the Revenge of Gaia

This book by James Lovelock is, hands-down, the scariest book I've read since I started this blog. Long-time readers will be familiar with my concerns about the environment: human societies have lost our relationship with the natural world, to the point that our entire economic systems as they currently stand are functionally incompatible with sustainable ecosystems (see this and this), and the only political movements calling out these issues on the scale they need to be called out on are marginal at best.

   Lovelock, as a climate scientist, has been one of the most prominent voices in the public sphere since the 1960s on environmentalism, and is still profoundly influenatial today, despite several notable areas of disagreement with 'mainstream' green types. His main claim-to-fame is for the 'Gaia' hypothesis, that planetary biological and geological systems (like Earth) are inextricably interconnected and self-regulating over extremely long time periods. He overviews this theory in this book, as well as the life-history of Earth within the scope of the theory, though other books by him focusing purely on the Gaia hypothesis and Earth-science will be more thorough on this topic.

   This book is concerned with the rapid destabilisation of Gaia's natural self-regulation: human civilisation has, to put it crudely, shat out so much waste that the typical means of carbon absorbtion are overwhelmed, so the planet (in the very short-term, geologically-speaking, but still long enough for a mass extinction of plants and animals and the probable deaths of billions of humans - mainly the poorer ones) is overheating. The scientific projections for the twenty-first century are downright chilling. James offers some generalistic overviews of how we need to reshape our food and energy industries, our entire societal use of technology, our entire economic systems - nothing too dissimilar from other environmentalists' Last-Prophet-Before-The-Flood pleas for large-scale social change and political action, which are still going largely unheeded.

   I don't know why I read this book. I already knew how utterly and completely our species has, as they say in Alabama (probably), "gone done fucked up." The only people who are likely to read this book will be dedicated environmentalists like myself who already know that massive radical change is needed, twenty years ago. It's probably too late to prevent a mass extinction (I mean, heck, it's already happening). It's probably too late to prevent dangerously runaway global warming that will force mass migration on scales never seen before in human history, runaway inflation on food, wars over water.

   If the contents of this book are interesting to you, don't read it. It'll just depress you without really telling you anything action-oriented that you probably don't already know. (Except that nuclear power doesn't deserve its demonised status.) Instead, go out and take direct action against the corporate-governmental schemes that are perpetuating the human destruction of our life support system, Gaia.

   That, or stock up on tinned goods and bottled water for a post-apocalyptic bunker.

   I'm doing both.