![]() “If … man had encroached on Gaia’s functional powers, to such an extent that he had disabled her, he would then wake up one day to find that he had the permanent lifelong job of planetary maintenance engineer…and the ceaseless intricate task of keeping all the global cycles in balance would be ours. “The larger the proportion of the Earth’s biomass occupied by mankind and the animals and crops required to nourish us, the more involved we become in the transfer of solar and other energy throughout the entire system….We shall have to tread carefully to avoid the cybernetic disasters of runaway positive feedback or of sustained oscillation….” In his first book, in 1979, he gave a warning that I can still quote verbatim 43 years later. Jim Lovelock’s blunt predictions of global climate disaster were once seen as exaggerated, but he understood what was really happening. ‘Gaia’ (under the more dignified name of Earth System Science) had achieved the status of scientific orthodoxy, Meanwhile, Lovelock had been accorded the status of honorary environmental saint by the Greens, although he regarded most of their priorities as mere distractions and some, like their hostility to nuclear power, as potentially lethal blunders. In 2001, a special congress of more than 1,000 physicists, biologists and climate scientists declared that the planet “behaves as a single self-regulating system, comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components.” (Jim was not a hippy.)īy 1988, however, the scientific world was starting to take the theory seriously. Most scientists treated it with disdain because he was not a biologist, but also because ‘Gaia’ had ‘New-Age’ connotations that he was unaware of. The puzzle that started Lovelock down that road was the fact that the Sun’s radiation has increased by 30% since life appeared on Earth 3.7 billion years ago, while the planet’s average temperature, despite occasional huge surges up or down, has consistently returned to the narrow range most suitable for life.Ĭollaborating with American biologist, Lynn Margulis, in the 1970s, he worked out a tentative description of the super-organism he named ‘Gaia’ and wrote his first book. ![]() Just as Darwin’s 19 th-century theory of evolution shaped our understanding of how life became so diverse, our understanding of the present is shaped by Lovelock’s idea that the millions of living species function as a self-regulating mechanism that keeps the planet cool enough for abundant life. That gives him a strong claim to be Charles Darwin’s legitimate heir. By the time he died, last Thursday, on his 103 rd birthday, he had written 10 more books on ‘Gaia,’ the hypothesis that has evolved into the key academic discipline of Earth System Science. ![]() His first book, ‘Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth’, was published in 1979, when he was already 60 years old. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |