6: The Gaia Theory
The other major breakthrough in the chemistry/biology problem was the Gaia Theory, which was discovered by James Lovelock.
Several books are available about the Gaia Theory. Dr. Lovelock’s first was called simply Gaia. His most recent is called The Revenge of Gaia. Somewhere in the middle, he collaborated with a lot of other scientists from around the world to write Gaia—The Atlas of Planetary Management. The original Gaia is a good introduction to the idea, but all the main points of that book are covered and built upon in The Revenge of Gaia. Gaia—The Atlas of Planet Management is a high school level reference book, or maybe even junior high school level book, with big colorful illustrations on every page that shows how the Gaia Theory works and how you can see it happening all around us.
Ironically, Dr. Dawkins and Dr. Lovelock disagreed with each other on a lot of things, because they were studying biology at two different levels, using two different approaches, so it wasn’t always obvious that the two fit together. Sometimes it looked like they disagreed with each other, even though they were talking about the same things using two different vocabularies. But having told you how Dr. Dawkins discovered his Selfish Gene Theory, it’s easier to build up from there to Dr. Lovelock’s Gaia Theory, instead of using Dr. Lovelock’s explanation.
Just like all the genes that create an individual person have settled into a stable chemical reaction by all working together, all the genes in an environment have settled into a much bigger stable reaction. That’s why environments survive for thousands of years, even though individual organisms come and go. But that’s just the beginning…
When we talk about local environments, that’s really just a human convention that makes the idea easier to think about, and it works pretty well most of the time. Every “local” environment overlaps with all the other “local” environments around it, so there really is no such thing as a local environment. If you want to talk about all the genes in an environment settling into a really big stable chemical reaction, you have to talk about the environment of the entire Earth.
Dr. Lovelock was involved in the early NASA program for planning how to search for life on Mars. Landing one or two probes on the surface of the planet to look around with cameras wasn’t good enough, because if they landed in the Martian equivalent of the Sahara desert, they wouldn’t see anything and would report there was no life on the planet. But that wouldn’t prove anything.
Dr. Lovelock worked on a team of scientists and engineers who developed a mobile chemistry lab for the probes that could sample the atmosphere. The idea was that if there were plants, or animals, or anything similar, on Mars, they would be breathing in and out. More specifically, they would need a constant supply of some chemical, and the chemical reaction they used to supply themselves with that chemical would create a waste product. The atmosphere would bring them a constant supply of one chemical, and carry away the waste product of that chemical reaction—which is exactly what the atmosphere here on Earth does when we breathe in oxygen and breathe out carbon dioxide.
That meant the scientists could use what they knew about the chemical composition of the planet to see how those chemicals should react with each other and what kinds of gasses would be produced as a result. If the atmospheric sample showed an atmospheric makeup that was a lot different from that, it would mean that something must be breathing in and out, somewhere on the planet, extracting some chemical from the atmosphere, and replacing it with something else.
Dr. Lovelock’s job for NASA was helping to design parts of the chemical laboratory, which wasn’t very interesting, so he wasn’t there long. But after he left, he got curious and started carrying out the experiment here on Earth.
To that point, scientists had always assumed that the atmosphere here on Earth had always been pretty much like it is now, and had only changed a little by the evolution of life. But when Dr. Lovelock ran the experiment, the atmosphere that the geochemistry of the Earth indicated was nowhere close to what we have. Likewise, the salt content of the oceans is all wrong. If we had the atmosphere and the ocean salinity that our planetary geochemistry would create, just about everything on Earth would die.
This meant that our entire planetary environment is maintained by the environment itself. Life on Earth depends on life on Earth. Back when life first evolved, we had the original geochemical atmosphere and ocean salinity, and whatever those original self-replicating molecules were, that’s the environment they evolved in and lived in. But over the course of about a billion and a half years, their waste products changed the environment gradually to what we have now. Then new organisms evolved to live in that environment.
Now we have a global environment that’s so highly evolved that every single thing on Earth is used by something. Something depends on every single thing on Earth for its livelihood. That includes every single thing that’s given off as a waste product by something else. That means that just about anything people do to the environment makes it stop working as well as it did before.
If you extract something from the environment, you throw off some chemical reaction of the environment. That throws off more chemical reactions of the environment. If you extract a lot of one species of an animal from a food cycle, whatever that animal ate goes through a population explosion, and whatever ate that animal goes through a population crash, because they starve to death. The environment is usually more robust than that, but you do push it in the direction of that happening. If you do it enough times, that will happen.
When Dr. Lovelock realized what he discovered, he realized he’d better find a way to report it that lots of people could understand, not just scientists. So he named it after an ancient Greek goddess of the Earth and called it the Gaia Hypothesis, to make the idea understandable to as many people as possible.
Unfortunately, a lot of ivory tower academic scientists spent the next 20 years kicking and screaming about him trying to name a scientific hypothesis after a Greek goddess. By the time other scientists had studied his work enough to see he was right and upgraded it to the Gaia Theory, it was too late for them to put it to use in solving the problems he’d been trying to warn everyone about.
Basically, we wasted a generation.
For 10,000 years we’ve been waging war against the environment that we depend on to keep ourselves alive, without realizing it. The Earth was patient with us for as long as it could be, but we never learned our lesson on our own, and we kept waging war against the environment harder and harder. Now the Earth is fighting back. New Orleans was just the beginning. When terrorists want to fight Americans, they destroy a few buildings (or so the story goes, anyway). When the Earth wants to wage war against humanity, it destroys entire cities.
Now you can see why I’m not wasting my time trying to write books academic snobs can understand. Instead, I’ll make things really easy for them. If they want observable evidence so badly and aren’t willing to lift a finger to go look around for themselves, they’re welcome to study the observable evidence of why the anti-Capitalist revolutionaries suddenly start winning.
Currently, most of the environmental movement is a joke. It’s either an emotional defense mechanism used by people who want to feel like they’re saving the environment even though they’re not really, or it’s a PR campaign to help Capitalists make more money to invest in extracting more resources from the environment.
Basically, if we were doing enough to save the global environment, everyone in the world would belong to Earth First!. Unfortunately, a lot of what Earth First!ers are doing isn’t even going to work.
First of all, we need our current technological level to build down to an environmentally sustainable relationship between humanity and the global environment. What we need is a different economic system.
If we shifted to a worldwide, localized organic agricultural economy immediately, we’d still kill ourselves. Right now, humans don’t know enough about organic agriculture to produce as much food per acre of land as we can by industrialized agriculture. Some people probably know how to do that, but collectively we don’t. The only way we could produce enough food to feed everyone in the world with crude organic agriculture would be to cut down a lot more wilderness and turn it into farmland. And right now, we need all the wilderness we have to keep the environment working—because it’s our planetary life support system.
(Granted, Dr. Lovelock is no expert at anti-Capitalism, so the redistribution of food would probably go a lot further than he realizes. But he wrote his book with the assumption that people were going to try to keep the economic and political systems we have right now—which they are, unless we stop them.)
Alternative fuels won’t save us, because we can’t produce enough of them to power our technological level. The big fake-environmental PR campaign has a lot to do with this. The majority of Americans, and people worldwide, now live in urban areas. That means that the majority of our species has no meaningful contact with the natural environment. That means that when politicians promise to use alternative energy to solve the environmental crisis, most city people have no idea what they’re talking about, and vote for anything they feel will help the environment, instead of anything that actually will help the environment.
So Capitalists go cutting down forests to build solar power stations that only work on sunny days, and they still keep the fossil-fuel plants burning constantly, to bring online whenever the solar power stations stop producing electricity. The Capitalists make money by selling people the feeling of helping the environment, even though they just sacrificed a whole forest just to save a fraction of the oil the fossil fuel plant was using, by letting it idle some of the time instead of turning its generators all the time.
So here’s something else progressive activists always hate to hear about: Our global economy has run down such a dead end that nuclear energy might be our only way out.
Fossil fuels and nuclear energy are the only two energy sources on Earth that can power our technological level. There’s one crucial difference between them: We are about to kill ourselves with fossil fuels, and we’re not about to kill ourselves with nuclear energy. We have stretched the global environment’s ability to absorb the pollution from fossil fuels, to its breaking point. We haven’t done that with nuclear energy.
Most of what anti-nuclear activists have said about the nuclear waste generated by reactors is propaganda. When the anti-nuke movement began in the 1970s, a bunch of activists were trying to prevent a nuclear war. As long as they made it political and economic suicide for politicians and business people to try to use nuclear energy for anything, the activists could kill the threat of nuclear war at its source. It was a crude strategy, but effective.
Nuclear power is the most environmentally destructive energy source ever harnessed by humankind, because it requires the most steps to extract the energy, compared to any other energy source, and each of those steps requires energy. You can’t talk about the energy efficiency of nuclear energy just by talking about the energy it takes to mine the uranium, process it, and dispose of it afterwards. If you want to talk about energy efficiency, you also have to talk about the energy it’s going to take to build the nuclear power plants, to build all the machinery that’s going to be used in those plants, to train the workers who are going to work in the plants, to build the universities the plant engineers are going to trained in, etc., etc.. But the thing is, we’ve already paid a lot of those environmental costs. We have the nuclear plants, we have the machinery, we have the universities, and so on.
Nuclear energy won’t let us carry on our technological level forever, because that’s a non-renewable resource too. Dr. Lovelock is probably the greatest environmental scientist in the world, but when it comes to human behavior he’s no expert. Despite what he says, we’re probably better off with the anti-nuke movement we’ve had. If we had used fossil fuels and nuclear energy side by side, we would’ve used up our environmental absorption capacity on both of them at the same time. We wouldn’t be suffering from the greenhouse effect yet, but we wouldn’t be trying to solve it yet either, because we wouldn’t’ve noticed it yet. When it finally did become a problem and we finally did start trying to fix it, we would have a lot less environmental absorption capacity for nuclear energy left to use. Then we might not have any escape route left at all.
What we have instead is a need for a new energy source, a good environmental safety margin for using it, and a public who hates the idea of having to use it. If the public agrees to use more nuclear energy to escape the greenhouse effect, it wouldn’t be too difficult for anti-nuke activists to keep the pressure on the Capitalists to limit the use of nuclear energy to power our economic build-down to environmental sustainability. A lot of Capitalists are trying to get us to write them a blank check on how much nuclear energy they should be allowed to use. So the anti-nuke movement wasn’t completely misguided, just premature. Even if everything they said wasn’t literally true before, they’ve prepared the public ahead of time for a problem that’s inevitable.
Just because Dr. Lovelock knew that a lot of people wouldn’t believe him that nuclear energy isn’t nearly as bad as everyone believes, he’s made a standing offer, in writing, in his latest book, The Revenge of Gaia, to dispose of a year’s supply of nuclear waste from any medium-size reactor literally in his own back yard—if not under his own house. He said the waste would consist of a one-meter cubic block of concrete. He said he would bury it and could use the heat it gave off to help heat his house. (I’m guessing he was talking about setting a water tank on top of it and using hot water radiators or baseboards or something, but he didn’t specify.)
Or if you would prefer this experiment, you could go to Hiroshima, which today is a city of over 1 million people, and ask them how bad the nuclear radiation is there. Nagasaki is a city of 400,000 people today.
A lot of other environmental scientists are saying that the greenhouse effect and the energy crisis could be solved by using technology that exists now to improve energy efficiency in every part of manufacturing, use, and disposal (which would now be recycling) of everything we make now. Dr. Lovelock was talking about how we could use the energy and resources we have in the world now with the political and economic systems we have now. Another way to look at the problem, which a lot of scientists use, is to see what we could do with the energy and resources we have now and ignore man-made political and economic systems—which is the same as assuming that our political and economic systems could be made to work in a way that would make those uses of energy and resources possible. That says nothing in favor of, or against, keeping the political and economic systems we have now.
Personally, I think we’d be better off using the energy efficiency solution and doing whatever was necessary to put the optimal political and economic system in place to make it work. We aren’t anti-Capitalist revolutionaries for nothing, are we? If we simply switch from fossil fuel over to nuke power, we won’t be solving the real problem, because we still won’t have a political or economic system that can solve the environmental crisis. Solving the environmental crisis and keeping it solved is going to depend on social evolution, not on different technology to use in making the same mistakes we’ve been making all along. Humanity inventing a lot of new technology and continuing to act like animals just keep making all our problems worse, because people keep making bigger and bigger versions of the same mistakes.
I think the best consensus I can draw here is that we can’t rule out the use of more nuclear power as an option, simply because we might not have any other viable options. There are other solutions, but any of them will take a lot more development to make them work. Nuclear power is a non-renewable resource so it isn’t a long-term solution, but we will probably need to use it temporarily to buy the time we need to develop sustainable alternatives—both technological and social. But if we write the Capitalists a blank check for using more nuclear energy, in a hundred more years from now or whenever, our descendants are going to be faced with another energy and environmental crisis, and they won’t have anything left they can burn to power their technological level while they build down to a sustainable relationship with the environment.