Whatever happened to Gaia?

Over 30 years ago, scientist James Lovelock first suggested that all life on the planet might somehow be working together to ensure a favourable climate for itself – the Gaia hypothesis. In a rare interview, Lovelock tells Caspar Henderson how recent evidence of climate change is bearing out the hypothesis to an alarming degree, how we haven’t even begun to take the threat seriously, and how Gaia can offer hope – and maybe even moral guidance – in a dangerously warming world

"Nature is not in the least fragile. People are fairly tough, although less tough than nature, but civilisation is very fragile."

And 25 years after the publication of Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, James Lovelock is less than sanguine about civilisation’s prospects. As climatic disruption kicks in on a large scale, civilisation could take some pretty heavy hits. This, he warns, is something we’re not remotely prepared for. "A little while ago there were just 15 days’ grain stocks left in the world."

Now in his 80s, but still active and vigorous, Lovelock lives in Cornwall, in an old mill nestled in a pocket woodland reserve he has created. A modest and softly spoken man with a ready sense of humour, he’s still engaged in scientific research, and to thinking about the significance of the Gaia hypothesis for the way society organises itself.

So is the message getting through? "I get the impression that it’s still got a long way to go", he says. Big changes in the way people think "take about 40 years to settle in...You won’t find many people who will give you an intelligent comment on Gaia – apart, that is, from the man in the street who says, ‘Well, it’s fairly obvious isn’t it, mate?’!"

Ironically, says Lovelock, acceptance of Gaia in the mainstream is happening first at the leading edge of science. At the Hadley Centre for Climate Change, for example, widely seen as one of the world’s leading centres of research into global warming, climate modellers are integrating Gaian thinking into their latest work. Not overtly, perhaps. "The name Gaia is still very unpopular among scientists," Lovelock admits. "So they’re not going to get funded and respected if they say they’re using it in their models, but they’re doing it nevertheless."

And he suspects the changes those scientists are modelling are going to be a lot more severe than we like to think. Already, the rise in average global temperatures is very sharp and, says Lovelock, "much more serious than regular old-fashioned science predicts. Because almost all of the systems that we know about are in positive feedback" – locked in a vicious spiral of multiplying causes and effects, which wehaven’t yet begun to get to grips with. Anything we do now is going to take at least 40 years to feed through to affect the climate.

Meanwhile, the process of climatic disruption has already been unleashed. Lovelock conjures up a picture of a world where food production could be massively disrupted, water scarce, and civil unrest out of control. It sounds apocalyptic.

Science is provisional

By way of balance, he cautions that science is always provisional, and nobody can really know what’s going to happen. He could, he agrees, be quite wrong about the rate and nature of climate change. But society needs to take out proper insurance against the strong possibility of such an unprecedented disaster. "It’s no use burying our heads in the sand." People with clout and influence must start taking such possibilities much more seriously.

So what is to be done? Lovelock has little time for current greenhouse strategies. The most stringent targets – such as cuts in emissions of around 20% by some industrial nations – he dismisses as "a joke... It’s almost a waste of time trying to do anything about significantly reducing emissions until the first disaster hits us and people’s minds are suddenly con-centrated on the prospect of hanging, so to speak... There’s not a lot one can do until such time as we know the Titanic has started sinking. Then people get together. I wish I could be more optimistic. But consider: it’s taken nearly all this century to build the mechanisms for peace in Europe, and we have nothing like that where the environment’s concerned. Yet severe destabilisation is coming up on us faster than ever."

To stay with the Titanic metaphor, then, perhaps it’s time we gave some thought to the lifeboats. Lovelock’s own suggestion is a ‘Book for all Seasons’. An easy-to-read outline of the basic elements of science – "an account of all we know that’s essential: all the science we take for granted now, but which was terribly hard won over many hundreds of years, such as the bacterial theory of disease". The book would be distributed to every school, home and other major buildings (and in a greenhouse world without too much in the way of electricity, a book would make a whole lot more sense than a website).

"If a disaster hit tomorrow, the few people who were left around on islands probably wouldn’t know very much. Most of our current know-ledge would have gone. Somebody might excavate an old library but what would they find? Hundreds of books on aromatherapy!" Most of the science texts they did find would be incomprehensible and all but useless. But if many copies of the ‘Book for all Seasons’ survived then people would be able to build up useful knowledge quickly.

Much of what Lovelock has to say is decidedly grim; but there is a positive side to Gaia that he is particularly keen to emphasise. Of at least equal importance as its usefulness to science, he thinks, is the spiritual guidance it can offer.

"This has been occupying my attention probably more than anything else. People do need something to revere or worship, and religion is beginning to fade all over the world because it’s failing to deliver in two fields. One: it used to be the source of infor-mation about life, the cosmos and everything – in other words, it did science’s job for it. And science now does that so superbly well that religion has become almost redundant in that sphere. Two: it used to give moral guidance. And it’s beginning to fail in that too... And so what do we do instead? Science offers nothing, or hasn’t done so far, where moral guidance is concerned."

Gaia in a world where religion is redundant

"But now it just happens, quite by accident and not by any conscious thought on my part or anybody else’s, that Gaia does offer moral guidance. It does so because its rules are quite simple: any species that improves its environment favours the welfare of its progeny, whereas any species that adversely affects the environment dooms it for its progeny. And this is very moral. It gives us something to which we are accountable – the Earth itself."

Gaia, Lovelock stresses, is not and should never be the basis of a religion, because religions have faith. "The word I prefer to faith is trust. If we put trust in Gaia then it gives us something that will fulfil the same kinds of needs as religions have." And the problem is that industrial civilisation in its present form is profoundly betraying that deeply held trust.

"I’m a grandfather with eight grandchildren. I need to be optimistic. I see the world as a living organism of which we are part; not the owner, nor the tenant, nor even a passenger. To exploit such a world on the scale we do is as foolish as it would be to consider our brains supreme and the cells of other organs expendable. Would we mine our livers for nutrient for some short- term benefit?"

Caspar Henderson is a freelance writer, and Senior Correspondent for Green Futures.

The Gaia Society, 020 8849 3496; gaia@uel.ac.uk

The science of Gaia

Back in the 1960s, James Lovelock suggested that the totality of all living things on Earth somehow maintained atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide and oxygen constant, along with surface temperature – not consciously or deliberately, but as part of an automatic process, just as our bodies increase our heart rate when we exercise, or repair wounds when we are hurt.

Just how the regulatory mechanism might work was further illuminated by Lynn Margulis, an American biologist who developed a theory of co-operative microbial communities. The work became known as the Gaia hypothesis, after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth.

Increasing numbers of scientists now accept that Gaia is a real phenomenon. William Hamilton, widely regarded as the most eminent evolutionary biologist alive, says"Lovelock is like Copernicus." Copernicus said the Earth moved around the sun. But he never came up with a full explanation – that was left to Newton and his laws of motion. As far as Hamilton’s concerned, "Jim’s still waiting for his Newton."

Very large gaps in understanding remain: "25% of atmospheric carbon dioxide disappears we know not where", cautions Chris Rapley, director of the British Antarctic Survey. Andy Watson, professor of environmental science at the University of East Anglia, thinks Gaia may be an unreliable regulator. "It is as if it has been assembled by a rather bad electrician and it’s just luck that it works that way".

But, responds Lovelock, "scientific theories are judged not so much by whether they are right or wrong as by the value of their predictions. Gaia theory has already proved so fruitful in this way that by now it would hardly matter if it were wrong."

For the last few decades mankind has been generating greenhouse gases far faster than the Earth system’s capacity to remove them from the atmosphere. Eventually, compensatory changes may reduce carbon dioxide levels, but not before tremendous ecological changes occur. Gaia’s persistence plays no favourites on which species survive or disappear in the midst of all this.

23 October 2001

Caspar Henderson