About Gaia

James Lovelock and Silver Donald Cameron

Father of the Gaia hypothesis
, IT's IMPORTANT for Gaia that
human beings survive," says
James Lovelock.
"Our intelligence, if it can be
integrated as part of the whole plane-
tary system, would make ours the first
intelligent planet in the galaxy, per-
haps. What a wonderful future for hu-
mans!"
A great scientist needs great courage
and a great imagination - and Jim
Lovelock has both, in spades.
It is now 40 years since he rattled the
scientific world and electrified the rest
of us by publishing Gaia: A New Look
at Life on Earth (1979), which argued
that the Earth behaves like a single
living organism that creates and main-
tains a viable environmentfor life.
The Gaia hypothesis - named for the
Greek Earth goddess - implied that
the world was far more complex than
modern reductionist science had imag-
ined. It offered a coherent vision of the
whole living world that echoed all our
wisdom traditions and renewed the
human sense of wonder.
Mainstream scientists were horri-
fied. Many still are. But Lovelock's bold
insights, and his continuing explora-
tion of their implications, became the
foundations of "Earth system science,"
the study of systems like the circulation
of the oceans, the maintenance of the
atmosphere and the relationships
among the earth's many systems.
Noted author Gwynne Dyer considers
Lovelock "the most important figure in
both the life sciences and the climate
sciences for the past half-century," and
compares his achievements to Dar-
win's.
Slight, cheerful and white-haired,
Lovelock is now 90 years old, though he
looks decades younger. He published a
new book last year, The Vanishing Face
of Gaia. He and his American-born wife
Sandy spend their summers in Devon,
England, and their winters in her home
town of st. Louis, Mo., where I came
calling one brilliant January morning.
Lovelock resembles a geologist in his
easy navigation of the vastness of deep
time, but he recalls the Enlightenment
sages in his assumption that science is
a single enterprise, artificially split
into disciplines. He has been self-em-
ployed as a freelance scientist and in-
strument-maker for 50 years, largely
because of "silly people who would say
to me, 'You can't do biology, you're a
chemist.' As ifl didn't have a brain."
Freedom from institutional politics
allowed him to indulge his preference

James Lovelock is the author of Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. (SILVER DONALD CAMERON)
C, where crocodiles lived and bred.
Lovelock thinks that's the kind of
world we're creating - and because of
our essentially tribal politics, our ef-
forts to avoid it will likely fail. Since a
less habitable Earth won't sustain a
global population of seven billion, pop-
ulations will crash. Human beings
should plan a "sustainable retreat" to
the Arctic region. Canadians should
prepare for hordes of people trying to
relocate to northern Canada.
Is this inevitable?
No, says Lovelock. Gaia is far more
complex than we understand, and we
do not even know the depth of our igno-
rance. A scientist can only say that this
nightmare scenario is probable. But we
should prepare for it now, while the
world is still a reasonably civilized
place.
The real horror would be if our spe-
cies survived, but its fmest achieve-
ments were lost - science, art, culture.
Lovelock believes we could be the
evolutionary ancestors of an intelli-
gent, post-tribal species that will serve
an aging Gaia as her consciousness.
This is a colossal vision of tragedy -
and redemption.
Lovelock smiles.
"Gaia needs us," he says. "What a
wonderful future for humans!"

SILVER DONAI.D CAMERON
for observation over computer model-
ling and permitted him to follow the
evidence fearlessly, wherever it led.
In 2007 he was "shocked" to learn
that the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change had "reached a consen-
sus on a matter of science.'!
Science is about nature. Consensus is
about politics.
So where has the evidence led him
lately?
Sea level, Arctic ice cover and ocean
algae populations, he says, are the best
indicators of global warming - and
they all reveal that the earth is heating
up much faster than the panel's projec-
tions. Furthermore, the evidence from
the Earth's last hot period, 55 million
years ago, shows that global temper-
atures don't necessarily change slowly
and evenly; they can flip fairly quickly
to hotter or colder states.
On that earlier occasion, most ofthe
Earth became a scorching desert. Life
retreated to the shores of an Arctic
Ocean with surface temperature of 21
Visit Silver Donald Cameron's website at
www.silverdonaldcameron.ca