The Beginning of the End -- Yikes!

I can’t say that I enjoyed this month’s book club selection. The Revenge of Gaia is one of those in-your-face doomsday books that made me question whether I would ever want grandchildren if they were going to grow up in a living hell or not at all.

Gaia theory tells us that the entire earth, including the atmosphere, oceans, biosphere and upper layers of rock, functions as a single superorganism, regulating its internal environment much as an animal regulates its body temperature and chemical balance.

The subject of the book is in the subtitle: earth’s climate crisis and the fate of humanity. He depicts global warming as just the tip of the (melting) iceberg. The problem we now find ourselves in, according to James Lovelock, is a complicated one caused by an excess of carbon dioxide, a world population which is greater than the planet can sustain, and an increase in the heat of the sun.

We are on an accelerating path to meet the accelerating energy demands of the world, but most everything we turn to has serious side-effects that further erode the status of the earth. He goes through the various possibilities and concludes that only nuclear energy holds any possibility for the long haul.

The bleak picture of the future that Lovelock paints is of shrinking land mass, where many of our current biggest (coastal) cities are underwater. The only habitable areas will be the far north and the far south. The survival of the fittest will dictate that many won’t survive this shift.

He predicts we will eat food that is manufactured. Instead of organic the prized food will be GROWN! Can you imagine what a restaurant menu would look like?

There are some fairly outrageous statements in this book that don’t necessarily square with my previous thinking. He claims that only 75 people actually died as a result of the Chernobyl incident. He says that more harm resulted in the developing world from the banning of DDT than in the developed world from using it. He really pans the use of “wind farms” that are becoming so common in Europe as an energy source. He thinks acid rain is a good thing because it creates a haze that blocks sunlight from reaching the earth.

I have resigned myself that I have entered the “end game” of my own life, but I was rather hoping to leave behind a vibrant and thriving world, not one that was also in its own end game.

I found myself asking as I read the book what we could do to reverse this death process, to FIX the problem. He offers a few band-aids, including the installation of heat shields in space that would sit between the sun and the earth to diminish the heat of the sun; the use of nuclear energy; and conscious changes in our life styles. Ironically, he says that one of the best things that ever happened to our affluent society was the introduction of cell phones and video games, low-energy forms of amusement that keep us occupied and keep us from using higher-energy things like cars.

But I’m afraid this is just another situation like that of asking a confirmed smoker to give up cigarettes, when that person would choose an earlier death over the deprivation of the source of nicotine. Most of us love our lifestyle far to much to think seriously about doing anything to protect the world for future generations.

I’m hopeful that Lovelock has depicted a world that is in worse shape than it actually is. Because if he is right, life as we know it will without a doubt exist only in history books.