The Revenge of Gaia

But I hear you say, 'What? Another book on global warming; isn't what was once a scare now becoming overkill?' If this book were no more than a reiteration of the arguments and counterarguments you would be right, and it would be one book too many. What makes it different is that I speak as a planetary physician whose patient, the living Earth, complains of fever; I see the Earth's declining health as our most important concern, our very lives depending upon a healthy Earth. Our concern for it must come first, because the welfare of the burgeoning masses of humanity demands a healthy planet.

At this point my friends and colleagues will wince and wish that I would give up talking of our planet as a form of life.^† I understand their concern but I am unrepentant; had I not first thought of the Earth this way we might all have remained 'scientifically correct' but lacked enlightenment about its true nature. Thanks to the concept of Gaia we now see that our planet is entirely different from its dead siblings Mars and Venus. Like one of us, it controls its temperature and composition so as always to be comfortable, and it has done this ever since life began over three billion years ago. To put it bluntly, dead planets are like stone statues, which if put in an oven and heated to 80°C remain unchanged. I would die and so would you if heated that hot, and so would the Earth.

Only when we think of our planetary home as if it were alive can we see, perhaps for the first time, why farming abrades the living tissue of its skin and why pollution is poisonous to it as well as to us. Increasing levels of carbon dioxide and methane gas in the atmosphere have consequences quite different from those that would occur on a dead planet like Mars. The living Earth's response to what we do will depend not merely on the extent of our land use and pollutions but also on its current state of health. When the Earth was young and strong, it resisted adverse change and the failure of its own temperature regulation; now it may be elderly and less resilient.

Sustainable development, supported by the use of renewable energy,^† is the fashionable approach to living with the Earth, and it is the platform of green-thinking politicians. Opposing this view, particularly in the United States, are the many who still regard global warming as a fiction and favour business as usual. Their thinking is well expressed in the recent novel by Michael Crichton, State of Fear, and by that saintly woman, Mother Theresa, who in 1988 said, 'Why should we care about the Earth when our duty is to the poor and the sick among us. God will take care of the Earth.' In truth, neither faith in God nor trust in business as usual, nor even commitment to sustainable development, acknowledges our true dependence; if we fail to take care of the Earth, it surely will take care of itself by making us no longer welcome. Those with faith should look again at our Earthly home and see it as a holy place, part of God's creation, but something that we have desecrated. Anne Primavesi's book Gaia's Gift shows the way to consilience^† between faith and Gaia.

When I hear the phrase 'sustainable development' I recall the definition given by Gisbert Glaser, the senior advisor to the International Council for Science, who said in a guest editorial of the International Geosphere Biosphere Program (IGBP) newsletter, 'Sustainable development is a moving target. It represents the continuous effort to balance and integrate the three pillars of social well-being, economic prosperity and environmental protection for the benefit of present and future generations.' Many consider this noble policy morally superior to the laissez faire of business as usual. Unfortunately for us, these wholly different approaches, one the expression of international decency, the other of unfeeling market forces, have the same outcome: the probability of disastrous global change. The error they share is the belief that further development is possible and that the Earth will continue, more or less as now, for at least the first half of this century. Two hundred years ago, when change was slow or non-existent, we might have had time to establish sustainable development, or even have continued for a while with business as usual, but now is much too late; the damage has already been done. To expect sustainable development or a trust in business as usual to be viable policies is like expecting a lung cancer victim to be cured by stopping smoking; both measures deny the existence of the Earth's disease, the fever brought on by a plague of people. Despite their difference, they come from religious and humanist beliefs which regard the Earth as there to be exploited for the good of humankind. When there were only one billion of us in 1800, these ignorant policies were acceptable because they caused little harm. Now, they travel two different roads that will soon merge into a rocky path to a Stone Age existence on an ailing planet, one where few of us survive among the wreckage of our once biodiverse Earth.

Science is supposed to be objective, so why has it failed to warn us sooner of these dangers? Global heating was lightly discussed by several authors in the mid twentieth century, but even that great climatologist Hubert Lamb, in his 1972 book Climate: Present, Past and Future, had only one page on the greenhouse effect^† in a work covering 600 pages. The subject did not go public until about 1988; before that, most atmospheric scientists were so absorbed by the intriguing science of stratospheric ozone depletion that they had little time for other environmental problems. Among the brave pioneers of the larger issues of global change were the American scientists Stephen Schneider and Jim Hansen. I first met Schneider in the late 1970s during a visit to the National Center for Atmospheric Research, an entrancing place of science perched on a mountainside at Boulder in Colorado, and our paths through science have been interlaced ever since. In his book with Randi Londer, The Coevolution of Climate and Life, published in 1984, he warns of the probable consequences of continuing to burn fossil fuels and recommends the need for a strategic control of emissions, not the business as usual of market forces. Jim Hansen of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies was equally strong in his warnings, and on 23 June 1988 he told the United States Senate that the Earth was now warmer than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. The best and most complete histories of this period are in John Gribbin's book Hothouse Earth, published in 1990, Schneider's 1989 book, Global Warming, and Fred Pearce's Turning up the Heat, published in 1989.