Transition Culture

21 Jun 2006

Lovelock’s Folly - A Book Review by Albert Bates.

Albert Bates, still the presenter of the single most inspiring talk I ever attended (Findhorn 1995, GEN conference, for any speech nerds out there…), has written an excellent review of James Lovelock’s ‘Revenge of Gaia’. Having a background in permaculture, ecovillages and also in many years campaigning against nuclear power, he is in a unique position to deconstruct Lovelock’s thinking. His review is respectful where necessary, and shows a deep understanding of the subject matter. It is by far the best review of it I have so far read.

The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back — and How We Can Still Save Humanity
A Review by Albert Bates for The Permaculture Activist, Spring 2006

It is much too late for sustainable development; what we need is a sustainable retreat. – James Lovelock

James Lovelock turns 87 in 2006 and wants to take another turn around the book signing circuit before he bids adieu. After that he can leave his Devonshire cottage and go into the West as Middle Earth passes out of the age of elves and men.

Picture Lovelock, clad in sandwich board, standing on Hyde Park corner declaring that the end is nigh. Forecasting the future is not something many scientists attempt, and setting a firm date for say, a mass die-off of the human population, is hardly even scientific, but Lovelock does, and that date is 2056 to 2081 (in order to be witnessed by our children or grandchildren). The Revenge of Gaia is both a tour de force and a sad collection of the rantings of a crazy old man.

Too many variables stand between here and 2056 to make me comfortable with that prediction—the waning of 11, 80, and 200 year solar cycles, the slowing of the Atlantic conveyor, Peak Oil, and a plethora of permaculturists making soil and planting trees, to name a few.

At its low points, Lovelock‘s stridency in postulating arguments—on the side of fission, fusion and synthetic food, against organic farming, environmentalists, solar and wind energy—to his real and imagined critics, reveals a lack of deeply seated confidence in his own positions. By contrast, when he is in his element, he is a stolid font of higher wisdom and a gifted educator.

An example of the weaker Lovelock is his suggestion that wind power is impractical because it would take 39,900 three-mW turbines to power the UK (although Germany had 40,000 windmills in the 19th century); that so many windmills would change the climate (the wind dissipation is about 0.7% of the total actual dissipation caused by the land or water surface under the windmill); and that windmills kill birds (less, actually, than house cats, and only if poorly designed and operated).

The stronger, beatific Lovelock observes that the fact that animals dispose of excess nitrogen in a plant-available form as urine, rather than conserving water by exhaling it as nitrogen gas, cannot be explained by Darwinian evolution. Unless you tilt in the direction of intelligent design, you have to accept that we piss out our vital water and then have to go in search of more because Gaia prefers mammals to make the nitrogen available for plants, which in turn feed us and supply our oxygen. It’s symbiosis.

Lovelock is a master of the pithy analogy. Some examples:

We are now approaching one of these tipping points, and our future is like that of the passengers of a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagra Falls…

• • *

It is almost as if we had lit a fire to keep warm and failed to notice, as we piled on fuel, that the fire was out of control and the furniture had ignited.

• • *

We are like the smoker who enjoys a cigarette and imagines giving up smoking when the harm becomes tangible.

• • *

We are already farming more than the Earth can afford, and if we attempt to farm the whole Earth to feed people, even with organic farming, it would make us like sailors who burnt the timbers and rigging of their ship to keep warm.

• • *

We are like passengers on a large aircraft crossing the Atlantic Ocean who suddenly realize just how much carbon dioxide their plane was adding to the already overburdened air. It would hardly help if they asked the captain to turn off the engines and let the plane travel like a glider by wind power alone. We cannot turn off our energy-intensive fossil-fuel powered-civilization without crashing; we need the soft landing of a powered descent.

• • *

The humanist concept of sustainable development and the Christian concept of stewardship are flawed by unconscious hubris. We have neither the knowledge nor the capacity to achieve them. We are no more qualified to be the stewards or developers of the Earth than are goats to be gardeners.

• • *

We are like a careless and thoughtless family member whose presence is destructive and who seems to think that an apology is enough.

One of his few and well-chosen graphs takes a page of predictions from Stephen Schneider’s seminal 1989 book, Global Warming, and marks us somewhere between the middle and upper line of damage, or right on track to cross a point of irreversibility by the late 21st century.

Lovelock says that Gaia probably has at least two states of repose, one colder and one warmer. We have been in the colder realm for the past fifty-five million years and might have lingered in our cool world longer had we not broken into the storehouse where Gaia had been putting the excess carbon she had wrung from the air to keep the sky clean. The Eocene domain we are destined to revisit when we cross the magic point of a carbon-dominated atmosphere is much warmer than humans are accustomed to. For that matter, it is much warmer than trees are accustomed to. Lovelock says that in a 5-degree warmer world the Amazon rainforest, the Eastern boreal forests of North America, and the forests of Europe, Africa and Asia will be replaced with blowing dust.

If that were really true, we would expect to see wildfires in the Southeast and Southwest USA, claiming millions of acres. We would be seeing hurricanes of unprecedented strength, some coming in times of the year or visiting places they have never been seen before. There would be more frequent droughts, along with an increase of tornadoes and insects knocking down whole forests. Hmmm.

In certain ways the human world is re-enacting the tragedy of Napoleon’s advance on Moscow in 1812. … He was unaware that the forces of General Winter were siding with the Russians….

This profound alteration of the habitability of Earth leads Lovelock to conclude that we are at the end of any and all civilization. “We are in a fool’s climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.â€?

(See Right. The world as it looked 5 degrees cooler, how it looks today, and how it might look 5 degrees warmer (by mid-Century). The bands in the ocean show where the production of algae and plankton is greatest. Pale areas in continents are deserts).

Lovelock’s folly is his choice of nerdy solutions to guide us into “the soft landing of a powered descent.� Nuclear power first rears its ugly head at page 11 of the book and won’t let go of its readers, chapter after chapter thrashing us like a ragged doll in its drooling maw. Three salient quotes reveal his nuclear bias:

The preference of wildlife for nuclear waste sites suggests that the best sites for its disposal are the tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian against their destruction by hungry farmers and developers.

• • *

The nuclear waste buried in pits at the production sites is no threat to Gaia and dangerous only to those foolish enough to expose themselves to its radiation.

• • *

I have offered in public to accept all of the high-level waste produced in a year from a nuclear power station for deposit on my small plot of land; it would occupy a space about a cubic metre in size and fit safely in a concrete pit, and I would use the heat from its decaying radioactive elements to heat my home.

The first statement is very reckless, and shows that he does not fully appreciate the unseen genetic alterations going on in the gene pool of Gaia’s wildlife. The second statement refers only to buried wastes in pits, not to the bulkier tailings and high-level containerized wastes, but it is simply wrong to suggest there is some sort of consensual process, especially with regard to future generations downstream, to random compulsory genetic engineering.

The third statement employs age-old nuclear PR deceptions, which can scarcely be believed in 2006. Defining “high-level” down to a thimbleful of transuranics is like US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales and the Bush biscuit teams in Guantanamo and Uzbekistan defining “torture” to exclude anything involving mental processes. It is also doubtful that Lovelock’s backyard Sakcrete barbecue pit would withstand the temperature and not embrittle and crack, spilling its contents onto his patio with every rainfall.

The antinuclear movement has many bones to pick here. Economists would point to the serious lack of financial justification for nuclear energy, with subsidies today running to $42 per barrel oil equivalent, and huge, largely externalized costs to be borne essentially forever. Physicists point to the brittle engineering and human fallibility of operators. Security experts know that nuclear power and nuclear weapons are not separable, and that every reactor, every shipment, every waste repository, is a terrorist target. But pay attention here, Sir James, there is also a Gaian argument. It is one I raised before the US Supreme Court in 1979 in Honicker v. Hendrie.

In the natural environment, our species has always been enveloped in radiation: from our sun and moon; from distant stars and cosmic winds; and from elements distributed in the soil, rocks, and oceans of the Earth. All human populations pass through life exposed to some part of this radioactive environment. It is now estimated that up to half of all new cancers are caused by this “background” radiation, which had previously been thought harmless, or even beneficial. The small dose that we receive from natural background radiation, typically in combination with free radicals of oxygen, is a significant factor in the normal aging process, the process of the bodies of living organisms whereby abnormal cells gradually replace normal cells until a vital function is sufficiently impaired to result in death.

Before life could begin upon the Earth, it took millions of years for our planet to quench the radiation from its surface and to erect atmospheric barriers to radioactive bombardment from space. Yet background radiation has continued to play a vital role in our billion-year process of evolution. By continual death and replacement, and by continual minor mutations over many eons, the human species, as well as all other lifeforms, have developed into what they are today.

Very early in this evolutionary process, primary emphasis had to be given to the protection of our genetic code through the development of extremely efficient and sophisticated chemical repair mechanisms. Only in this way could the advancements of evolution be protected against the deteriorating effect of oxygen and natural radiation, and could the high stability of the human species over periods of millions of years be assured. For evolution to proceed, however, it was also necessary that a balance be struck between the ability of the human organism to repair itself and the need for continual death and replacement to evolve the species. This fine balance was made between the evolving human organism and the relatively constant natural background level of radiation over the course of millions of years, and is an extremely delicate one.

When a marauding high-energy particle rips a nucleoprotein out of a DNA sequence, the entire code is thrown askew unless and until fortuitous breaks occur elsewhere that restore the correct sequence. Radioactive bombardment endows biological molecules with such unstable properties that they can produce all kinds of energetic chemical reactions that would never have been possible before the exposure, multiplying the genetic damage in many invisible and enduring ways.

When a mutated gene is responsible for regulating normal cell growth, an uncontrolled proliferation of damaged cells, or cancer, can develop. When mutation occurs in the procreative cells or in the developing embryo, birth defects can result. When mutation occurs in the blood-forming tissue, impairment of the immune response system can result, and this can increase susceptibility to an entire spectrum of human disease as well as lowering resistance to a host of environmental insults.

Early studies of genetic mutation demonstrated that only one percent of the latent damage of exposure to radiation may appear in each generation. We will have to wait 100 generations of human population to experience the full genetic effects of the late 20th century’s nuclear dalliance, including Hiroshima, Nagasaki, the atmospheric tests, Chelyabinsk, Windscale, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and whatever comes next. In the past 50 years our species has doubled the planet’s natural background radiation.

Lovelock misses all this with his nuclear blinders firmly attached. He says we should be developing synfood brews from carbon, nitrogen and oxygen waste streams rather than wasting our time on organic farming, and power these synfood factories with first fission, then fusion. He gets livid at the mention of windmills, seeing them as a blight on the landscape, and pooh-poohs solar energy as impossibly inadequate to the needs of civilized peoples. He makes some interesting suggestions about sending mirror arrays towards the sun to partially block its light, and generating fog over the ocean to reflect light back into space, but this is all still tugging at Gaia’s elbow instead of going with her program.

What is our role, as humans, in Gaia, he asks himself repeatedly. He doesn’t really answer this directly, but he does give a clue when he describes the process by which humans excrete urine. Our service to Gaia is as providers for plants. Think of that the next time you stand in front of a urinal or squat over a toilet bowl. Walt Whitman drew the circle even wider in Leaves of Grass (1900):

Now I am terrified at the Earth! it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas’d corp ses,
It distils such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor, 45
It renews with such unwitting looks, its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

Albert Bates is director of the Ecovillage Training Center at the Farm in Summertown, Tennessee. His forthcoming book, The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times, will be out from New Society Publishers in September, 2006. In a previous incarnation as an environmental attorney, he argued nuclear power health issues before numerous federal courts. Honicker v. Hendrie, which challenged the constitutional authority of the United States to sacrifice future civilian lives to produce electricity, went four times to the US Supreme Court and is the subject of two books. Albert Bates also wrote an overview of the science of global warming in 1990, in Climate in Crisis: The Greenhouse Effect and What We Can Do.

References: Abdussamatov. H.I., “About the long-term coordinated variations of the activity, radius, total irradiance of the Sun and the Earth’s climate” in Multi-Wavelength Investigations of Solar Activity: Proceedings of the 223rd Symposium of the International Astronomical Union, Saint Petersburg, Russia June 14-19, 2004.
David W. Keith, D.W., et al, The influence of large-scale wind power on global climate, PNAS 101:46 November 16, 2004, posted at www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0406930101v1.pdf
Bates, A.K., The Karma of Kerma: Nuclear Wastes and Natural Rights, Journal of Environmental Law and Litigation 9:3, February, 1988, posted at www.thefarm.org/lifestyle/albertbates/akbp5.html