If temperatures increase out of control, James Lovelock suggests that the few surviving humans may end up travelling through wastelands by camel, searching for the last remaining green areas at the north pole.

(Published in The Gananoque Reporter)

by Cameron Smith

 Last week Frank Kinsella, mayor of the township where I live in the Thousand Islands, wrote a guest editorial in The Gananoque Reporter describing his delight in discovering the Gaia hypothesis. It maintains that the Earth is a self-regulating system which will strive to keep conditions as favourable as possible for whatever is living on its surface. Although the theory has attracted heated debate within the scientific community, it has steadily gained support, and has profoundly advanced acceptance for thinking holistically, by which I mean trying, in everything we do, not to break strands in the spider web of connections that links all things.

Mr. Kinsella urges readers to embrace the Gaia hypothesis, which is named after the ancient goddess of Earth, born out of Chaos. “We need to renew ... love and empathy for nature,” he says, and I couldn’t agree with him more.

But, at the same time, it is necessary to read deeper into what James Lovelock has written in The Revenge of Gaia, published in 2006, twenty-seven years after the hypothesis was first published.

In the Revenge, he says that”(W)e are now so abusing the Earth that it may rise and move back to the hot state it was in 55 million years ago, and if it does, most of us, and our descendants, will die.”

He’s not the only one to be saying this. James Hansen, chief climate scientist for NASA  says that if we don’t take enormous strides to reduce emissions that contribute to global warming, temperatures will rise beyond the point that we can stop them. If this happens, most of the world will be turned into deserts and scrubland, almost all people will die, and the only habitable areas left will be small patches of green and the north and south poles.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change agrees. The IPCC, a collection of 2,000 of the world’s top scientists, warned in its last report published in November 2007 that the the world is on track to reach this point of no return. Rajendra Pachauri, the chair of the panel said, “What we do in the next two or three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

Since then we have seen precious few government initiatives that will divert us from this path.

What all this means is that yes, self-regulating Earth will adjust to provide the best that it can for whatever is able to live on its surface. If we make the surface uninhabitable for humanity, as we seem intent on doing by adding to global warming, Earth will continue. It will support what replaces us.

As Lovelock says in Revenge, “(W)e are at the end of our tether, and the rope, whose weave defines our fate, is about to break.”

So, we need to do more than simply love nature. In his guest editorial, Kinsella rightly pointed out that Lovelock says renewable energy and sustainable development are not going to save us. The job is simply too big. But Kinsella used this in a sad attempt to try and diminish the efforts of those he called naïve greens to promote renewable energy.

I don’t know of any environmentalist who thinks that renewable energy will save the world. But in conjunction with other measures, it certainly can help.

Kinsella should have read deeper into Gaia's Revenge. Lovelock says we need sustainable retreat instead of sustainable development. We need to get rid of the notion that growth can continue forever. This is a concept that should interest any politican, municipal or otherwise.

I’m sure, if we were to ask him, Lovelock would say say the world is lucky that it’s in such a deep recession. As a result, factories have cut back production, transportation has been drastically reduced, air flights have shrunk, economic activity, as a whole, has tanked, and all this has dramatically reduced greenhouse gas emissions. We have been granted a short reprieve.

But what are we doing? The global community is spending trillions of dollars to bring back the unsustainable growth that got us into this climate mess in the first place. Reckless consumption has been our problem. We should be searching for ways to maintain quality of life, not to boost consumerism back to where it was.

So what can we do individually and locally? Well, as a first step I suggest looking at a lovely little video called The Story of Stuff that you can find at www.storyofstuff.com. Then start thinking about how to live more simply, and reduce what you used to think you needed. Start planning a sustainable retreat from too much stuff.