts of Antarctica were to melt. “It’s hard to see west Antarctica’s ice sheets surviving the century, meaning a sea-level rise of at least 1 or 2 metres,” says climatologist James Hansen, who heads NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York. “CO₂ concentrations of 550 parts per million [compared with about 385 ppm now] would be disastrous,” he adds, “certainly leading to an ice-free planet, with sea level about 80 metres higher… and the trip getting there would be horrendous.”

Half of the world’s surface lies in the tropics, between 30° and -30° latitude, and these areas are particularly vulnerable to climate change. India, Bangladesh and Pakistan, for example, will feel the force of a shorter but fiercer Asian monsoon, which will probably cause even more devastating floods than the area suffers now. Yet because the land will be hotter, this water will evaporate faster, leaving drought across Asia. Bangladesh stands to lose a third of its land area – including its main bread basket.

The African monsoon, although less well understood, is expected to become more intense, possibly leading to a greening of the semi-arid Sahel region, which stretches across the continent south of the Sahara desert. Other models, however, predict a worsening of drought all over Africa. A lack of fresh water will be felt elsewhere in the world, too, with warmer temperatures reducing soil moisture across China, the south-west US, Central America, most of South America and Australia. All of the world’s major deserts are predicted to expand, with the Sahara reaching right into central Europe.

Glacial retreat will dry Europe’s rivers from the Danube to the Rhine, with similar effects in mountainous regions including the Peruvian Andes, and the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges, which as result will no longer supply water to Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, Bhutan, India and Vietnam.

Along with the exhaustion of aquifers, all this will lead to two latitudinal dry belts where human habitation will be impossible, say Syukuro Manabe of Tokyo University, Japan, and his colleagues. One will stretch across Central America, southern Europe and north Africa, south Asia and Japan; while the other will cover Madagascar, southern Africa, the Pacific Islands, and most of Australia and Chile (Climatic Change, vol 64, p 59).

The high life

The only places we will be guaranteed enough water will be in the high latitudes. “Everything in that region will be growing like mad. That’s where all the life will be,” says former NASA scientist James Lovelock, who developed the “Gaia” theory, which describes the Earth as a self-regulating entity. “The rest of the world will be largely desert with a few oases.”

So if only a fraction of the planet will be habitable, how will our vast population survive? Some, like Lovelock, are less than optimistic. “Humans are in a pretty difficult position and I don’t think they are clever enough to handle what’s ahead. I think they’ll survive as a species all right, but the cull during this century is going to be huge,” he says. “The number remaining at the end of the century will probably be a billion or less.”

Humans will survive as a species, but the cull this century will be huge

John Schellnhuber of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impacts Research in Germany is more hopeful. The 4 °C warmer world would be a huge challenge, he says, but one we could rise to. “Would we be able to live within our resources, in this world? I think it could work with a new division of land and production.”

In order to survive, humans may need to do something radical: rethink our society not along geopolitical lines but in terms of resource distribution. “We are locked into a mindset that each country has to be self-sustaining in food, water and energy,” Cox says. “We need to look at the world afresh and see it in terms of where the resources are, and then plan the population, food and energy production around that. If aliens came to Earth they’d think it was crazy that some of the driest parts of the world, such as Pakistan and Egypt, grow some of the thirstiest crops for export, like rice.”

Taking politics out of the equation may seem unrealistic: conflict over resources will likely increase significantly as the climate changes, and political leaders are not going to give up their power just like that. Nevertheless, overcoming political hurdles may be our only chance. “It’s too late for us,” says President Anote Tong of Kiribati, a submerging island state in Micronesia, which has a programme of gradual migration to Australia and New Zealand. “We need to do something drastic to remove national boundaries.”

Cox agrees: “If it turns out that the only thing preventing our survival was national barriers then we would need to address this – our survival is too important,” he says.

Imagine, for the purposes of this thought experiment, that we have 9 billion people to save – 2 billion more than live on the planet today. A wholescale relocation of the world’s population according to the geography of resources means abandoning huge tracts of the globe and moving people to where the water is. Most climate models agree that the far north and south of the planet will see an increase in precipitation. In the northern hemisphere this includes Canada, Siberia, Scandinavia and newly ice-free parts of Greenland; in the southern hemisphere, Patagonia, Tasmania and the far north of Australia, New Zealand and perhaps newly ice-free parts of the western Antarctic coast.

We will need to abandon huge areas and move people to where the water is

If we allow 20 square metres of space per person – more than double the minimum habitable space allowed per person under English planning regulations – 9 billion people would need 180,000 square kilometres of land to live on. The area of Canada alone is 9.1 million square kilometres and, combined with all the other high-latitude areas, such as Alaska, Britain, Russia and Scandinavia, there should be plenty of room for everyone, even with the effects of sea-level rise.

These precious lands with access to water would be valuable food-growing areas, as well as the last oases for many species, so people would be need to be housed in compact, high-rise cities. Living this closely together will bring problems of its own. Disease could easily spread through the crowded population so early warning systems will be needed to monitor any outbreaks.

It may also get very hot. Cities can produce 2 °C of additional localised warming because of energy use and things like poor reflectivity of buildings and lower rates of evaporation from concrete surfaces, says Mark McCarthy, an urban climate modeller at the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre. “The roofs could be painted a light, reflective colour and planted with vegetation,” McCarthy suggests.

Since water will be scarce, food production will need to be far more efficient. Hot growing seasons will be more common, meaning that livestock will become increasingly stressed, and crop growing seasons will shorten, according to David Battisti of the University of Washington in Seattle and his colleagues (Science, vol 323, p 240). We will need heat and drought-tolerant crop varieties, they suggest. Rice may have to give way to less thirsty staples such as potatoes.

Vegetarian dystopia

This will probably be a mostly vegetarian world: the warming, acidic seas will be largely devoid of fish, thanks to a crash in plankton that use calcium carbonate to build shells. Molluscs, also unable to grow their carbonate shells, will become extinct. Poultry may be viable on the edges of farmland but there will simply be no room to graze cattle. Livestock may be restricted to hardy animals such as goats, which can survive on desert scrub. One consequence of the lack of cattle will be a need for alternative fertilisers – processed human waste is a possibility. Synthetic meats and other foods could meet some of the demand. Cultivation of algal mats, and crops grown on floating platforms and in marshland could also contribute.

Supplying energy to our cities will also require some adventurous thinking. Much of it could be covered by a giant solar belt, a vast array of solar collectors that would run across north Africa, the Middle East and the southern US. Last December, David Wheeler and Kevin Ummel of the Center for Global Development in Washington DC calculated that a 110,000-square-kilometre area of solar panels across Jordan, Libya and Morocco would be “sufficient to meet 50 to 70 per cent of worldwide electricity production, or about three times [today’s] power consumption in Europe”. High-voltage direct current transmission lines could relay this power to the cities, or it could be stored and transported in hydrogen – after using solar energy to split water to provide hydrogen for fuel cells.

If the comparatively modest level of solar installation that Wheeler and Ummel propose were to begin in 2010, the total power delivery by 2020 could be 55 terawatt hours per year – enough to meet the household electricity demand of 35 million people. This is clearly not enough to provide power for our future 9 billion, but improving efficiency would reduce energy consumption. And a global solar belt would be far larger than the one Wheeler and Ummel visualise.

Nuclear, wind and hydropower could supplement output, with additional power from geothermal and offshore wind sources. Each high-rise community housing block could also have its own combined heat and power generator, running on sustainable sources, to supply most household energy.

If we use land, energy, food and water efficiently, our population has a chance of surviving – provided we have the time and willingness to adapt. “I’m optimistic that we can reduce catastrophic loss of life and reduce the most severe impacts,” says Peter Falloon, a climate impacts specialist at the Hadley Centre. “I think there’s enough knowledge now, and if it’s used sensibly we could adapt to the climate change that we’re already committed to for the next 30 or 40 years.”

This really would be survival, though, in a world that few would choose to live. Large chunks of Earth’s biodiversity would vanish because species won’t be able to adapt quickly enough to higher temperatures, lack of water, loss of ecosystems, or because starving humans had eaten them. “You can forget lions and tigers: if it moves we’ll have eaten it,” says Lovelock. “People will be desperate.”

Still, if we should find ourselves in such a state you can bet we’d be working our hardest to get that green and pleasant world back, and to prevent matters getting even worse. This would involve trying to limit the effects climate feedback mechanisms and restoring natural carbon sequestration by reinstating tropical forest. “Our survival would very much depend on how well we were able to draw down CO₂ to 280 parts per million,” Schellnhuber says. Many scientists think replanting the forests would be impossible above a certain temperature, but it may be possible to reforest areas known as “land-atmosphere hotspots”, where even small numbers of trees can change the local climate enough to increase rainfall and allow forests to grow.

Ascension Island, a remote outpost buffeted by trade winds in the mid-Atlantic, may be a blueprint for this type of bioengineering. Until people arrived in the 17th century, vegetation was limited to just 25 scrubby species. But plantings by British servicemen posted there produced a verdant cloud forest. “It shows that if you have rainfall, forest can grow within a century,” says ecologist David Wilkinson of Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, who studied the phenomenon.

Even so, the most terrifying prospect of a world warmed by 4 °C is that it may be impossible to return to anything resembling today’s varied and abundant Earth. Worse still, most models agree that once there is a 4 °C rise, the juggernaut of warming will be unstoppable, and humanity’s fate more uncertain than ever.

“I would like to be optimistic that we’ll survive, but I’ve got no good reason to be,” says Crutzen. “In order to be safe, we would have to reduce our carbon emissions by 70 per cent by 2015. We are currently putting in 3 per cent more each year.”

Explore an interactive map of the world warmed by 4 °C

Gaia Vince is a freelance science writer who is travelling the world. www.wanderinggaia.com

Fiddling with figures while the Earth burns

The latest initiatives to stop global warming won’t save us, James Lovelock tells Jonathan Leake

RECOMMEND?

If you want to get some idea of what much of the Earth might look like in 50 years’ time then, says James Lovelock, get hold of a powerful telescope or log onto Nasa’s Mars website. That arid, empty, lifeless landscape is, he believes, how most of Earth’s equatorial lands will be looking by 2050. A few decades later and that same uninhabitable desert will have extended into Spain, Italy, Australia and much of the southern United States.

“We are on the edge of the greatest die-off humanity has ever seen,” said Lovelock. “We will be lucky if 20% of us survive what is coming. We should be scared stiff.”

Lovelock has delivered such warnings before, but this weekend they have a special resonance. Last week in Bangkok, Thailand, the world’s governments finalised this year’s third and final report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) setting out how humanity might save itself from the worst effects of climate change.

In it was a message of hope, albeit a faint one. The report set out a complex mix of political, economic and technological solutions. If they all worked, said the report, they could achieve huge cuts in the 25 billion tons of carbon dioxide (CO2) released by humanity into the air each year, thus keeping global temperature rises below 3C.

At the same time in Cologne, Germany, 4,000 sharp-suited bankers, lawyers and financial traders at Carbon Expo 2007 were congratulating themselves on the booming new markets in carbon credits that will, they boasted, save the world as well as making them rich.

“I have a dream,” Yvo de Boer, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, told the delegates. He set out his belief that carbon trading will help stabilise greenhouse gas emissions and aid developing countries by transferring £50 billion a year to these nations from the First World to support green development.

For Lovelock, however, such dreams are dangerous nonsense on a par with a drowning man clutching at straws. “It’s all ridiculous,” he sighed. “These new markets do some good in that they generate wealth and keep these people employed, but they and the IPCC are just raising false hopes. We have done too much damage to the world and now it is changing too fast for us to make much difference.”

Lovelock’s view is that the world has two stable states: the “icehouse”, when ice covers both poles, sometimes extending far into lower latitudes in the form of ice ages; and the “greenhouse”, when all the ice melts. Both have already happened many times in the Earth’s history.

“Human outpourings of greenhouse gases have flicked the switch that turns the world from its colder to its warm state – and it is probably too late to stop it,” he said. “The warming impact of the carbon we have already released is such that the Earth has taken over and our greenhouse gas emissions are being amplified by nature itself.”

Lovelock believes that the transformation is happening far too fast for humanity to tackle, especially in a world that remains committed to economic growth and whose 6.5 billion population is predicted to reach more than 9 billion by mid-century.

For evidence, he points to Siberia where the melting of the permafrost, already widely reported in scientific literature, will enable bacteria to decompose organic matter that has accumulated in the soil over tens of millions of years – potentially releasing billions more tons of CO2 “I have just come back from Norway where the temperatures are even further above normal than Britain’s. The climate is changing every year now. Everyone can see it – as in this very warm April. By mid-century the heatwave [in Europe] that killed 20,000 people in 2003 will be a cool summer by comparison.”

At first sight Lovelock’s predictions seem wildly at odds with the IPCC’s reports, but in many ways the only difference is in the vividness of the language. “The progressive acidification of oceans due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide is expected to have negative impacts on marine shell-forming organisms (ie corals) and their dependent species,” said the IPCC report detailing the impacts of climate change – its careful language draining the drama from a warning that vast tracts of the ocean may turn so acidic that little life will be left in them.

It added: “At lower latitudes, especially seasonally dry and tropical regions, crop productivity is projected to decrease for even small local temperature increases (1-2C), which would increase risk of hunger.” What these measured tones imply, warns Lovelock, is that millions – perhaps hundreds of millions – of people living in equatorial lands will be forced from their homes, with most of them heading northwards. “The world will face mass shortages of food and water. That will lead to wars and the effective clearance of vast areas of land as the deserts spread,” he said.

Lovelock’s reputation as a scientific seer was founded four decades ago when he published his Gaia hypothesis. His idea, that the Earth’s chemistry, climate and life were all closely linked into a kind of self-sustaining system, is now received wisdom. It has become clear that the first life forms on Earth transformed its early climate and atmosphere, generating the oxygen that allowed life to evolve – eventually into us.

What’s more, that process continues. Oxygen is a reactive gas that would vanish from the atmosphere were it not for the plankton, and plants that keep topping it up.

Lovelock’s warnings may seem remote (and he hasn’t always been proved right) but with Britain basking in record spring heat he says our scepticism about the damage we can expect from global warming is understandable. “Britain and Scandinavia are becoming green oases. In 2050 or soon after, most of the world may be scrub and desert and most of the oceans will be denuded of life, but temperatures here will remain very tolerable. The downside of that is that we risk becoming like a lifeboat with millions of refugees trying to settle here.”

He is not alone in predicting a huge northwards shift in human populations: in his new book, How the World will Change with Global Warming, Professor Trausti Valsson, an Icelandic academic, predicts how population centres will move north.

“The Arctic ice cap is melting. When it goes it will open up new shipping routes, new fishing grounds and new oil fields,” said Valsson. “The Arctic Ocean will become the new Mediterranean with Siberia and Canada as the centres for human culture and civilisation.”

Lovelock is fond of recounting how, on a recent lecture tour of America, he was accosted by earnest academics seeking advice on whereabouts in Canada they should buy their second homes.

Behind such comic anecdotes, however, lies the grim possibility that billions of people face a miserable life and death as humanity finds a new equilibrium with the Earth. At 87 Lovelock acknowledges that he is unlikely to be one of them. His concern is for the generations represented by his nine grandchildren. “What we have lived through, the 20th century, has been like a great party. Adults now have had the best time humanity has ever had. Now the party is over and the Earth is reckoning up.”

URL: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/16956300/the_prophet_of_climate_change_james_lovelock

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The Prophet of Climate Change: James Lovelock

One of the most eminent scientists of our time says that global warming is irreversible — and that more than 6 billion people will perish by the end of the century

JEFF GOODELL

Posted Nov 01, 2007 2:20 PM

At the age of eighty-eight, after four children and a long and respected career as one of the twentieth century’s most influential scientists, James Lovelock has come to an unsettling conclusion: The human race is doomed. “I wish I could be more hopeful,” he tells me one sunny morning as we walk through a park in Oslo, where he is giving a talk at a university. Lovelock is a small man, unfailingly polite, with white hair and round, owlish glasses. His step is jaunty, his mind lively, his manner anything but gloomy. In fact, the coming of the Four Horsemen — war, famine, pestilence and death — seems to perk him up. “It will be a dark time,” Lovelock admits. “But for those who survive, I suspect it will be rather exciting.”

In Lovelock’s view, the scale of the catastrophe that awaits us will soon become obvious. By 2020, droughts and other extreme weather will be commonplace. By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions. “The Chinese have nowhere to go but up into Siberia,” Lovelock says. “How will the Russians feel about that? I fear that war between Russia and China is probably inevitable.” With hardship and mass migrations will come epidemics, which are likely to kill millions. By 2100, Lovelock believes, the Earth’s population will be culled from today’s 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes — Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.

By the end of the century, according to Lovelock, global warming will cause temperate zones like North America and Europe to heat up by fourteen degrees Fahrenheit, nearly double the likeliest predictions of the latest report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations-sanctioned body that includes the world’s top scientists. “Our future,” Lovelock writes, “is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.” And switching to energy-efficient light bulbs won’t save us. To Lovelock, cutting greenhouse-gas pollution won’t make much difference at this point, and much of what passes for sustainable development is little more than a scam to profit off disaster. “Green,” he tells me, only half-joking, “is the color of mold and corruption.”

If such predictions were coming from anyone else, you would laugh them off as the ravings of an old man projecting his own impending death onto the world around him. But Lovelock is not so easily dismissed. As an inventor, he created a device that helped detect the growing hole in the ozone layer and jump-start the environmental movement in the 1970s. And as a scientist, he introduced the revolutionary theory known as Gaia — the idea that our entire planet is a kind of superorganism that is, in a sense, “alive.” Once dismissed as New Age quackery, Lovelock’s vision of a self-regulating Earth now underlies virtually all climate science. Lynn Margulis, a pioneering biologist at the University of Massachusetts, calls him “one of the most innovative and mischievous scientific minds of our time.” Richard Branson, the British entrepreneur, credits Lovelock with inspiring him to pledge billions of dollars to fight global warming. “Jim is a brilliant scientist who has been right about many things in the past,” Branson says. “If he’s feeling gloomy about the future, it’s important for mankind to pay attention.”

Lovelock knows that predicting the end of civilization is not an exact science. “I could be wrong about all this,” he admits as we stroll around the park in Norway. “The trouble is, all those well-intentioned scientists who are arguing that we’re not in any imminent danger are basing their arguments on computer models. I’m basing mine on what’s actually happening.”

When you approach Lovelock’s house in Devon, a rural area in southwestern England, the sign on the metal gate reads:

COOMBE MILL EXPERIMENTAL STATION

SITE OF NEW NATURAL HABITAT

PLEASE DO NOT TRESPASS OR DISTURB

A few hundred yards down a narrow lane, beside the site of an old mill, is a white, slate-roofed cottage where Lovelock lives with his second wife, Sandy, an American, and his youngest son, John, who is fifty-one and mildly disabled. It’s a fairy-tale setting, surrounded by thirty-five wooded acres — no vegetable garden, no manicured rosebushes. “I detest all that,” Lovelock tells me. Partly hidden in the woods is a life-size statue of Gaia, the Greek goddess of the Earth, whom Lovelock named his groundbreaking theory after.

Most scientists toil at the margins of human knowledge, adding incrementally to our understanding of the world. Lovelock is one of the few living scientists whose ideas have touched off not only a scientific revolution but a spiritual one as well. “Future historians of science will see Lovelock as a man who inspired a Copernican shift in how we see ourselves in the world,” says Tim Lenton, a climate researcher at the University of East Anglia, in England. Before Lovelock came along, the Earth was seen as little more than a cozy rock drifting around the sun. According to the accepted wisdom, life evolved here because the conditions were right — not too hot, not too cold, plenty of water. Somehow bacteria grew into multicelled organisms, fish crawled out of the sea, and before long, Britney Spears arrived.

In the 1970s, Lovelock upended all this with a simple question: Why is the Earth different from Mars and Venus, where the atmosphere is toxic to life? In a flash of insight, Lovelock understood that our atmosphere was created not by random geological events but by the cumulative effusion of everything that has ever breathed, grown and decayed. Our air “is not merely a biological product,” Lovelock wrote, “but more probably a biological construction: not living, but like a cat’s fur, a bird’s feathers or the paper of a wasp’s nest, an extension of a living system designed to maintain a chosen environment.” According to Gaia theory, life is not just a passenger on Earth but an active participant, helping to create the very conditions that sustain it. It’s a beautiful idea –life begets life. It was also right in tune with the post-flower-child mood of the Seventies. Lovelock was quickly adopted as a spiritual guru, the man who killed God and put the planet at the center of New Age religious experience.

Lovelock is not an alarmist by nature. In his view, the dangers of nuclear power are grossly overstated. Ditto mercury emissions in the atmosphere, genetic engineering of food and the loss of biodiversity on the planet. The greatest mistake in his career, in fact, was not claiming that the sky was falling but failing to recognize that it was. In 1973, after being the first to discover that industrial chemicals called chlorofluorocarbons had polluted the atmosphere, Lovelock declared that the buildup of CFCs posed “no conceivable hazard.” As it turned out, CFCs weren’t toxic to breathe, but they were eating a hole in the ozone. Lovelock quickly revised his view, calling it “one of my greatest blunders,” but the mistake may have cost him a share in a Nobel Prize.

At first, Lovelock didn’t view global warming as an urgent threat to the planet. “Gaia is a tough bitch,” he often said, borrowing a phrase coined by a colleague. But a few years ago, alarmed by rapidly melting ice in the Arctic and other climate-related changes, Lovelock became convinced that Gaia’s autopilot system — the giant, inexpressibly subtle network of positive and negative feedbacks that keeps the Earth’s climate in balance — is seriously out of whack, derailed by pollution and deforestation. Lovelock believes the planet itself will eventually recover its equilibrium, even if it takes millions of years. What’s at stake, he says, is civilization.

“You could quite seriously look at climate change as a response of the system intended to get rid of an irritating species: us humans,” Lovelock tells me in the small office he has created in his cottage. “Or at least cut them back to size.”

Lovelock’s cottage in the woods is a world away from South London, where he grew up with coal soot in his lungs, coughing and pale and working-class. His mother was an early feminist; his father grew up so desperately hungry that he spent six months in prison when he was fourteen for poaching a rabbit from a local squire’s estate. Shortly after Lovelock was born, his parents passed him off to his grandmother to raise. “They were too poor and too busy to raise a child,” he explains. In school, he was a lousy student, mildly dyslexic, more interested in pranks than homework. But he loved books, especially the science fiction of Jules Verne and H.G. Wells.

To escape the grime of urban life, Lovelock’s father often took him on long walks in the countryside, where he caught trout by hand from the streams and gorged on blueberries. The freedom and romance Lovelock felt on these jaunts had a transformative effect on him. “It’s where I first saw the face of Gaia,” he says now.

By the time Lovelock hit puberty, he knew he wanted to be a scientist. His first love was physics. But his dyslexia made complex math difficult, so he opted instead for chemistry, enrolling at the University of London. A year later, when the Nazis invaded Poland, Lovelock converted to Quakerism and soon became a conscientious objector. In his written statement, he explained why he refused to fight: “War is evil.”

Lovelock took a job at the National Institute for Medical Research in London, where one of his first assignments was to develop new ways to stop the spread of infectious diseases. He spent months in underground bomb shelters studying how viruses are transmitted — and shagging nurses in first-aid stations while Nazi bombs fell overhead. “It was a hard, desperate time,” he says. “But it was exciting! It’s terribly ironic, but war does make one feel alive.”

As a result of his research in the bomb shelters, Lovelock ended up inventing the first aerosol disinfectant. A few years later, as a pioneer in the field of cryogenics, he became the first to understand how cellular structures respond to extreme cold, developing a means to freeze and thaw animal sperm — a method still in use today. “Thanks to Lovelock,” says biologist Lynn Margulis, “they don’t have to send the entire bull to Australia.”

But Lovelock’s most important invention was the Electron Capture Detector, or ECD. In 1957, working at his kitchen table, Lovelock hacked together a device to measure minute concentrations of pesticides and other gases in the air. The instrument fit into the palm of his hand and was so exquisitely sensitive that if you dumped a bottle of some rare chemical on a blanket in Japan and let it evaporate, the ECD would be able to detect it a week later in England. The device was eventually redesigned by Hewlett-Packard: If Lovelock had retained the patent, he would have been a rich man. “Jim has never cared much for money,” says Armand Neukermans, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and old friend of Lovelock, “except to buy himself freedom as an independent scientist.”

As it turned out, Lovelock’s invention roughly coincided with the publication in 1962 of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, which alerted the world to the dangers of pesticides like DDT. By the time her book appeared, scientists were already using the ECD to measure pesticide residue in the fat of Antarctic penguins and in the milk of nursing mothers in Finland, giving hard evidence to Carson’s claims that chemicals were impacting the environment on a global scale. “If it hadn’t been for my ECD,” Lovelock says, “I think critics in the industry would have dismissed the whole thing as wet chemistry — ‘Oh, you can’t measure this stuff accurately, can’t extrapolate.’ And they would have been right.”

A decade later, Lovelock made an even more important discovery. In the late 1960s, while staying at an isolated vacation house in Ireland, he took a random sample of the haze that drifted into the area and found it laced with chlorofluorocarbons. CFCs are man-made compounds used as a refrigerant and as a propellant in aerosol cans — a sure sign of man-made pollution. If CFCs are in remote Ireland, Lovelock wondered, where else might they be? Hitching a ride on a research vessel for a six-month voyage to Antarctica, he used a jury-rigged ECD to detect the buildup of CFCs in the atmosphere. But Lovelock failed to grasp the danger that they posed; two other scientists won the Nobel Prize for correctly hypothesizing that CFCs would burn a hole in the stratosphere, allowing dangerous levels of ultraviolet light to reach the Earth. As a result, CFCs were banned. “If Lovelock hadn’t detected those CFCs,” says Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, “we’d all be living under the ocean in snorkels and fins to escape that poisonous sun.”

If you type “gaia” and “religion” into Google, you’ll get 2,360,000 hits — Wiccans, spiritual travelers, massage therapists and sexual healers, all inspired by Lovelock’s vision of the planet. Ask him about pagan cults, though, and Lovelock grimaces — he has no interest in soft-headed spirituality or organized religion, especially when it puts human existence above all else. At Oxford, he once stood up and admonished Mother Teresa for urging an audience to take care of the poor and “leave God to take care of the Earth.” As Lovelock explained to her, “If we as people do not respect and take care of the Earth, we can be sure that the Earth, in the role of Gaia, will take care of us and, if necessary, eliminate us.”

Lovelock came up with the Gaia theory during a rough time in his life. In 1961, he was forty-one and working at a research center in London. It was a good job, decent pay, plenty of freedom, but he was bored. He had four kids at home, including John, who was born with a birth defect that left him brain-damaged. In addition, Lovelock’s mother — cranky, demanding, aged — was driving him nuts. He smoked, he drank. Today, we’d call it a midlife crisis.

One day, a letter from NASA arrived in Lovelock’s mailbox, inviting him to join a group of scientists who were about to explore the moon. He had never heard of the space agency — but within a few months he had dumped his job, packed up the family and moved to America to join the space race. Before long, though, he concluded that, scientifically speaking, the moon wasn’t a very interesting place. The real excitement was Mars. “With the moon, the question was, is it safe for astronauts to walk on the surface?” Lovelock recalls. “With Mars, the question was, is there life there?”

Lovelock’s colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, struggled to design instruments to test for life on the Martian surface. Lovelock, as usual, took a different approach. Instead of using a probe to dig up soil and look for bacteria, he thought, why not analyze the chemical composition of the Martian atmosphere? If life were present, he reasoned, the organisms would be obliged to use up raw materials in the atmosphere (such as oxygen) and dump waste products (like methane), just as life on Earth does. Even if the materials consumed and discharged were different, the chemical imbalance would be relatively simple to detect. Sure enough, when Lovelock and his colleagues finally got an analysis of Mars, they discovered that the atmosphere was close to chemical equilibrium — suggesting that there had been no life on the planet.

But if life creates the atmosphere, Lovelock reasoned, it must also, in some sense, be regulating it. He knew, for example, that the sun is now about twenty-five percent hotter than when life began. What was modulating the surface temperature of the Earth, keeping it hospitable? Life itself, Lovelock concluded. When the Earth heats up, plants draw down levels of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases; as it cools, the levels of those gases rise, warming the planet. Thus, the idea of the Earth as superorganism was born.

The idea was not entirely new: Leonardo da Vinci believed pretty much the same thing in the sixteenth century. But Lovelock was the first to assemble all the existing thinking into a new vision of the planet. He soon quit NASA and moved back to England, where his neighbor William Golding, author of Lord of the Flies, suggested that he name his theory after Gaia, to capture the popular imagination. When established scientific journals refused to touch his ideas, Lovelock put out a book called Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. “The Gaia hypothesis,” he wrote, “is for those who like to walk or simply stand and stare, to wonder about the Earth and the life it bears and to speculate about the consequences of our own presence here.” Gaia, he added, offers an alternative to the “depressing picture of our planet as a demented spaceship, forever traveling driverless and purposeless around an inner circle of the sun.”

Hippies loved it. Darwinists didn’t. Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, dismissed Lovelock’s book as “pop-ecology literature.” British biologist John Maynard Smith went further, calling Gaia “an evil religion.” In their view, Lovelock’s concept flew in the face of evolutionary logic: If the Earth is an organism, and organisms evolve by natural selection, then that implies that somehow the Earth out-competed other planets. How is that possible? They were also troubled by Lovelock’s suggestion that life creates the condition for life, which seems to suggest a predetermined purpose. In the minds of many of his peers, Lovelock was dancing very close to God.

But that was not what Lovelock had in mind. Large systems, in his view, don’t need a purpose. To prove it, Lovelock and a colleague devised a simple, elegant computer model called Daisyworld, which used competing fields of daisies to show how organisms evolving under rules of natural selection are part of a self-regulating system. As the model planet heats up, white daisies thrive, reflecting more sunlight; that, in turn, lowers the temperature, which favors black daisies. Working together, the flowers regulate the temperature of the planet. The daisies are not altruistic or conscious — they simply exist and, by existing, alter their environment.

Daisyworld quieted some of the critics, but the scientific debate over Gaia raged throughout the 1980s. Lovelock continued refining his thoughts despite troubles in his personal life. His first wife, Helen, was in the midst of a slow and painful decline from multiple sclerosis. Lovelock himself had several major surgeries, including the removal of a kidney he damaged in a tractor accident. He supported himself in part as a consultant for MI5, England’s top counterintelligence agency, where he developed a method to monitor the movements of KGB spies in London by using an ECD to track their vehicles. To Lovelock, working for the spy agency was the equivalent of writing potboiler novels for a quick paycheck. “It was enjoyable work, and it kept food on the table,” he says now.

Among scientists, Lovelock redeemed himself with a second book, The Ages of Gaia, which offered a more rigorous exploration of the biological and geophysical feedback mechanisms that keep the Earth’s atmosphere suitable for life. Plankton in the oceans, for example, help cool the planet by giving off dimethyl sulfide, a chemical that seeds the formation of clouds, which in turn reflect the sun’s heat back into space. “In the 1970s, plenty of us thought Gaia was nonsense,” says Wally Broecker, a paleoclimatologist at Columbia University. “But Lovelock got everyone thinking more seriously about the dynamic nature of the planet.” Of course, scientists like Broecker rarely used the word “Gaia.” They prefer the phrase “Earth system science,” which views the world, according to one treatise, as “a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components.” In other words, Gaia in a lab coat.

Gaia offers a hopeful vision of how the world works. After all, if the Earth is more than just a rock drifting around the sun, if it’s a superorganism that can evolve, that means — to put it in a way that will piss off biology majors and neo-Darwinists everywhere — there is a certain amount of forgiveness built into our world.

For Lovelock, this is a comforting idea. Consider his little spread in Devon. When he bought the place thirty years ago, it was surrounded by fields shorn by a thousand years of sheep-grazing. But to Lovelock, open land reeks of human interference with Gaia. So he set out to restore his thirty-five acres to its more natural character. After consulting with a forester, he planted 20,000 trees — alders, oaks, pines. Unfortunately, he planted many of them too close together, and in rows. The trees are about forty feet tall now, but rather than feeling “natural,” parts of his land have the look of a badly managed forestry project. “I botched it,” Lovelock says with a grin as we hike through the woods. “But in the long run, Gaia will take care of it.”

Until recently, Lovelock thought that global warming would be just like his half-assed forest — something the planet would correct for. Then, in 2004, Lovelock’s friend Richard Betts, a researcher at the Hadley Centre for Climate Change — England’s top climate institute — invited him to stop by and talk with the scientists there. Lovelock went from meeting to meeting, hearing the latest data about melting ice at the poles, shrinking rain forests, the carbon cycle in the oceans. “It was terrifying,” he recalls. “We were shown five separate scenes of positive feedback in regional climates — polar, glacial, boreal forest, tropical forest and oceans — but no one seemed to be working on whole-planet consequences.” Equally chilling, he says, was the tone in which the scientists talked about the changes they were witnessing, “as if they were discussing some distant planet or a model universe, instead of the place where we all live.”

As Lovelock was driving home that evening, it hit him. The resiliency of the system was gone. The forgiveness had been used up. “The whole system,” he decided, “is in failure mode.” A few weeks later, he began work on his latest and gloomiest book, The Revenge of Gaia, which was published in the U.S. in 2006.

In Lovelock’s view, the flaws in computer climate models are painfully apparent. Take the uncertainty around projected sea levels: The IPCC, the U.N. panel on climate change, estimates that global warming will cause Earth’s average temperature to rise as much as 11.5 degrees by 2100. This will cause inland glaciers to melt and seas to expand, triggering a maximum sea level rise of only twenty-three inches. Greenland, according to the IPCC’s models, will take 1,000 years to melt.

But evidence from the real world suggests that the IPCC is far too conservative. For one thing, scientists know from the geological record that 3 million years ago, when temperatures increased to five degrees above today’s level, the seas rose not by twenty-three inches but by more than eighty feet. What’s more, recent satellite measurements indicate that Arctic ice is melting so rapidly that the region could be ice-free by 2030. “Modelers don’t have the foggiest idea about the dynamics of melting ice sheets,” scoffs Lovelock.

It’s not just ice that throws off the climate models. Cloud physics are notoriously difficult to get right, and feedbacks from the biosphere, such as deforestation and melting tundra, are rarely factored in. “Computer models are not crystal balls,” argues Ken Caldeira, a climate modeler at Stanford University whose career has been deeply influenced by Lovelock’s ideas. “By observing the past, you make informed judgments about the future. Computer models are just a way to codify that accumulated knowledge into automated educated bets.”

Here, in its oversimplified essence, is Lovelock’s doomsday scenario: Rising heat means more ice melting at the poles, which means more open water and land. That, in turn, increases the heat (ice reflects sunlight; open land and water absorb it), causing more ice to melt. The seas rise. More heat leads to more intense rainfall in some places, droughts in others. The Amazon rain forests and the great northern boreal forests –the belt of pine and spruce that covers Alaska, Canada and Siberia –undergo a growth spurt, then wither away. The permafrost in northern latitudes thaws, releasing methane, a greenhouse gas that is twenty times more potent than CO2 — and on and on it goes.

In a functioning Gaian world, these positive feedbacks would be modulated by negative feedbacks, the largest of which is the Earth’s ability to radiate heat into space. But at a certain point, the regulatory system breaks down and the planet’s climate makes the jump — as it has many times in the past — to a new, hotter state. Not the end of the world, but certainly the end of the world as we know it.

Lovelock’s doomsday scenario is dismissed by leading climate researchers, most of whom dispute the idea that there is a single tipping point for the entire planet. “Individual ecosystems may fail or the ice sheets may collapse,” says Caldeira, “but the larger system appears to be surprisingly resilient.” But let’s assume for the moment that Lovelock is right and we are indeed poised above Niagara Falls. Do we just wave as we go over the edge? In Lovelock’s view, modest cuts in greenhouse-gas emissions won’t help us — it’s too late to stop global warming by swapping our SUVs for hybrids. What about capturing carbon-dioxide pollution from coal plants and pumping it underground? “We can’t possibly bury enough to make any difference.” Biofuels? “A monumentally stupid idea.” Renewables? “Nice, but won’t make a dent.” To Lovelock, the whole idea of sustainable development is wrongheaded: “We should be thinking about sustainable retreat.”

Retreat, in his view, means it’s time to start talking about changing where we live and how we get our food; about making plans for the migration of millions of people from low-lying regions like Bangladesh into Europe; about admitting that New Orleans is a goner and moving the people to cities better positioned for the future. Most of all, he says, it’s about everybody “absolutely doing their utmost to sustain civilization, so that it doesn’t degenerate into Dark Ages, with warlords running things, which is a real danger. We could lose everything that way.”

Even Lovelock’s friends cringe when he talks like this. “I fear he’s overdrawing our despair budget,” says Chris Rapley, head of the Science Museum in London, who has worked hard to raise international awareness of global warming. Others are justifiably concerned that Lovelock’s views will distract from the rising political momentum for tough restrictions on greenhouse-gas pollution. Broecker, the Columbia paleoclimatologist, calls Lovelock’s belief that cutting pollution is futile “dangerous nonsense.”

“I wish I could say that wind turbines and solar panels will save us,” Lovelock responds. “But I can’t. There isn’t any kind of solution possible. There are nearly 7 billion people on the planet now, not to mention livestock and pets. If you just take the CO2 of everything breathing, it’s twenty-five percent of the total –four times as much CO2 as all the airlines in the world. So if you want to improve your carbon footprint, just hold your breath. It’s terrifying. We have just exceeded all reasonable bounds in numbers. And from a purely biological view, any species that does that has a crash.”

This is not to suggest, however, that Lovelock believes we should just party while the world burns. Quite the opposite. “We need bold action,” Lovelock insists. “We have a tremendous amount to do.” In his view, we have two choices: We can return to a more primitive lifestyle and live in equilibrium with the planet as hunter-gatherers, or we can sequester ourselves in a very sophisticated, high-tech civilization. “There’s no question which path I’d prefer,” he says one morning in his cottage, grinning broadly and tapping the keyboard of his computer. “It’s really a question of how we organize society — where we will get our food, water. How we will generate energy.”

For water, the answer is pretty straightforward: desalination plants, which can turn ocean water into drinking water. Food supply is tougher: Heat and drought will devastate many of today’s food-growing regions. It will also push people north, where they will cluster in cities. In these areas, there will be no room for backyard gardens. As a result, Lovelock believes, we will have to synthesize food — to grow it in vats from tissue cultures of meats and vegetables. It sounds far out and deeply unappetizing, but from a technological standpoint, it wouldn’t be hard to do.

A steady supply of electricity will also be vital. Five days after his visit to the Hadley Centre, Lovelock penned a fiery op-ed titled “Nuclear Power Is the Only Green Solution.” Lovelock argued that we should “use the small input from renewables sensibly” but that “we have no time to experiment with visionary energy sources; civilization is in imminent danger and has to use nuclear — the one safe, available energy source — now or suffer the pain soon to be inflicted by our outraged planet.”

Environmentalists howled in protest, but for anyone who knew Lovelock’s past, his embrace of nukes is not surprising. At the age of fourteen, reading about how the sun is powered by a nuclear reaction, he came to believe that nuclear energy is one of the fundamental forces in the universe. Why not harness it? As for the dangers — radioactive waste, vulnerability to terrorism, the possibility of a Chernobyl-like meltdown — Lovelock says it’s the lesser of two evils: “Even if they’re right about the dangers, and they are not, it is still nothing compared to climate change.”

As a last resort, to keep the planet even marginally habitable, Lovelock believes that humans may be forced to manipulate the Earth’s climate by erecting solar shades in space or building devices to strip huge quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere. Although he views large-scale geoengineering as an act of profound hubris — “I would sooner expect a goat to succeed as a gardener than expect humans to become stewards of the Earth” — he thinks it may be necessary as an emergency measure, much like kidney dialysis is necessary to a person whose health is failing. In fact, it was Lovelock who inspired his friend Richard Branson to put up a $25 million prize for the Virgin Earth Challenge, which will be awarded to the first person who can figure out a commercially viable way of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere. As a judge in the contest, Lovelock is not eligible to win, but he’s intrigued by the challenge. His latest thought: suspend hundreds of thousands of 600-foot-long vertical pipes in the tropical oceans, put a valve at the bottom of each pipe and allow deep, nutrient-rich water to be pumped to the surface by wave action. Nutrients from the deep water would increase algae bloom, which would suck up carbon dioxide and help cool the planet.

“It’s a way of leveraging the Earth’s natural energy system against itself,” Lovelock speculates. “I think Gaia would approve.”

Oslo is Lovelock’s kind of town. It’s in the northern latitudes, which will grow more temperate as the climate warms; it has plenty of water; thanks to its oil and gas reserves, it’s rich; and there’s already lots of creative thinking going on about energy, including, much to Lovelock’s satisfaction, renewed discussion about nuclear power. “The main issue they’ll face here,” Lovelock tells me as we walk along Karl Johans Gate, the city’s main boulevard, “is how to manage the hordes of people that will descend upon the city. In the next few decades, half the population of southern Europe will try to move here.”

We head down to the waterfront, where we pass Akershus Castle, an imposing thirteenth-century fortress that served as Nazi headquarters during their occupation of the city during World War II. To Lovelock, the parallels between what the world faced then and what the world faces now are clear. “In some ways, it’s 1939 all over again,” he says. “The threat is obvious, but we’ve failed to grasp what’s at stake. We’re still talking about appeasement.”

Then, as now, the lack of political leadership is what’s most striking to Lovelock. Although he respects Al Gore’s efforts to raise people’s consciousness, he believes no politician has come close to preparing us for what’s coming. “We’ll be living in a desperate world in no time,” Lovelock says. He believes the time is right for a global-warming version of Winston Churchill’s famous “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat” speech he gave to prepare Great Britain for World War II. “People are ready for this,” Lovelock says as we pass under the shadow of the castle. “They understand what’s happening far better than most politicians.”

However the future turns out, Lovelock is unlikely to be around to see it. “My goal is to live a rectangular life: long, strong and steady, then a quick drop at the end,” he says. Lovelock shows no signs of hitting his own personal tipping point. Although he’s had forty operations, including a heart bypass, he still zooms around the English countryside in his white Honda like a Formula One driver. He and Sandy recently took a month long trip through Australia, where they visited the Great Barrier Reef. He’s about to start another book about Gaia. Richard Branson has invited him on the first flight on the Virgin Galactic space shuttle late next year –“I want to give him a view of Gaia from space,” says Branson. Lovelock is eager to go, and plans to take a test in a centrifuge later this year to see if his body can withstand the G-forces of spaceflight. He shuns talk of his legacy, although he jokes with his kids that he wants his headstone to read, HE NEVER MEANT TO BE PROSCRIPTIVE.

Whatever his epitaph, Lovelock’s legacy as one of the most provocative scientists of our time is assured. And for all his gloom and doom, his notion of the planet as a single dynamic system remains a hopeful idea. It suggests that there are rules the system operates by and mechanisms that drive it. These rules and mechanisms can be studied and, possibly, tweaked. In many ways, Lovelock’s holistic vision is an antidote to the chaos of twentieth-century science, which fragmented the world into quarks, quantum mechanics and untouchable mystery.

As for the doom that awaits us, Lovelock may well be wrong. Not because he’s misread the science (although that’s certainly possible) but because he’s misread human beings. Few serious scientists doubt that we’re on the verge of a climate catastrophe. But for all Lovelock’s sensitivity to the subtle dynamics and feedback loops in the climate system, he is curiously tone-deaf to the subtle dynamics and feedback loops in the human system. He believes that, despite our iPhones and space shuttles, we are still tribal animals, largely incapable of acting for the greater good or making long-term decisions for our own welfare. “Our moral progress,” says Lovelock, “has not kept up with our technological progress.”

But maybe that’s exactly what the coming apocalypse is all about. One of the questions that fascinates Lovelock: Life has been evolving on Earth for more than 3 billion years — and to what purpose? “Like it or not, we are the brains and nervous system of Gaia,” he says. “We have now assumed responsibility for the welfare of the planet. How will we manage it?”

As we weave our way through the tourists heading up to the castle, it’s easy to look at them and feel sadness. It’s harder to look at them and feel hopeful. But when I say this to Lovelock, he argues that the human race has gone through many bottlenecks before –and perhaps we’re the better for it. Then he tells me the story of an airplane crash years ago at Manchester Airport. “A fuel tank caught fire during takeoff,” Lovelock says. “There was plenty of time for everybody to get out, but many of the passengers wouldn’t move. They just stayed there in their seats as they were told to, and the people who escaped had to climb over them to get out. It was perfectly obvious how to get out, but they wouldn’t move. They died from the smoke or burned to death. And an awful lot of people, I’m sad to say, are like that. And that’s what will happen this time, except on a much vaster scale.”

Lovelock looks at me with unflinching blue eyes. “Some people will sit in their seats and do nothing, frozen in panic. Others will move. They’ll see what’s about to happen, and they’ll take action, and they’ll survive. They’re the carriers of the civilization ahead.”

Quotes:

A billion could live off the earth; 6 billion living as we do is far too many, and you run out of planet in no time.

James Lovelock

All the modeling we do shows that the climate is poised on the jump up to a new hot state. It is accelerating so fast that you could say that we are already in it.

James Lovelock

An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it.

James Lovelock

China will soon emit more greenhouse gases than America, but its regime knows if it caps aspirations there will be a revolution.

James Lovelock

Civilization in its present form hasn’t got long.

James Lovelock

Climatologists are all agreed that we’d be lucky to see the end of this century without the world being a totally different place, and being 8 or 9 degrees hotter on average.

James Lovelock

Esso has been the main one in America spreading the disinformation that there is no global warming problem.

James Lovelock

Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.

James Lovelock

Florida will be gone altogether, the whole damned place, in not too long.

James Lovelock

For each of our actions there are only consequences.

James Lovelock

Geological change usually takes thousands of years to happen but we are seeing the climate changing not just in our lifetimes but also year by year.

James Lovelock

I have heard that the Saudi Arabians are paying Greenpeace to campaign against Nuclear Power. It wouldn’t surprise me at all.

James Lovelock

I suspect any worries about genetic engineering may be unnecessary. Genetic mutations have always happened naturally, anyway.

James Lovelock

I’m a scientist, not a theologian. I don’t know if there is a God or not. Religion requires certainty.

James Lovelock

I’m not a pessimist, even though I do think awful things are going to happen.

James Lovelock

I’ve got personal views on the ’60s. You can’t have freedom without paying the price for it.

James Lovelock

If it hadn’t been for the Cold War, neither Russia nor America would have been sending people into space.

James Lovelock

If we gave up eating beef we would have roughly 20 to 30 times more land for food than we have now.

James Lovelock

If you start any large theory, such as quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, evolution, it takes about 40 years for mainstream science to come around. Gaia has been going for only 30 years or so.

James Lovelock

Just after World War II, this country led the world in science by every way you could measure it, yet the number of scientists was a tiny proportion of what it is now.

James Lovelock

Let’s make hay while it lasts.

James Lovelock

Life does more than adapt to the Earth. It changes the Earth to its own purposes.

James Lovelock

NASA will send up a big sun shade that will be in orbit between the earth and sun and deflect 2 or 3 percent of the sunshine back into space. It would be cheaper than the international space station.

James Lovelock

Nature favors those organisms which leave the environment in better shape for their progeny to survive.

James Lovelock

One pound of uranium is worth about 3 million pounds worth of coal or oil.

James Lovelock

Sadly, it’s much easier to create a desert than a forest.

James Lovelock

Science always uses metaphor.

James Lovelock

The oil companies regard nuclear power as their rival, who will reduce their profits, so they put out a lot of disinformation about nuclear power.

James Lovelock

There aren’t just bad people that commit genocide; we are all capable of it. It’s our evolutionary history.

James Lovelock

There is little evidence that our individual intelligence has improved through recorded history.

James Lovelock

This programme to stop nuclear by 2020 is just crazy. If there were a nuclear war, and humanity were wiped out, the Earth would breathe a sigh of relief.

James Lovelock

We’d never have got a chance to go outside and look at the earth if it hadn’t been for space exploration and NASA.

James Lovelock

You mustn’t take what I say as gospel because no one can second-guess the future.

James Lovelock

You never know with politicians what they are really saying. And I don’t say that in a negative way-they have an appalling job.

James Lovelock

Evolution: Origin of Species (Darwin), Dover Beach (Arnold), Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey (Wordsworth)

Hard to know where to begin with Darwin. It’s one of those seminal pieces but how many have actually read it? So I waded in, full of daunt (is this a word?) and trepidation. Well one thing that was helpful were the chapter summaries. And I noted that from chapter 7 things got more readable for me for a bit. I found it pretty heavy reading in general though elegant text. Some was hard for me because it seemed a more lengthy exposition of my general understanding of the issue (which of course it was), some was hard because it went beyond a layman’s understanding a little. Some stuff to me was just plain repetitive, but of course he was trying to hammer something new home, so no surprise there. However whatever these troubles there was no mistaking what an incredibly important work this was in its time, and one for which we all still owe a lot of thanks. Recently of course there is renewed interest in how Darwin’s work in evolution may be improved upon.

See this New Scientist edition for example  http://www.newscientist.com/special/on-the-origin-of-species-revisited

that was out last year. Its interesting to see how his work is being revisited. I also listened to an interesting BBC radio 4 one world podcast on Darwin in islamic societies and the islamic students comments were interesting, esp the ones working on human genome type work, who had odd views on evolution, made one wince with the Collins type of concern!

Regarding the two poems , the class discussed these little. I really enjoyed them both, lyrical, evocative, moody and sensitive, but found they contributed less to the theme than I expected, for me at least. Was it the revisiting aspect (I gather Wordsworth returned for a second trip) that was meant to elude to evolution? Or was it the nature worship side (Wordworth was a pantheianist I belive) we were meant to focus on here? The poem is riddled with natural religion, and Wordsworth seems to consider himself  a “worshipper of Nature” with a “far deeper zeal / Of holier love”, so was it this side that fitted into the theme of the week? Equally Dover beach with its sea and love. Gorgeous but what aspect beyond nature were we to focus attention on? I was unclear and would have liked to have spent longer on these pieces. For what lovely pieces they were none the less!

Freedom: Vindication of the Rights of Woman (Wollstonecraft), What is Enlightenment? (Kant)

Vindication of the Rights of Woman

Now this book I really enjoyed, and found surprisingly relevant to todays world. The stuff on co-ed schooling, day education based near home (as opposed to boarding schools), I found all really forward thinking, quite prophetic in fact. In the class we discussed this, and whether Wollstonecraft was ‘before her time’ or rather was it more a case of her time ‘was before itself’ as Wendy and Steve suggested. By this they meant that this period, leading up to the French Revolution, was an exceptionally advanced open time for free thinking, and that things clamped down a lot, for a hundred odd years, after the French Revolution, as the English upper classes and intelligencia struggled to keep dissent stifled and under wraps. Either way I did find her ideas quite stunning considering the period and quite wished I had read this before I read ‘Letters’ last term. This was written by a younger, more ardent viewed writer, to be sure, and as a result was idealistic in many ways. But despite this, and its repetition at times, it has much of merit.

What is Enlightenment?

Kant has never been one of my personal favorites I am afraid. Early on I got the impression of him as rigid in terms of his doctrine and this has never really shifted. I was unimpressed by his views on animal ‘rights’, old school. And his endless obsession with duty, reminded me of the Ogden Nash Poem, Kind of An Ode to Duty, which is just so good I have to include it here…

Ogden Nash’s “Kind Of An Ode To Duty”:

O Duty,

Why hast thou not the visage of a sweetie or a cutie?

Why glitter thy spectacles so ominously?

Why art thou clad so abominously?

Why are thou so different from Venus

And why do thou and I have so few interests mutually

in common between us?

Why art thou fifty per cent martyr

And fifty-one per cent Tartar?

Why is it thy unfortunate wont

To try to attract people by calling on them either to

leave undone the deeds they like, or to do the deeds

they don’t?

Why art thou so like an April post-mortem

Of something that died in the ortumn?

Above all, why dost thou continue to hound me?

Why art thou always albatrossly hanging around me?

Thou so ubiquitous,

And I so iniquitous,

I seem to be the one person in the world thou art

perpetually preaching at who or to who;

Whatever looks like fun, there art thou standing

between me and it, calling “you-hoo”.

O Duty, Duty!

How noble a man should I be hadst thou the visage of

a sweetie or a cutie!

But as it is thou art so much forbiddinger than a

Wodehouse hero’s forbiddingest aunt

That in the words of the poet, When Duty whispers low

“Thou must,” this erstwhile youth replies, “I just can’t”.

But Kant aside, in respect of duty at least, how do I feel about what he says on the topic of enlightenment. Yes of course he has a point. But……this is a big but….

Kant says “Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-incurred immaturity.” He argues that the immaturity is self-inflicted not from a lack of understanding, but from the lack of courage to use one’s reason, intellect, and wisdom without the guidance of another. Our fear of thinking for ourselves. I can agree with much of this. But I wonder where he is coming from and where he hopes to take us.

It makes me think (as does Wollstonecraft in her comments about how our obsession with frippery and dress distracts our mind from more important issues of philosophy) of Marcuse, and his views on choice and freedom, as below.

…..

Herbert Marcuse strongly criticizes consumerism, arguing consumerism is a form of social control. He suggests that the system we live in may claim to be democratic, but it is actually authoritarian in that the few individuals are dictating our perceptions of freedom by only allowing us choices to buy for happiness.^[3] It is in this state of “unfreedom”^[4] in which consumers act irrationally by working more than they are required to fulfill actual basic needs, ignoring the psychologically destructive effects, ignoring the waste and environmental damage it causes, and also by searching for social connection through material items. ^[5]

It is even more irrational in the sense that the creation of new products, calling for the disposal of old products, fuels the economy and encourages the increased need to work more to buy more. An individual loses his or her humanity and becomes a tool to the industrial machine and a cog in the consumer machine. Additionally advertising sustains consumerism, which disintegrates societal demeanor, delivered in bulk and informing the masses that happiness can be bought, an idea that is psychologically damaging.

There are other alternatives to counter the consumer lifestyle. Anti-consumerism: a lifestyle that demotes any unnecessary consumption, and with that, demotes unnecessary extra work, extra waste, etc. But even this alternative is complicated with the extreme penetration of advertising and commodification because everything is a commodity, even the things that are actual needs.