“Enjoy it while you can”: Lovelock

So we’re shifting gears in NW, saving Stewart Brand’s eco-pragmatism for later and turning today instead to James Lovelock’s dire forecast that it’s too late for us to save the planet. We shouldn’t end our course on that note, though we definitely need to consider it. Let’s consider it now.

Gaia and Whole Earth are expressions of the holistic, indigenous POV we’ve been encountering in the course so far with Wildcat, Eagle Man, Cajete and others. But I wonder if they’re not as uncomfortable as Brand and I with his idea that our jig is about up.

Supposedly,  the nonagenerian godfather of “Gaia” has lately moderated his pessimism a bit. But he told Bob Edwards that

it’s already far too late to stop global warming… we should be committing our resources to surviving in the new hotter world to come instead of trying to stop it.

And less than a year ago he was still sounding pretty fatalistic.

The Vanishing Face of Gaia is subtitled “A Final Warning,” but he says that wasn’t his first choice. He wanted it to read: “Enjoy It While You Can.” That’s generally good advice, especially in one’s 10th decade on the planet, but it’s a bit resigned. As a Jamesian I’m sure it would be better for us to believe that we still have a chance to swerve from the worst imaginable collision with consequences, if we’re prepared to act on that belief and Lovelock’s “warning.”

Lovelock’s “Gaia hypothesis” co-founder was Lynn Margulis, once married to Carl Sagan, with whom Lovelock worked at the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena. Carl would undoubtedly be delighted, and envious, to learn of Lovelock’s plans to travel into space (courtesy of Richard Branson) and see Mother Earth entire. He’s hoping to enjoy a transcendent moment while he can.

What most of us don’t get, he says, is our deeply transient nature as a transitional species on a planet we can never own or manage. We’re full of hubris about this.

Lovelock’s view, he concedes, is unpopular. Most climate scientists dispute his “procedure” but not the facts. What we must proceed to do immediately, he says, is get to higher ground and haul out the lifeboats. Our loving mother will kill us in an instant without batting an eyelash. So, climb on up. Or, if you’re already in one of the relatively few temperate or high-altitude, high-latitude places, close the gate.

Bucky Fuller notwithstanding, Earth is not our spaceship but more the incubator of our successors. Is that hopeful enough for you? For us? Well, it’s apparently more hopeful than the green dream of safe and renewable energy for the 7th generation.

Near the end of this clip he explains how he thinks Richard Dawkins and other critics have misunderstood his Gaia thesis. (“Gaia is a tough bitch,” indeed.) Then he says: “I speak for Gaia much more than I speak for people.” Hmmm.

[“Daisy World and Nuclear Energy: Two Sides of Gaia“]

Tags: Carl Sagan, Gaia Hypothesis, James Lovelock, Lynn Margulis, Richard Branson, Richard Dawkins