The Flight of the Iguana: A Sidelong View of Science and Nature by Quammen David

Author:Quammen, David [Quammen, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science
ISBN: 9781476728735
Amazon: 1476728739
Goodreads: 16074530
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 1988-01-01T08:00:00+00:00

PROVIDE, PROVIDE

The Gaia Hypothesis and Global Evolution

An Englishman named J. E. Lovelock believes that he may have discovered the largest of all living creatures. This thing he has found is so incomprehensibly huge that almost nobody until now had even noticed it. Bigger and more advanced than the biggest dinosaur that ever slogged through Cretaceous marshes. Bigger than the biggest whale that ever came up for a gasp of air. It is not an extinct species, furthermore, but an organism that thrives today, a survivor throughout three and a half billion years. Lovelock calls this creature Gaia. He is talking about the Earth itself.

He suggests that our planet, floating sublimely in space like the Star Child from Kubrick’s 2001, is a single great animate being.

Lovelock has outlined the idea in various scientific papers (some of them coauthored with the distinguished biologist Lynn Margulis) published over the past dozen years, and developed it at length in a book titled Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. The name Gaia is borrowed from the ancient Greeks, who applied it to that goddess they knew also as Mother Earth. What Lovelock proposes is that “the Earth’s living matter, air, oceans, and land surface form a complex system which can be seen as a single organism and which has the capacity to keep our planet a fit place for life.” Of course any cold-eyed reader will note that “can be seen as a single organism” is a slippery formulation, and Lovelock never makes quite clear whether he means that to be a literal suggestion or just a useful metaphor. Elsewhere he calls Gaia “a vast being who in her entirety has the power to maintain our planet as a fit and comfortable habitat for life.” Being is another vague term that never receives precise definition, but never mind. The more solid and persuasive part of Lovelock’s idea—also the more significant part—is the second half. According to his Gaia hypothesis, earthly life has created its own required environment.

The biosphere has to some extent dictated the physical and chemical conditions on Earth, rather than merely vice versa, he argues. Ever since life began, it has taken active measures to keep the planet livable. The ratio of gases in the atmosphere, the degree of salinity in the oceans, the acidity level of water and soil—all of these, says Lovelock, are selfishly controlled by the collective body of living creatures. Nothing is left to chance. Fluctuations are not suffered passively. Gaia provides for her own.

If true, this is news indeed. One of the implications, as Lovelock points out, would be that the Earth has the ability to cure itself of catastrophic environmental disruptions—ozone depletion, the greenhouse effect, acid rain, even the poisonous aftermath of a nuclear war—as easily and routinely as the human body cures itself of a cold.

Some people will find great satisfaction in that idea. Others will judge it a terrifyingly dangerous bit of optimism.

• • •

The atmosphere as we know it is highly improbable. It is not the one our planet should have.

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