Getting beyond greed
Gaia theory offers a more cooperative way to think about our existence
We need a gentler worldview.
Our current worldview has proven dangerous. It condones leaders who use the concept of “survival of the fittest” to idolize cut-throat competition with rivals, and mistreatment of the masses. These billionaires are eager to count our nation’s gold while they boot dedicated federal workers off into unemployment. They’d rather see wheat rot than shared, via USAID, with the world’s children.
We need a worldview emphasizing not competition, but cooperation.
Gaia: a cooperative worldview
Earth as a living organism dubbed Gaia—it’s a mind-opening concept. Accepting this theory almost by definition requires a shift in worldview.
Gaia theory puts cooperation at the heart of planetary survival. It says various life forms on our planet cooperate to keep conditions suitable for life to exist. How elegant.
It makes sense that the late American microbiologist Lynn Margulis would join forces with Gaia theory originator James Lovelock to develop this theory. Years before she attended a talk by Lovelock on this hypothesis in the early 1970s, Margulis recognized that different organisms combined to form cells, in both plants and animal.
Thanks to our cells, we are living, breathing examples of cooperation.
And the cooperation extends beyond the boundaries of our skin.
Take our breathing, for example. Plants support us by releasing oxygen. And we return the favor by exhaling carbon dioxide—the very gas plants require to build their tissues.
Most of our solid and liquid wastes also serve as nutrients for plants, when disposed of in a way that suits nature. We recognize horse and cow manure as powerful fertilizers for plants, but even composted or otherwise treated human sewage can serve this function. And urine contains urea, another plant fertilizer.
Carbon dioxide also fertilizes plants. That’s one of the ways our planet moderates climate, in fact—plants take up more carbon dioxide when there’s more of it in the air.
Gas-guzzling Gaia?
The concept that various life forms on Earth, a.k.a. Gaia, work together to help keep planetary temperature and other conditions suitable for life’s overall existence offers a different view of our world than seeing it as a dead rock where nature is red in tooth and claw, competing for the last scrap of food.
Some scientists and activists, though, worry viewing our planet as a somewhat self-regulating system serves those who deny climate change. They argue it allows those who profit from continued oil and gas use to leave it to Gaia to clean up the mess.
A historian of science and the environment recently found ties between James Lovelock and the oil and gas industry. In “Gas-Guzzling Gaia, or: A Prehistory of Climate Change Denialism,” published in Critical Inquiry, author Leah Aronowsky points out that some of Lovelock’s 1960s research into how algae might help moderate temperature received funding from Royal Dutch Shell.
Aronowsky doesn’t accuse him of changing his views to suit Shell. But she does argue that his work opened the door for oil companies to downplay pollution. For instance, she notes, ExxonMobil alluded to Gaia theory in a 1995 advertisement claiming, “The environment recovers well from both natural and man-made disasters. . . . Our main point is that nature, over the millennia, has learned to cope.”
Lovelock later “retreated from his contention that the climate will restore itself in the face of anthropogenic pollutants,” she stated in the 2021 article, the year before he died at 103. In fact, “He construes climate change as evidence that Gaia is moving ‘irreversibly to a new hot state,’ one that will no longer be hospitable to human life.”
Visionary or vision impaired?
While I can acknowledge that nobody’s perfect and welcome his retreat from the oil industry, Lovelock’s full swing into doomsday mode speaks to the gripe I had with him. It was frustrating to watch someone whose work shaped my own throw up his hands in defeat about life’s role on a warming planet. It was as if he abandoned his own theory.
Yet his abandonment appears related to faulty information.
As I described years ago in an online Scientific American piece, Lovelock published self-described “imaginary sketches” in his 2006 book Revenge of Gaia. These sketches had no basis in reality. As I explained:
In his imagination, forests virtually covered the continents of the ice-age Earth, while only a few specks of forests remained near the poles in his rendition of a hothouse Earth.
In fact, the opposite situation is closer to the truth, based on evidence from fossils, sediments, peats and coals, and anything else that survived time’s passage. In the distant past, albeit in the absence of widespread human civilization, forests generally expanded during hothouse periods and shrank during ice ages.
Heat-trapping gases, whether released from modern factories or ancient volcanoes, have specific effects on the planet. When abundant, they make the Earth more humid as well as hotter.
While not necessarily comfortable for many humans, these conditions and the higher carbon dioxide levels that come with warmer climates boost plant growth and expand forests. I go into more detail about this in my book, Life in the Hothouse: How a Living Planet Survives Climate Change, and summarize some aspects here.
I spent many years working on my Ph.D. exploring this, including by taking graduate courses with University of Arizona paleoclimatologist Judith Totman Parrish. Her work revealed fossil forests of dawn redwood in both the Arctic and Antarctic from the toasty mid-Cretaceous about 100 million years ago.
Yet forest cover generally continued in the tropics and temperate zone.
Scott Wing, a longtime curator for the Smithsonian who led expeditions to collect fossils from the Cretaceous, Eocene, and other hothouse climates, talked with me about this while I was researching my book. His work suggested widespread humidity during hothouse climates supported a variety of plants around the globe.
“I think that if there were really widespread dry conditions, we probably would have evidence for them,” Wing said.
For instance, in deserts such as the one where I live, soils typically contain a layer of concrete-like caliche formed from seasonal drying. There are few signs of these so-called evaporite formations during ancient hothouses.
“For most places we have records, there seem to be coals and other records that suggest relatively humid conditions,” Wing said.
These include Cretaceous coals in the Four Corners area. The deep coal deposits speak to the productivity of wetland forests where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado now meet.
Similar episodes of massive coal production from other hothouses indicate nature was working hard to pull heat-trapping carbon dioxide down into trees, soils, and then coal. There, the condensed carbon could remain trapped indefinitely—or at least until unearthed by a certain industrial biped to power trains, heaters and factories.
Forests in a Gaian worldview
If we stick with facts while imagining our planet as a living system with some power to regulate conditions to support life over the long term, we can recognize those past expansions of forests and wetlands as a prescription for adapting to our modern warming climate.
Instead, we continue to cut them down. Not very cooperative of us.
Perhaps our forests would have more hope of surviving—because it’s the ongoing human onslaught killing them rather than climate change, for the most part—if we adopted an Earth-centered worldview.
Our cultural worldview changed when we realized the sun rather than the Earth was the center of our solar system. It changed again with quantum mechanics’ recognition that light exists as both a particle and a wave.
Now it needs to change again.
Cooperation exists everywhere we look: in our own bodies, in plant and animal cells, in planetary bodies.
Reaching the conclusion that life thrives because of cooperation doesn’t depend on where you look—just what you choose to see.