Scientist says Mother Earth is Out to Kill Us

Earlier this week I chatted with Peter Ward, a paleontologist from the University of Washington, who studies climate changes past and present. The interview was based on his book Under a Green Sky, which I read, and which he says is his best book. Still, he said, he got more attention for another book, The Medea Hypothesis, which is kind of counterpoint to the Gaia idea that came out of the 1970s.

He said he never liked the so-called Gaia hypothesis, which, roughly, stated that the Earth acts like a giant organism. The idea is too new-age, he said, and naming our organism/planet after the nurturing mother-goddess is downright misleading.

The fossil record is rife with disasters, mass extinctions, and long eras when the living world acted suicidal. Periodically complex living things take a beating and are replaced by microbes. We live on Gaia's evil sister Medea – the sorceress known for killing her own children.

Medea Hypothesis is not as depressing as that idea that the mother Earth has cancer, which was popular in the 1990s. Scientists would show slides of Earth's surface, marred by development and sprawl, followed by close-ups of metastatic cancers. Then they'd point to the fact that both types of growth follow the same pattern.

What I didn't know when I talked to Dr. Ward was that Gaia would be catapulted into the news again with the death of famed biologist Lynn Margulis, who co-formulated the Gaia idea back in the 1970s, along with chemist James Lovelock.

I had met Lynn Margulis about 12 years ago in a meeting at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute. I regret I can't call her and ask for her current interpretation of Gaia, as there seem to be as many ways of looking at it as there are scientists. There's now a weak version and a strong version, and various flavors. Nobody seems to agree whether the earth-as-organism is to be taken literally or metaphorically.

One aspect of Gaia that's crucially important and backed by evidence is that life is not just a passenger on this planet. Living things are active participants, capable of causing massive changes in the oceans and atmosphere.

That can lead to all kinds of feedback loops. Sometimes the feedbacks are negative, keeping conditions stable, and sometimes they are positive, accelerating change. Sometimes the planet is nice and sometimes it's not.  On this Margulis and Ward are agreed.

Luckily, Lynn Margulis did leave behind some relatively recent writings on her version of Gaia. Here's what she has to say in The Edge:

It took me days of conversation even to begin to understand Lovelock's thinking. My first response, just like that of the neo-Darwinists, was "business as usual." I would say, "Oh, you mean that organisms adapt to their environment." He would respond, very sweetly, "No, I don't mean that." Lovelock kept telling me what he really meant, and it was hard for me to listen. Since his was a new idea, he hadn't yet developed an appropriate vocabulary. Perhaps I helped him work out his explanations, but I did very little else.

The Gaia hypothesis is a biological idea, but it's not human-centered. Those who want Gaia to be an Earth goddess for a cuddly, furry human environment find no solace in it. They tend to be critical or to misunderstand. They can buy into the theory only by misinterpreting it. Some critics are worried that the Gaia hypothesis says the environment will respond to any insults done to it and the natural systems will take care of the problems. This, they maintain, gives industries a license to pollute. Yes, Gaia will take care of itself; yes, environmental excesses will be ameliorated, but it's likely that such restoration of the environment will occur in a world devoid of people.

Lovelock would say that Earth is an organism. I disagree with this phraseology. No organism eats its own waste. I prefer to say that Earth is an ecosystem, one continuous enormous ecosystem composed of many component ecosystems. Lovelock's position is to let the people believe that Earth is an organism, because if they think it is just a pile of rocks they kick it, ignore it, and mistreat it. If they think Earth is an organism, they'll tend to treat it with respect. To me, this is a helpful cop-out, not science. Yet I do agree with Lovelock when he claims that most of the things scientists do are not science either. And I realize that by taking the stance he does he is more effective than I am in communicating Gaian ideas.

If science doesn't fit in with the cultural milieu, people dismiss science, they never reject their cultural milieu! If we are involved in science of which some aspects are not commensurate with the cultural milieu, then we are told that our science is flawed. I suspect that all people have cultural concepts into which science must fit. Although I try to recognize these biases in myself, I'm sure I cannot entirely avoid them. I try to focus on the direct observational aspects of science.

Gaia is a tough bitch — a system that has worked for over three billion years without people. This planet's surface and its atmosphere and environment will continue to evolve long after people and prejudice are gone.

That sounds a lot like Medea - different name, same bitch. And we're just the fleas.