Gaia and Unsustainability
The big question now is: If the Earth created life, and Gaia is a stable chemical reaction, and we are a part of Gaia, but we are destabilizing the chemical reaction, what are we?
Quite simply, when humans evolved intellect, Gaia developed cancer.
If we don’t cure her, she’s going to cure herself. She’s just now starting her cancer treatment program.
People talk a lot about destroying the global environment, and I talk about it too. That’s another humanocentric abstraction, but I use it because the alternative is irrelevant to us. No matter what we do, the Earth will always have an environment. Venus has a global environment. So does Mars. It’s not a question of whether or not the environment will continue to exist. It’s a question of whether or not the environment will continue to support us.
There are many different degrees of destroying the environment. We probably aren’t even capable of eradicating all life on Earth with an all-out nuclear war. As long as some bacteria survive buried in the mud at the bottom of the ocean, the living environment will survive. It was bacteria like that that created the environment we have now.
Dr. Lovelock is fairly optimistic about humanity’s ability to survive the environmental crisis. But when you’re talking about the survival versus extinction of a species, you’re talking about enough members of the species surviving to be able to maintain a healthy gene pool. Before we destroy the environment to the point that humanity becomes extinct, it’s virtually guaranteed that the environmental crisis will destroy our ability to destroy the environment any further. A few thousand people are bound to survive, somewhere in the world. Maybe even a few million. If only one out of every million people survived the environmental crisis, and built a few small villages where they farmed bananas and coconuts on the tropical beaches of northern Alaska, our species would still survive. Gaia’s cancer would be in remission. She would be left severely weakened by it, but she could recover in a few hundred thousand years.
This gives whole new meaning to the saying, “Stop, or be stopped.”









