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THE AGES OF GAIA: A BIOGRAPHY OF OUR LIVING EARTH |
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Preface I am writing in a room added to what was once a water mill that drew power from the River Carey as it flowed on to join the Tamar and the sea. Coombe Mill is still a work place, but now a laboratory, den, and meeting place where I spend much of my time. The room looks out onto the river valley with its small fields and hedgerows typical of the Devonshire country scene. The description of the place where this book was written is relevant to its understanding. I work here and it is my home. There is no other way to work on an unconventional topic such as Gaia. The researches and expeditions to discover Gaia have occupied nearly twenty years, and have been paid for from the income I receive for the invention and development of scientific instruments. I gratefully acknowledge the generosity of Helen Lovelock for letting me use the greater part of our joint income this way and also the faithful and consistent role of the Hewlett Packard Company, who have been the best of customers for my inventions, and truly have made the research possible. Science, unlike other intellectual activities, is almost never done at home. Modern science has become as professional as the advertising industry. And, like that industry, it relies on an expensive and exquisitely refined technique. There is no place for the amateur in modern science, yet, as is often the way with professions, science more often applies its expertise to the trivial than to the numinous. Where science differs from the media is in its lack of a partnership with independent individuals. Painters, poets, and composers easily move from their own worlds into advertising and back again, and both worlds are enriched. But where are the independent scientists?
You may think of the academic scientist as the analogue of the independent artist. In fact, nearly all scientists are employed by some large organization, such as a governmental department, a university, or a multinational company. Only rarely are they free to express their science as a personal view. They may think that they are free, but in reality they are, nearly all of them, employees; they have traded freedom of thought for good working conditions, a steady income, tenure, and a pension. They are also constrained by an army of bureaucratic forces, from the funding agencies to the health and safety organizations. Scientists are also constrained by the tribal rules of the discipline to which they belong. A physicist would find it hard to do chemistry and a biologist would find physics well-nigh impossible to do. To cap it all, in recent years the "purity" of science is ever more closely guarded by a self-imposed inquisition called the peer review. This well, meaning but narrow-minded nanny of an institution ensures that scientists work according to conventional wisdom and not as curiosity or inspiration moves them. Lacking freedom they are in danger of succumbing to a finicky gentility or of becoming, like medieval theologians, the creatures of dogma. As a university scientist I would have found it nearly impossible to do full-time research on the Earth as a living planet. To start with, there would be no funds approved for so speculative a research. If I had persisted and worked in my lunch hour or spare time, it would not have been long before I received a summons from the lab director. In his office I would have been warned of the dangers to my career of persisting in so unfashionable a research topic. If this did not work and obstinately I persisted, I would have been summoned a second time and warned that my work endangered the reputation of the department, and the director's own career. I wrote the first Gaia book so that a dictionary was the only aid needed and I have tried to write this way in the present book. I am puzzled by the response of some of my scientific colleagues who take me to task for presenting science this way. Things have taken a strange turn in recent years; almost the full circle from Galileo's famous struggle with the theological establishment. It is the scientific establishment that makes itself esoteric and is the scourge of heresy. It was not always like this. You may well ask, Whatever became of those colorful romantic figures, the mad professors, the Drs. Who? Scientists who seemed to be free to range over all of the disciplines of science without let or hindrance? They still exist, and in some ways I am writing as a member of their rare and endangered species. More seriously, I have had to become a radical scientist also because the scientific community is reluctant to accept new theories as fact, and rightly so. It was nearly 150 years before the notion that heat is a measure of the speed of molecules became a fact of science, and 40 years before plate tectonics was accepted by the scientific community. Now perhaps you see why I work at home supporting myself and my family by whatever means come to hand. It is no penance, rather a delightful way of life that painters and novelists have always known about. Fellow scientists join me, you have nothing to lose but your grants. The main part of this book, chapters 2 to 6, is about a new theory of evolution, one that does not deny Darwin's great vision but adds to it by observing that the evolution of the species of organisms is not independent of the evolution of their material environment. Indeed the species and their environment are tightly coupled and evolve as a single system. What I shall be describing is the evolution of the largest living organism, Gaia. My first thoughts about Gaia came when I was working in Norman Horowitz's biosciences division of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where we were concerned with the detection of life on other planets. These preliminary ideas were expressed briefly in the proceedings of a meeting held by the American Astronautical Society in 1968 and more definitely in a letter to Atmospheric Environment in 1971. But it was not until two years later, following an intense and rewarding collaboration with the biologist Lynn Margulis, that the skeleton Gaia hypothesis grew flesh and came alive. The first papers were published in the journals Tellus and Icarus, where the editors were sympathetic and were prepared to see our ideas discussed. Lynn Margulis is the staunchest and best of my colleagues. I am also fortunate in that she is unique among biologists in her broad understanding of the living world and its environment. At a time when biology has divided itself into some thirty or more narrow specialties proud in their ignorance of other sciences, even of other biological disciplines, it needed someone with Lynn's rare breadth of vision to establish a biological context for Gaia. Sometimes, when confronted with excesses of sentiment about life on Earth, I follow Lynn's lead and take on the role of shop steward, the trade union representative, of microorganisms and the lesser under-represented forms of life. They have worked to keep this planet fit for life for 3.5 billion years. The cuddly animals, the wildflowers, and the people are to be revered, but they would be as nothing were it not for the vast infrastructure of the microbes. It would be difficult after spending nearly twenty years developing a theory of the Earth as a living organism -- where the evolution of the species and their material environment are tightly coupled but still evolve by natural selection -- to avoid capturing views about the problems of pollution and the degradation of the natural environment by humans. Gaia theory forces a planetary perspective. It is the health of the planet that matters, not that of some individual species of organisms. This is where Gaia and the environmental movements, which are concerned first with the health of people, part company. The health of the Earth is most threatened by major changes in natural ecosystems. Agriculture, forestry, and to a lesser extent fishing are seen as the most serious sources of this kind of damage with the inexorable increase of the greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, methane, and several others coming next. Geophysiologists do not ignore the depletion of the ozone layer in the stratosphere with its concomitant risk of increased irradiation with short-wave ultraviolet, or the problem of acid rain. These are seen as real and potentially serious hazards but mainly to the people and ecosystems of the First World -- from a Gaian perspective, a region that is clearly expendable. It was buried beneath glaciers, or was icy tundra, only 10,000 years ago. As for what seems to be the greatest concern, nuclear radiation, fearful though it is to individual humans is to Gaia a minor affair. It may seem to many readers that I am mocking those environmental scientists whose life work is concerned with these threats to human life. This is not my intention. I wish only to speak out for Gaia because there are so few who do, compared with the multitudes who speak for the people. Because of this difference in emphasis, a concern for the planet rather than for ourselves, I came to realise that there might be the need for a new profession, that of planetary medicine. I am indebted to the historian Donald McIntyre for writing to tell me that it was James Hutton who first introduced the idea of planetary physiology in the eighteenth century. Hutton was a physician as well as a geologist. Physiology was the first science of medicine, and one of the aims of this book is to establish "geophysiology" as a basis for planetary medicine. At this early stage in our understanding of the Earth as a physiological entity, we need general practitioners, not specialists. We are like physicians before the use of antibiotics; even in the 1930s they could offer little other than symptomatic relief to patients suffering from infection. Now the major causes of death in the early part of this century -- tuberculosis, diphtheria, whooping cough, pneumonia -- have vastly declined, and physicians are mostly concerned with the diseases of degeneration -- cardiovascular and neoplastic disease. It is true that the appearance of the HIV virus has shaken the confidence we had in medicine to cure all ills, but still we have advanced far beyond the helplessness of the days before the 1940s. We are in the same condition now with respect to the health of the Earth as were the early physicians. Specialties, like biogeochemistry, theoretical ecology, and evolutionary biology, all exist, but they have no more to offer the concerned environmental physician or the patient than could the analogous science of biochemistry and microbiology in the nineteenth century. As part of their graduation, physicians must take the Hippocratic Oath. It includes the injunction to do nothing that would harm the patient. A similar oath is needed for putative planetary doctors if they are to avoid iatrogenic error: an oath to prevent the overzealous from applying a cure that would do more harm than good. Consider, for example, an industrial disaster that contaminated a whole geographic region with easily measurable levels of some carcinogenic agent, one that posed a calculable risk to the whole population of the region. Should all the food crops and livestock of the region be destroyed to prevent the risk attendant upon their consumption? Should nature, instead, just take its course? Or should we aim for some less stark choice in between? A recent disaster illustrates how, in the absence of the voice of the planetary physician, treatment may be applied with consequences more severe than those of the poison. I refer to the tragedy of Swedish Lapland in the wake of the Chernobyl accident, where thousands of reindeer, the food prey of the Lapps, were destroyed, because it was thought they were too radioactive to eat. Was it justifiable to inflict this brutal treatment for mild radioactive poisoning on a fragile culture and its dependent ecosystem? Or were the consequences of the "cure" worse than the remote and theoretical risk of cancer in a small proportion of its inhabitants? In addition to a chapter on these environmental affairs, the last part of the book is concerned with some speculations about establishing a geophysiological system on Mars. The first Gaia book also stirred an interest in the religious aspects of Gaia, so in another chapter I have tried to answer some of the difficult questions that were raised. In this unfamiliar territory I have benefited from the strong moral support of the Lindisfarne Fellowship and especially from its founders, William Irwin Thompson and James Morton, and from the friendship of its other members, like Mary Catherine Bateson, John and Nancy Todd, and Stewart Brand, who was for many years the editor of CoEvolution Quarterly.
From the days when I first started writing and thinking about Gaia I have been constantly reminded how often the same general idea has been posed before, I have felt a special empathy with the writings of the ecologist Eugene Odum. If I unintentionally offend prior "geophysiologists" by failing to give credit to their writings, I ask their forgiveness. I know that there must be numerous other thinkers, like the Bulgarian philosopher, Stephen Zivadin, who have said much of it before me and have been ignored. I have been fortunate in the friends who have read and criticized the chapters of the book as it was written. Peter Fellgett, Gail Fleischaker, Robert Garrels, Peter Liss, Andrew Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, Euan Nisbet, Andrew Watson, Peter Westbroek, and Michael Whitfield, all have unstintingly and thoughtfully given their advice on the science. I am equally thankful to my friends who criticised the book in terms of its readability: Alex and Joyce Andrew, Stewart Brand, Peter Bunyard, Christine Curthoys, Jane Gifford, Edward Goldsmith, Adam Hart-Davis, Mary McGowan, and Elizabeth Sachtouris. Since 1982 the United Nations University, through its program officer, Walter Shearer, has provided moral and material support especially for the notion of planetary medicine. Left to myself I tend to write blocks of text that, like the pattern of a mosaic, make sense only from a distant view. I greatly valued the friendly skill with which Jackie Wilson rearranged my words as she edited the manuscript and made it readable. The Commonwealth Fund Book Program, by their generous support, gave me the opportunity to set aside the time needed to develop the ideas of the book and to write. I am especially grateful to Lewis Thomas and to the two editors Helene Friedman and Antonina Bouis for the warmth of their encouragement and moral support. But this book could never have been written without the sustenance and love that Helen and John Lovelock so freely gave.
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