The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning by James Lovelock

And the end of all our exploring," wrote TS Eliot in Little Gidding, the last of the Four Quartets, "[w]ill be to arrive where we started/And know the place for the first time." So it was with the Apollo Moon Landings, man's farthest jaunt and the puffed-up apotheosis of human exploration. The true reward wasn't found on the Moon itself, a frozen waste of pumice stone you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy, but in the vision of another, stranger planet altogether. "Suddenly," as the astronaut Edgar Mitchell described it, "from behind the rim of the Moon & there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky-blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery.

It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth & home." Accounts such as these, together with the sublime photographs of "spaceship Earth" taken by the astronauts, entered deeply into the popular imagination. It is no coincidence that what is now known as Gaia theory — which sees our planet as a single, unified entity that regulates its temperature and chemical composition in much the same way as living organisms — began to take shape at the same time. As John and Mary Gribbin demonstrate in He Knew He Was Right: The Irrepressible Life of James Lovelock and Gaia, Lovelock was not the only scientist thinking along these lines in the early 1970s. The physician Lewis Thomas, for example, wrote of the Earth seen from space as having "the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvellously skilled in handling the sun".

But it was Lovelock who came up with a working hypothesis, and who, prompted by the novelist William Golding, had the gall to name it after the Ancient Greek goddess personifying the Earth. The name has been both a curse and a blessing, eliciting distrust from researchers wary of its hippy connotations and interest from those for whom a philosophic reverence for our nurturing mother is long due. How apt that it is the very changes due to industrial pollution that are finally winning over the scientists, who once regarded concepts such as the interconnectedness of all things as dubious New Age reveries.

The Vanishing Face of Gaia, the latest and perhaps the last of Lovelock's state-of-the-planet reports, concerns both the inevitability and unpredictability of these changes. As is fast becoming clear from the ice-melt at both the North and South Poles, the predictions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are too conservative and too compromised. More importantly, they ignore the fact that changes in the planetary climate can be as sudden and dramatic as those in the economic one. The proper field of study here is not sober graphs and 50-year predictions but the wild vicissitudes of chaos theory. Thus a central theme of Lovelock's book is that it is precisely because many climatologists regard the Earth as inert and unresponsive that their — and, consequently, our — conception of the crisis is so limited. "The disastrous mistake of 20th-century science," he says, "was to assume & that the biosphere merely responds passively to change instead of realizing it was in the driving seat".

What all this means in real terms is that the majority of supposedly "green" measures are too little and too late, mere salves to the consciences of industrialists and consumers who want to carry on as before. In the case of biofuels such as ethanol, large-scale production would have "appalling" consequences for the environment (most green energy, Lovelock writes, is just "big business as usual"). This does not mean, however, that we can merrily stick our noses back in the collective trough. Lovelock compares humanity's current predicament with that of Britain in the late 1930s. We are in a perilous position, one that vague promises and well-meaning treaties will not get us out of. It is only by facing up to the stark reality of the situation that we can even begin to come up with the appropriate measures. Might the solution ultimately lie not in green-tinged shopping but in Churchill's "blood, toil, tears and sweat"? Listening to Lovelock's bracing polemic, it seems more than likely..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

Acclaim for "The Revenge of Gaia": 'The most important book for decades' - Andrew Marr. 'Riveting! a stark warning to mankind' - "The Times". 'Both entertaining and utterly terrifying, both thoughtful and constantly provocative! its echoes should reverberate throughout the world' - Mark Lynas, "New Statesman". 'We ignore James Lovelock's apocalyptic vision of the future at our peril' - Robin McKie, "Observer". 'Gaia will survive in one form or another. Lovelock's chilling question is: Will we?' - Rosie Boycott, "Mail on Sunday".