The Revenge of Gaia

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This article is about a book by James Lovelock. For other uses of Gaia, see Gaia.

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The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back - and How we Can Still Save Humanity (2006) is a book by James Lovelock. Lovelock believes that it is too late to avoid significant global heating and significant climate change which will make large parts of the Earth's surface much less hospitable for humans; as a result, there will be inevitable, major decline in the human population over the next hundred years. Lovelock's answer is that nuclear power is the only short-term solution for the preservation of civilization as it stands now. The dangers that many environmentalists see from nuclear power are quite minor with respect to most of Earth's ecologies. Lovelock sees benign alternate energy sources as inadequate and irrelevant at best.

Lovelock draws a distinction between his original Gaia hypothesis of the 1970s and current Gaia theory. He believes that the time will come when the US government takes global heating seriously and that they will respond with immense planet-scale engineering fixes, perhaps space based. While he indicates these may succeed, he is left despondent by the prospect that humans will have to deal with the extra costs of maintaining an inhabitable surface climate, a task formerly done for the human race by Gaia.

Lovelock thinks the time is past for sustainable development, and that we have come to a time when development is no longer sustainable. He proposes that we need sustainable retreat from an impending Climate Storm -- that we must retreat in an orderly fashion from the coming threats to our global habitat, to mitigate adverse impacts on human health and happiness.

[edit] Criticism

Lovelock has warned of other impending planetary crises over his career which, although as yet not disproven, have not garnered widespread acceptance in the scientific community. Most notably, in The Great Extinction, which Lovelock and Michael Allaby published in 1983, Lovelock wrote that the earth was on course for an asteroid strike on Feb. 1, 2019, a disaster that could only be averted by the development of asteroid-deflecting technology.[1]