Moon Books, 2022
ISBN:978-1789048308
Reviewed by Marian Van Eyk McCain
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At the beginning of this book, the author poses THE big question of our times:
The next decade will be the most decisive in the entire history of humanity. Will we irreversibly destroy Earth’s benevolent climate? Will we fail to counteract the sixth mass extinction? Will we annihilate our own race? Why are governments and leaders acting so slowly? And what can individuals do?
The key problem, of course, is that the concept of our planet that we all grew up with is one of a ball of rock with a coating of soil that has trees and other ‘useful’ plants growing in it and a vast range of other creatures, including ourselves, scurrying around on its surface like ants on a doughnut. And it is probably because so many of us – including our governments and leaders – have never updated this worldview that the remedial process is so slow.
What Hageneder does, in this book, is to start by going back to basics and looking at the whole matter through the lens of Gaia Theory instead – i.e. with the concept, first put forward in 1973 by James Lovelock, of Earth as a self-regulating, living organism of which we, along with all other life forms, are an intrinsic part.
As he points out, prior to Lovelock, science was doing its usual trick of dividing its object of study into many smaller pieces, such as biology, geology, oceanography, paleontology, mineralogy and many more. But this new, post-Lovelock way of looking at the world integrates all these into a totally new discipline known – and now widely taught in universities – called Earth systems science. And the first section of this book is like a neat little mini-course in exactly that, with easy-to-understand descriptions of some of the primary planetary cycles such as water, carbon, nitrogen etc. that resembles what we learned in school yet with a whole new emphasis: the key role that living organisms have played, and still play, in these cycles. Without living organisms, we now learn, these cycles would not exist. Life forms have even influenced the movement of tectonic plates! According to James Lovelock and to Eileen Crist: …organisms are not mere passengers on the planet…they are more like pilots.
We know, now, that since we are an intrinsic part of Gaia, whatever harms Her, inevitably harms us. Therefore the motivation to find remedies is self-interest writ large! But although Earth systems science and the technology that arises from it have progressed in leaps and bounds with potential solutions, progress is still maddeningly slow. Partly because so many people still see the world through an outdated lens but largely because of politics and the pervasiveness of the growth model of economics.
The remainder of this book gives the reader…an overview of what’s going on and how the different causes and effects are interlinked. And suggestions for steps we can take. The ‘steps we can take’ include the steps we need to take as communities and nations but also the ones that all of us can take as individuals.
Inasmuch as it unflinchingly lists and describes so many of the problems currently facing us, this is a depressing read. At the same time, however, for every single problem listed, the author suggests remedies. Plus the very fact of switching to a Gaia-based worldview provides an immediate corrective to any tendency to see other life forms as ‘resources’ rather than as our fellow Earthlings. So as well as being a primer for the science that many of us were not taught in school, it is also a call to action and a very useful source of inspiration when we are feeling ground down by the immensity of the problems. Where there is life, there is always hope. I see this as a useful book to have on one’s shelf.