GODS,
GAIA, AND GREAT CATS
An essay by John Williamson
and John Burkitt
Even without our modern tools and scientific
methodology, early Hellenistic culture made huge contributions to western
civilization, not least of which was a cosmology based on rational deductions
of cause and effect. The Ancient Greeks
were an inquisitive people who sought to understand the natural world. While
they were good observers of empirical truth, they relied on a pantheon of
immortals to explain the origin and significance of what they saw. To a large degree our modern cultures often
rely on the same methods to explain what it cannot understand, and the
explanation almost always works to the benefit of man and the sorrow of
nature. Considering we are overrunning
nature, and that history is always written by the victor, this is hardly
surprising.
The Greek earth goddess Demeter was said to bring
forth the fruits of the earth and it was she that taught men agriculture so
they could end their nomadic existence. As the giver of stability, prosperity
and safety, Demeter was also the goddess of social architecture and was revered
by the rural population as a fertility goddess.
In more modern times she has also become known as Gaia.
The daughter of Gaia was abducted by the lord of the
underworld. Gaia neglected the world as
she searched for her lost child and it sank into the bleak depression of
winter. Finally Zeus ordered the child
restored to her mother. Before young
Persephone left, the lord of the underworld gave her a pomegranate. Because she ate from it, she was bound to
spend a third of the year with him in the underworld. Gaia spreads life through the world when her
daughter is near but grieves through the loneliness of winter. Thus the Ancient Greeks linked the death and
rebirth of nature with Gaia.
Here
is a brief introduction to Gaia theory as developed by Lovelock, Margullis and
others. It appears courtesy of David
Orrell’s insightful overview in Gaia
Theory: Science of the Living Earth.
In the early 1960's, James Lovelock was invited by
NASA to participate in the scientific research for evidence of life on Mars.
His job was to design instruments to detect life. This was not straightforward
since it was hard to know what to test for: any life forms on Mars might be
radically different from those on Earth.
That led him to think about what constituted life,
and how it could be detected. He decided that the most general characteristic
of life was that it takes in energy and matter and discards waste products. He
also reasoned that organisms would use the planet's atmosphere as a medium for
this cyclic exchange, just as we breathe in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide. He
speculated that life would therefore leave a detectable chemical signature on
the Martian atmosphere. Maybe it could be detected from Earth, so it wouldn't
even be necessary to send a spaceship.
To test his idea, he and a colleague, Dian Hitchcock,
began to analyze the chemical makeup of Mars, and compare it with that of the
Earth. The results showed a strong contrast. The atmosphere of Mars, like Venus,
was about 95% carbon dioxide, with some oxygen and no methane. The Earth was
77% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, and a relatively large amount of methane. Mars was
chemically dead; all the reactions that were going to take place had already
done so. The Earth, however, was far from chemical equilibrium. For example,
methane and oxygen will react with each other very easily, and yet they are
both present in the atmosphere. Lovelock concluded that for this to be the case
the gases must be in constant circulation, and that the pump driving this
circulation was life.
Lovelock began to look back at the history of life's
interaction with the atmosphere. He noted that about three billion years ago,
bacteria and photosynthetic algae started to remove carbon dioxide from the
atmosphere, producing oxygen as a waste product. Over enormous time periods,
this process changed the chemical content of the atmosphere - to the point
where organisms began to suffer from oxygen poisoning! The situation was only
relieved with the advent of organisms powered by aerobic consumption.
"For me, the personal revelation of Gaia came quite suddenly -
like a flash of enlightenment. I was in a small room on the top floor of a
building at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in
“The Earth's atmosphere was an
extraordinary and unstable mixture of gases, yet I knew that it was constant in
composition over quite long periods of time. Could it be that life on Earth not
only made the atmosphere, but also regulated it - keeping it at a constant
composition, and at a level favorable for organisms?"
On a stroll with his novelist neighbor William Golding, Lovelock
described his idea, and asked advice for a name. Golding suggested Gaia, after
the Greek Earth Goddess. The Gaia Hypothesis was born.
In 1979, Lovelock wrote the book "Gaia: A New
Look at Life on Earth", which developed his ideas. He stated:
"The
physical and chemical condition of the surface of the Earth, of the atmosphere,
and of the oceans has been and is actively made fit and comfortable by the
presence of life itself. This is in contrast to the conventional wisdom which
held that life adapted to the planetary conditions as it and they evolved their
separate ways."
Key to Lovelock's idea was his observation that the
planet is self-regulating. He knew, for example, that the heat of the sun has
increased by 25% since life began on Earth, yet the temperature has remained
more or less constant. However, he didn't know precisely what mechanisms were
behind the regulation. It was when he began to collaborate with the American
microbiologist Lynn Margulis that the full theory began to take shape. Margulis
was studying the processes by which living organisms produce and remove gases
from the atmosphere. In particular she was examining the role of microbes which
live in the Earth's soil. Working together, they managed to uncover a number of
feedback loops which could act as regulatory influences.
An example is the carbon dioxide cycle. Volcanoes
constantly produce massive quantities of carbon dioxide. Since carbon dioxide
is a greenhouse gas, it tends to warm the planet. If left unchecked, it would
make the Earth too warm to support life. While plants and animals take in and
expel carbon dioxide through life processes such as photosynthesis, respiration
and decay, these processes remain in balance and don't affect the net amount of
the gas. Therefore there must be another mechanism.
One process by which carbon dioxide is removed from
the atmosphere is rock weathering, where rainwater and carbon dioxide combine
with rocks to form carbonates. Lovelock, Margulis and others discovered that
the process is greatly accelerated by the presence of soil bacteria. The
carbonates are washed away into the ocean, where microscopic algae use them to
make tiny shells. When the algae die, their shells sink to the bottom of the
ocean, forming limestone sediments. Limestone is so heavy that it gradually
sinks underneath the Earth's mantle, where it melts. Eventually some of the
carbon dioxide contained in the limestone will be fed back into the atmosphere
through another volcano.
Since the soil bacteria are more active in high
temperatures, the removal of carbon dioxide is accelerated when the planet is
hot. This has the effect of cooling the planet. Therefore the whole massive
cycle forms a feedback loop. Lovelock and Margulis identified a number of other
feedback loops which operate in a similar way. An interesting feature of these
loops is that, like the carbon dioxide cycle, they often combine living and
non-living components.
The importance of biological processes on the planet
was pointed out by the Russian scientist Vernadsky, who as early as 1929 said:
"Life
appears as a great, permanent and continuous infringer on the chemical
'dead-hardness' of our planet's surface ... Life therefore is not an external
and accidental development on the terrestrial surface. Rather, it is intimately
related to the constitution of the Earth's crust, forms part of its mechanism,
and performs in this mechanism functions of paramount importance, without which
it would not be able to exist."
Vernadsky showed, for example, that living organisms
are the primary transformer of solar energy to chemical energy, and stressed
the importance of biotransport systems. An example of a biotransport system is
birds which feed on marine life, hence transferring an enormous amount of
matter from the oceans back to the land. In order to understand how the planet
works, one has to take into account the effect of life -- exactly what Lovelock
says.
Life is a dynamic biological system, whether it be a
simple cell, a tiger, or the entire life mass of a planet. Very complex
controls exist to guide energy transactions among the myriad members of the
life community of Earth to prevent both degenerative and runaway conditions. We
know enough details of many of these systems to be increasingly concerned of a
biological tsunami in the making.
The biodiversity system, Gaia, can be defined as
"The sum total of all the plants, animals (including humans), fungi and
microorganisms, along with their individual variations and the interactions
between them. It is the set of living organisms and their genetic basis that
make up the fabric of the planet earth and allow it to function as it does, by
capturing energy from the sun and using it to drive all of life's
processes."
We know the system is in trouble because of the
rapidly increasing loss of entire species – and we don’t have all the answers,
or the power to change the fact. We know that urbanization is a major problem.
Recent analyses, for example, suggest that 83 percent
of the earth's land surface has been affected by human settlements and
activities, leaving only 17 percent in wilderness. According to one set of
estimates, urban built-up areas, with average population densities of
approximately 200 persons per square km., probably comprise around four percent
of all land uses worldwide. A joint project by CIESIN, IFPRI and the World Bank
is currently testing and implementing methodologies for measuring the extent of
urban built-up areas. Urban areas are expanding, particularly in the developing
world. The UN Population Division estimates suggest that the world's population
will become majority urban by 2010; in contrast the world was only 37 percent
urban in 1970.
Though the extent of urban areas is not that large
when compared with other land uses such as agriculture or forestry, their
environmental impact is significant. This is due not only to the large
concentrations of population that are found in cities, but because they are
centers of political, cultural and economic influence, and are often the
location of significant industrial activity. In the era of economic
globalization, so-called "megacities" like
The most significant historical change in land cover,
however, has been the expansion of agricultural lands. Today close to a third
of the earth's land surface is devoted to pastures or cropland, which amounts
to approximately one-half of all lands suitable for agriculture. Since the dawn
of plant domestication the progression of cropland was relatively slow. The
past century witnessed over half of the worldwide increase in agricultural
lands, and in the developing world half the land cover conversion occurred in
just the past 50 years.
Today, roughly 39 million square kilometers (29
percent) of the world's land surface is under forest cover, and of that 28 million
square kilometers is in so-called "closed forests." Since the end of
the last ice age, approximately half the world's forest cover has been lost,
most of it due to the expansion of human activities and settlements. In terms of primary forest, in contrast to
secondary or other successional forests, much less remains. The World Resources
Institute estimates that only one-fifth of the world's original forest cover
remains. No other species has affected the biological foundations of Earth so
profoundly as we humans.
What does our future hold? Have we already lost the
one or more interlocked species crucial to the life web? There are no answers
yet to these questions, but there are things we can individually and
collectively do to stem our population explosion and save our genetic wealth.
They may be difficult things to effect but certainly doable.
The very least we can do is follow the instincts of
our conservation minded communities. And for the purpose of this essay, this is
a call to the great cat owners and their detractors, the animal rights
industry.
In our lifetime, on the record,
we have already witnessed great losses among feline species in the wild. And
daily we see further depredations wrought by the animal rights industry in
their effort to eliminate great cats in private care throughout the world. Let
us see why this is a foolish, dangerous plan from the Gaia point of view and a
threat to us all. As John Burkitt has so succinctly put it:
“Life
on Earth is very complex. The interplay
of predator and prey, growth and decay, is so intricate we can only grasp the
basic principles.
Plants turn light from the sun into life
energy animals can harness. But it takes
time to build plants from sunshine, and without some limits on the rate animals
eat plants, disaster would follow.
Predators like the tiger insure a fair share of earth’s limited
resources to all plants and animals.”
Or, in so many words, within the bounds of Gaia, the great cats and other predators are a necessary part of the vital business of life. They are master regulators of a delicately balanced biosphere we all depend on for our very lives.
The existence of humans within the earth’s biosphere
does not confer upon them a favored ranking. Clearly, humans have lost their
niche in a dispersed, tightly cooperative biosphere as a result of their
destructive activities.
The wave of ban laws breaking over private owners
should be re-thought in terms of considered science. Politically inspired
agendas to end life on earth should be reversed. There is a serious risk they
may work.
As many knowledgeable people over the years have
suggested, we all need to think in terms of working with nature instead of
destroying it. A good start would be to begin to relate to Gaia as what we are;
a big brained, misinformed species of regulator quite able to use our minds to
support Gaia’s clear destiny to continue this magnificent experiment of life on
Earth -- with or without us.
We need to communicate more with our elected
officials and need to assert our views, or otherwise the chaos will reign.
After all, as the front line keepers and companions of great cats, it truly is
our fundamental obligation. So, without seeming maudlin, the lessons of Gaia
may help unify us as we look into the eyes of a great cat and read its plea.
☼
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