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GAIA CENTENARIAN
09/08/2019
From decades ago I well remember James Lovelock, who has just turned 100, and his famous “Gaia Hypothesis”[1] that exploded onto the environmental scene in the 1970s. Although it was hungrily fallen upon by what used to be rather disparagingly called the “brown bread and sandals brigade” of green quasi-mystics that abounded at that time, there was good science behind it. Lovelock proposed that the interactions between Earth’s inorganic environment and life had become a planetary self-regulating, life-maintaining and life-perpetuating system, albeit one of great complexity but synergistic in the sense that the whole was greater than the sum of its parts: he hypothesised Earth as a superorganism.
[1] For those wanting to explore the detail, there is a well-organised and detailed article on the Gaia Hypothesis on Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaia_hypothesis.
NASA (public domain)
Lovelock is undoubtedly a great and innovative independent scientist with a penchant for thinking outside the box. He is a polymath – medical scientist (respiratory infections, blood clotting, freezing cells, artificial insemination, air sterilisation) and famous for inventing a gas chromatograph in the 1950s, a vacuum pump and for work with NASA on how to detect if there was life on Mars (he showed there isn’t). That Martian planetary atmospheric work led to the realisation that, in comparison, Earth has an atmosphere, unlike Mars, that indicates a significant reduction of entropy (think of entropy as the degree of disorder in a system). The unexpectedly high levels of oxygen in Earth’s atmosphere only made sense to
Lovelock if you think of Earth as a system in which life produces an energy-rich atmosphere which then feeds back to support the life that produced it, whence his idea of Earth as a superorganism. It was his friend, the author William Golding, who suggested the name Gaea or Gaia (Γαία), after the Greek goddess, the primordial earth mother.
Photo caption: Gaia – detail from Wilhelm Heinrich Roscher (1886) Attic red-figure calyx-krater, 410-400 B.C. (public domain).
Lovelock’s current thinking is that we are moving from the Anthropocene (I have barely got used to that yet but it started in 1712!) into what he calls the Novacene, in which he foresees humans becoming a non-biological “species” operating on cybernetics, cyborgs in fact – an extrapolation of AI if you like. That is quite a leap intellectually but then that is something in which Lovelock excels. He does not see an end to biological life, rather a transcendence from it for some if not all humans, allowing much faster information processing (ten thousand times as fast).
James Lovelock has recently written “Novacene” which is published by Allen Lane and available on Amazon. He says of his long life, “All along, I’ve just happily trundled on, doing the experiments and getting the answers.” Novacene is interesting: I disagree with some of the thinking in it, though, which tends towards the almost mystical and is sometimes teleological, but there is certainly creative and challenging thought in it.
Betts Ecology’s work respects the ecologically integrated, interrelated and interdependent systems of our planet and we strive to minimise adverse impacts on functioning ecosystems through the protection and promotion of biodiversity.
Text © Betts Ecology
