Today's Green Icon comes courtesy of our regular contributor Brendan Phelan AKA thewrittenone, whose finger is sore and can’t post today so he has asked me.
His man of the moment is the enigmatic James Lovelock who will forever be remembered for the simple beauty of his Gaia Hypothesis. The mythical reference has always rubbed ‘true’ scientists up the wrong way, but his insistence that the earth is itself a single living organism has inflamed many critics and remains deeply controversial to this day.
Formulated when he was working for NASA in the 1960’s, it proposes that the physical earth and all life upon it form a complex system working tirelessly to ensure that the atmosphere is comfortable for life itself.
You can see how this has plugged into many environmental (and even spiritual) ideals. In itself, it inspires a belief in the earth and instills a sense of purpose into the work of all living organisms (us included). Life itself is always working towards a state of balance in which it can prosper.
The flip side to the coin of course is that one particular species has been working hard for generations to upset that balance at a time in the earth’s history when conditions have been pretty favorable for the prosperity of life. We have truly upset what was (when you consider certain periods in the earths vast history) a golden age, and we will suffer as much as every other living organism for our less than healthy lifestyle choices.
Lovelock himself is particularly pessimistic about our prospects. To quote The Guardians recent article on the maverick scientist, ‘by 2020 extreme weather will be the norm, causing global devastation; by 2040 much of Europe will be Saharan; and parts of London will be underwater’. The article goes on to say that the calculations of a recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are scarily similar to his, though they use far less dramatic language.
Scientists, evolutionists and environmentalists have castigated him over the years. He is a strong advocate for the expansion of the nuclear programme, which baffles many said environmentalists, and yet strangely his work has added to and complimented so much of what these people have been trying to say and prove for a generation.
Whether or not the earth can be defined, as a living organism is one for the dictionary writers to worry about. What we can confirm now is that Lovelock’s work has given the human race something it can look to as a unifying agent. It is no longer simply philosophical to view the world as one being with all its parts linked into a system of co-dependence. It is now scientific fact, backed by hard evidence. For that, James Lovelock will always remain at the top of our icon list.
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