Gaia in turmoil : climate change, biodepletion, and earth ethics in an age of crisis

390 Pages·2010·1.91 MB·English

by  Eileen Crist

Gaia in Turmoil

Gaia in Turmoil
Climate Change, Biodepletion, and Earth Ethics in
an Age of Crisis
edited by Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinker
foreword by Bill McKibben
The MIT Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts
London, England
© 2010 Massachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any
electronic or mechanical means (including photocopying, recording, or informa-
tion storage and retrieval) without permission in writing from the publisher.
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Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gaia in turmoil: climate change, biodepletion, and earth ethics in an age of crisis
/ edited by Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinker; foreword by Bill McKibben.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-262-03375-6 (hardcover : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-262-51352-4
(pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Gaia hypothesis. 2. Climatic changes–Environmental
aspects. 3. Environmental ethics. I. Crist, Eileen, 1961– II. Rinker, H.
Bruce.
QH331.G224 2010
577-dc22
2009007502
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
We dedicate this collection
to Rob Patzig
and to the next generation of Earth stewards,
especially
Jordan Chase Littrell and
Hunter Marshall Littrell

Contents
Foreword by Bill McKibben ix
Preface xi
Acknowledgments xvii
I Introductory Essays 1
1 One Grand Organic Whole 3
Eileen Crist and H. Bruce Rinker
2 Our Sustainable Retreat 21
James Lovelock
II The Science of Gaia 25
3 How the Biosphere Works 27
Tyler Volk
4 Water Gaia: 3.5 Thousand Million Years of Wetness on Planet
Earth 41
Stephan Harding and Lynn Margulis
5 Gaia and Evolution 61
Timothy M. Lenton and Hywel T. P. Williams
6 Forest Systems and Gaia Theory 85
H. Bruce Rinker
III Imperiled Biosphere 105
7 Gaia and Biodiversity 107
Stephan Harding
8 Global Warming, Rapid Climate Change, and Renewable Energy
Solutions for Gaia 125
Donald W. Aitken
viii Contents
9 Gaia’s Freshwater: An Oncoming Crisis 151
Barbara Harwood
10 Deep Time Lags: Lessons from Pleistocene Ecology 165
Connie Barlow
IV Gaian Ethics and Education 175
11 From the Land Ethic to the Earth Ethic: Aldo Leopold and the
Gaia Hypothesis 177
J. Baird Callicott
12 Principles of Gaian Governance: A Rough Sketch 195
Karen Litfi n
13 In the Depths of a Breathing Planet: Gaia and the Transformation
of Experience 221
David Abram
14 Sustainability and an Earth Operating System for Gaia 243
Tim Foresman
15 The Gaian Generation: A New Approach to Environmental
Learning 255
Mitchell Thomashow
16 Gaia Theory: Model and Metaphor for the Twenty-fi rst
Century 275
Martin Ogle
17 Neocybernetics of Gaia: The Emergence of Second-Order Gaia
Theory 293
Bruce Clarke
18 Intimations of Gaia 315
Eileen Crist
V Afterword 335
19 Gaia Going Forward 337
Eugene Linden
About the Contributors 343
Index 347
Foreword
Bill McKibben
To say that this book is timely would be an understatement. It literally
couldn’t be more of the moment, more crucial, more necessary.
The Gaian idea—or really, the very framework of the Gaian idea, the
notion that we could think about the planet as a functional unit—seemed
largely abstract until the question of global warming emerged in the late
1980s. With it came the thought that we might have introduced a real
disequilibrium into the system whose remarkable stability for the dura-
tion of human civilization had masked the very existence of the Earth
system. But even global warming seemed a little abstract, hard for most
to picture, until the fall of 2007 when satellite pictures started appearing
of the rapid melt of sea ice in the Arctic. All of a sudden we could see
in virtually real time something that looked an awful lot like the experi-
ments fi rst modeled in Daisyworld. The ice began to melt; as it disap-
peared, and albedo shifted, the melt seemed to accelerate. By the end of
September, the New York Times was describing scientists as “shaken”
by the pace. Instead of the long, slow problem many had imagined
climate change to be, we seemed to be staring at a dynamic system bent
on fl ipping into some new state. In early December, America’s foremost
climatologist, NASA’s James Hansen, gave a paper at the annual meeting
of the American Geophysical Union laying out the latest Arctic data, and
the most recent paleoclimatic interpretations: only if we somehow got
back beneath 350 parts per million CO in the atmosphere was there
2
some hope of avoiding massive tipping points—a process that would
require leaving most of the carbon still underground safely in place.
Which would require, in turn, massive changes in human desire and
appetite, in societal trajectory and organization. This was, at least in the
loose sense, a Gaian diagnosis.