Conservatives are Nature-Worshippers

This essay is a follow-up to the one on June 17.

Environmentalists are sometimes accused of being Earth-worshippers. I have heard this excuse more times than I can remember from the religious right. And it doesn’t help when scientists like James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis (and myself, in my forthcoming book Life of Earth) refer to the Earth as Gaia.

But these scientists are using Gaia as just a metaphor for the living systems of the Earth. They do not believe the Earth is really a goddess or even an organism (I got this straight from Margulis). In fact, these and all other scientists are only too aware that the Earth is not godlike in its invincibility. The Earth is quite resilient—it has many processes that allow its habitats to recover from damage and disturbance, to maintain a balance of temperatures and atmospheric carbon. But it has its limits. It was in fact Lovelock himself who wrote a book about The Revenge of Gaia. The Earth can be pushed past the tipping point into disaster. Or what at least we consider disaster. Maybe bacteria, which were the only life forms on Earth for over two billion years, would not consider it a disaster. The Earth has its limits because it is not a goddess.

It is the political right that worships the Earth. They think that the Earth can recuperate from any abuse that we lay upon it. The right-wing co2science.org website says that we can pour as much carbon as we like into the air and plants will clean it up. Fred Singer, a famous anti-environmentalist, says that global warming will cause lots of new biodiversity. Conservative economists like the late Julian Simon think that the economy will create new resources whenever they are needed. They are worshipping a godlike, indestructible Earth goddess who leads our economy with what Adam Smith called (figuratively; but to some today, literally) the Invisible Hand.

This essay also appeared on my website in 2008.

Gaia

In 1978, James Lovelock, an independent British inventor of scientific equipment, proposed that the Earth was a unified living system, which he called Gaia. The Earth did not just have organisms living upon it, but could be thought of as an organism in its own right. It had physiological processes that regulated its internal conditions, just as an organism does. One of the first biologists to join him in this viewpoint was Lynn Margulis, who was famous for having figured out that complex cells evolved from the merger of simpler cells. Simple cells merged together to form complex cells, and complex organisms form complex ecosystems, which form the entire Earth. It is not just cells that are alive, but life exists on all these different levels.

Some animals (the homeotherms, such as humans) can regulate body temperature. Some scientists, following the lead of Lovelock and Margulis, claim that the Earth can do this also. Five billion years ago, the Sun produced less light, but the Earth was even warmer than it is today because there was a lot of carbon dioxide in the air, causing a greenhouse effect. As the Sun grew brighter, green cells in the oceans of the Earth removed carbon dioxide from the air (through photosynthesis), reducing the greenhouse effect, and keeping Earth’s temperature about the same as (even a little bit cooler than) it was before. This is one example of Earth having a type of homeostasis, or physiological regulation. Some scientists even use the term geophysiology for such processes. (Photosynthesis cannot rescue us from the greenhouse effect now occurring, simply because it is occurring too fast.)

This does not mean that the Earth has intelligence. All it needs is negative feedback processes. If the atmosphere has too much carbon dioxide, plant cells will remove it, and if it does not have enough carbon dioxide, decomposition will produce it. No intelligence required. Of course, intelligence is not needed for most processes within animal or plant physiology. Trees losing their leaves in autumn is a physiological process involving the length of the night and a pigment called phytochrome and a shift in hormone production, all of it accomplished without brains.

The Gaia viewpoint continues to reside on the fringes of scientific thought, often because scientists take it too literally. Some dismiss it because they think Lovelock and Margulis literally believe the Earth to be a goddess, when in reality they use Gaia as a metaphor. But every year more scientists accept some version of the Gaia concept, once they realize that it is a system of negative feedback processes rather than a goddess. It may have been unfortunate for Lovelock to have chosen the name Gaia; then again, who would have noticed the concept if he had written about the Earth as an integrated set of negative feedback processes?

So, if I were a scientist with a reputation for big-time highly-funded research, I might hesitate to use the word Gaia in public. But since I am a science educator and writer (and I do research also, on the cheap) who wants to get people to grasp the major concepts of the way the world works, I decided to go ahead and throw my hat in the ring with the Gaia theorists. Once my book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World comes out later in 2010, there will be no turning back. I had to write the book in a hurry, without sitting around and wondering about my reputation. Too late now; the book is in production. But I don’t think I am going to regret my decision.

A version of this essay has also appeared on my website.