Product Description

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #30559 in Books
• Published on: 2007-06-04
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 208 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The end is all but nigh for Mother Earth's inhabitants unless drastic measures are soon taken: that's the rueful prognostication delivered by Lovelock (Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth), intuitive originator of the theory that the world is a self-regulating system that, over the eons, has been able to sustain an equilibrium between hot and cold so as to support life. Now, propelled by global warming, Lovelock says, a tipping point has almost been reached beyond which the Earth will not recover sufficiently to sustain human life comfortably. Lovelock dismisses biomass fuels, wind farms, solar energy and fuel cell innovations as technologies unlikely to mitigate greenhouse gases in time to save the planet. Instead he sees nuclear energy as the only energy source that can meet our needs in time to prevent catastrophe. Chernobyl was a calamity, he notes, but nuclear power's danger is "insignificant compared with the real threat of intolerable and lethal heatwaves" and rising sea levels that could "threaten every coastal city of the world." Lovelock's pro-nuke enthusiasm, unexpected from one of the mid-20th century's most ardent environmental thinkers, is the well-reasoned core of this urgent call for braking at the brink of global catastrophe. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
British geophysicist Lovelock introduced the Gaia theory in the early 1970s, envisioning the biosphere as "an active, adaptive control system able to maintain the earth in homeostasis." Since then, Lovelock has expanded the Gaia concept to embrace "physical, chemical, biological, and human components," recognizing that organisms do change the environment, none more radically than humanity. Lovelock now describes Gaia as fighting for its very existence as a rapidly increasing human population threatens to upset the precise balance of forces the make the earth conducive to life. Lovelock looks beyond biodiversity (see E. O. Wilson's The Creation, p.19) to elucidate the functions of the polar ice caps, Amazon rain forests, and ocean currents, and then explains the causes and consequences of global warming. This is solid science, a practice Lovelock seems to abandon in his strangely irresponsible arguments for nuclear energy and against sustainable energy sources (see Helen Caldicott, p.15). In spite of its flaws, Lovelock's tough-minded presentation is a valuable contribution to the urgent debate over humankind's future. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Daily Telegraph
"His final testament about the catastrophe of global warming is probably the most important book for decades."

Customer Reviews

The Book of Ought
James Lovelock is one of the most brilliant thinkers alive. Yet The Revenge of Gaia is a book of contradiction. If you read it in public, you will look up and around you wondering, "Why is everyone wasting what precious time we have left?" You will also have to stifle the urge to throw the thing, with its poor scholarship, lack of source material, insistent repetition, and gaps in logic, clear across the room.

Lovelock begins, predictably, with a definition of Gaia, and likens the condition of Gaia to that of a sick body. Lovelock is at his most eloquent here and issues a warning: We may have had time to right our wrongs gradually in the past, but now we no longer have time for gradualness. The sickened state of Gaia will seek a new equilibrium if it can no longer abide its current condition. This means, of course, that civilization might have to go the way of a nasty virus.

It is upon this foundation of urgency and illness that Lovelock prescribes his solution. It is a messy, incomplete and irresponsible one: he advocates a replacement of current energy sources with nuclear power, arguing that it is our only viable alternative to destruction.

Lovelock's arguments against other possible energy sources are important in spirit, but not conclusion. His primary problem with renewable energy is that it is "expensive". Given what we are faced with, why does Lovelock defer to such economic trappings? Perhaps the expense adds what he perceives to be a "get real" dimension to his argument. But it is unrealistic to base our future on the make-believe demands of the current economic system which, after all, has contributed much to this mess in the first place.

Furthermore, such a feeble argument distracts from the actual problems with solar panels, wind, and nuclear power. That is, we need oil to build the alternative energy sources, and the oil just isn't there. Oil dependency in production, plastics, transportation, mining, and so forth makes it unlikely that we shall find an exit door to a world powered by other sources of energy anytime soon. It's wishful thinking to believe that industry and government will give up their routines to supply oil for a cleaner, healthier world. Shortly after September 11th, Vice President Dick Cheney said, "The American way of life is non-negotiable." In the context of resource wars and dwindling oil supply, one can see exactly where this desperate stubbornness emerges from. We are unlikely to divert oil to alternative energy sources because to do so would mean depleting oil from, say, Disneyland.

Lovelock's portrayal of nuclear power is sloppy, and leaves out crucial contextual information. He bolsters his case for nuclear power by writing that it is not actually a health risk. Whether this is true or not is difficult to say, since Lovelock does not source much of his basis for stating this. The mining of uranium is conspicuously absent from The Revenge of Gaia, probably because its inclusion would reveal what a wasteful and polluting process it is, since it is dependent on fossil fuels, including oil. Similarly, the construction of nuclear plants is absent.
Even more notably absent is the uranium extraction processes. Lovelock should have responsibly included this in his book. Since most of the uranium on the planet is in low-grade ores (that is, substances that contain small percentages of uranium), and not in the dwindling sources of high-grade ores, a complicated extraction process is needed.

"...162 tons of natural uranium must be extracted from the earth's crust each year to fuel one nuclear power plant. If the uranium is in granite ore, with a low-grade uranium concentration of 4 grams per ton of rock (0.0004%), then 40 million tons of granite will need to be mined. This rock will need to be ground into fine powder and chemically treated with sulphuric acid and other chemicals to extract the uranium from the rock (milling). Assuming an extraction capacity of 50% (an unrealistically high estimate), 80 million tons of granite will therefore need to be treated...The extraction of uranium from this granite rock would consume over thirty times the energy generated in the reactor from the extracted uranium." (p. 7-8, H. Caldicott, Nuclear Power is Not the Answer, New York, 2006. The New Press)

Lovelock's ignorance of context puts him in the Wired magazine crowd - those who optimistically praise technological innovation without acknowledging social, economic, environmental, or political considerations.
Scientists, particularly British ones, are often fond of stating that "is doesn't mean ought." In other words, "this is just the way it is, I wish it weren't this way." But the same scientists that make such is/ought divisions are nearly always proscriptive in the social realm. Lovelock's sense of how things are deeply derails his judgment. He calls "fancy birds and cuddly animals" (i.e. rainforest dwellers) "dandies...doing little of the hard work needed to keep Gaia going." (p. 111) He uses this as an excuse for burying nuclear waste beneath the floor of rainforests! This is a bit like a wealthy congressman accusing single mothers of abusing welfare. These "fancy" plants and animals are expressions of and key players in vital ecosystems. Would that western humanity could say the same. Lovelock has written a grand book of ought, framing it as a book of is. His tone is imperative and pretends to be sober. But we ought not extract uranium, store radioactive waste in the rainforest, or forget that all organisms have their own purposes, lives, and desires separate from our own.

We find in Lovelock's recommendations his Eurocentric, anthropocentric views distilled for us. Basically, people who have caused a grave imbalance in Gaian regulation should stop worrying about the human and non-human beings that can't assist in a technological fix for the problem. Western civilization needs to take care of itself only, because most other beings of the planet (with the exception, perhaps, of bacteria), aren't going to do any work like westerners to rebalance the planet. It's pure utilitarianism.

This view is echoed again and again in Lovelock's ignorance and disregard for non-western cultures. Lovelock happily champions the meadows of England against what appears to me to be his fabricated enemies, the rabid, power-hungry, windpower lobby. If windpower activists and corporations have their way, Lovelock would not be able to take walks in the countryside or manicured yards. One wonders where he thinks uranium will come from. Since over one half of uranium deposits are under Navajo and Pueblo tribal land (H. Caldicott, p. 48), the destruction of indigenous land is guaranteed if Lovelock's advice is followed. Lovelock hasn't thought about or doesn't care about this as much as he does well-trimmed lawns. There are other dark shades here of anti-indigenous sentiment, particularly when Lovelock insists that "tribal behavior is surely written in the language of our genetic code" (p. 9 - evidence, please?), and then immediately makes the not-so-logical jump that tribal behavior is the cause of genocide.

If Lovelock would do more research on indigenous peoples, he would see that many indigenous societies were less destructive and more egalitarian then our own. He hasn't done his research, and speculates toward the end of the book that Australian aboriginies "destroyed the natural forests of the Australian continent". He offers no suggestions as to how the aboriginies are now so adapted to desert living, nor how they survived for tens of thousands of years with an apparently unbroken culture after having so traumatically destroyed their landscape. We have something to learn from these cultures about how to live without destroying our environment and landbase utterly.

Part of the lesson is that we should NOT seek to preserve civilization as it is. No matter what form of power we use, if we continue to consume, dominate, and pollute the world, we are doomed.

Tyler Volk, in his review of The Revenge of Gaia for Nature, griped that Lovelock was pushing the Gaia metaphor too hard, and that doing so wouldn't help us out of our predicament, it would only confuse us and misguide our science. But this criticism strikes me also as woefully misguided. Of all the things to choose from, why did Volk have issue with the idea that the Earth was alive?

Both James Lovelock and Tyler Volk are incorrect in their assessments of Gaia. Volk argues that Lovelock's metaphor has gone too far, and thus becomes not useful for understanding climate change. Lovelock argues that the Gaia metaphor helps us to understand environmental problems on a larger scale. Both are wrong in assuming that Gaia is a metaphor at all. They characterize Gaia is something somehow separate from its parts, and thus fall into an odd monotheism. For them, Gaia is an angry God, detached from its components. But what is Gaia if not the very earthworms and bacteria, birds of paradise and tree kangaroos, algal blooms and granite, westerners and indigenous? Gaia is a hidden awareness that evinces itself through the actions of all its parts, and emerges through weather, climate, salinity, clouds, atmospheric gasses.

It is precisely the intentionality of Gaia that will lead us to better mediation of science and everyday action. Since dull, dead functionalism and reduction has led us down this destructive path, it is a view of the world as animate that will lead us out. It is necessary to understand Gaia by abandoning our reductionism - whether it be a reduction to chemicals, metaphors, or planets - and instead see Gaia present in every living thing. By doing this, we will finally be able to understand both the whole and the parts without reduction. It is also necessary to abandon the fantasy that industrial culture can ever hope to live in accordance with Gaia and to abandon the dream of sustaining unsustainable industrial culture by imposing a hopeless, dangerous, and thoughtless stopgap. We must change our perception of the is. Then, maybe, the ought will change as well.

The Revenge of Lovelock - Me, Myself & I
For all his impressive curriculum, Mr. Lovelock seems much more interested here in vindicating his achievements than in advancing his views on the future of Nature.

He has got some very interesting arguments and reasonings, but the value of the book is terribly depleted by his simplifications and deliberate obscuring of reality, if not worse. Such a well informed scientist must be aware of many of the mendacities he slips in his books (like his gross misinterpretation of mortality due to nuclear radiation statistics) but he seems to chose effect over truth, probably in the name of the greater good of Gaia.

What he doesn't like he rejects peremptorily. (wind mills breaking the verticality of air????) But only an Englishman would suggest to substitute synthetic stuff for real food. We know it doesn't make a hell of a difference in the Islands but what about us, the rest of humans.

The problem with this kind of illuminated scientists is that they are virtual dictators. They know better than the world and anyway, there's no time for discussion, so everybody do like I say. If I was wrong, well, there was nothing to loose, you were all doomed, anyway. And you will be better off with a few simplified facts I'll provide you with than having to think by yourselves.

Considering his shameless bragging about the importance of his doublessly great inventions, one is tempted to think that his pronuclear stance is only his way to be (even) more épatant.

Anyway, the book has rich food for thought and simplification does have some merits, so there go three stars for the short gentleman at the back yes, the one with the white hair.

Revenge of Gaia
This book was bought for my husband. He liked it very much. He had borrowed it from the library and wanted his own copy.