Reflections+on+Gaia

Jordan Mundell March 5th Annotation #5 “Reflections on Gaia,” Lovelock

In this piece, Lovelock comments on the how the scientific community has viewed the “Gaia Hypothesis” (formulated by him and Lynn Margulis in the 70s). In general, the Gaia theory expands upon the biosphere idea, claiming that the earth is a self-regulating, complex system, similar to that of an individual organism. What Lovelock is saying is that organisms are interconnected with their environment. However, the Gaia theory was not readily accepted, even though its principles were being applied:

“What we do not seem to have noticed is that the science of Gaia is now part of conventional wisdom and is called Earth system science; only the name Gaia is controversial.”

To me, I think the problem was that the Gaia theory sounded too philosophical to the scientific community (Gaia being the personification of the earth in Greek mythology). The theory was proposed in a time where there was a movement towards empirical-backed science rather than theory-based. As a result, many people were using the idea behind the Gaia theory, but they were not calling it by that name, as Lovelock points out in a few examples (e.g. astrobiology at NASA example). Another problem with the adoption of Gaia that Lovelock points out is that it was misinterpreted and broken into two parts, a strong one (which he never promoted), and the weak one (what he actually said):

“Here was the fallacy of Gaia: Lovelock was claiming that the Earth was alive. The idea of the Earth as alive in a biological sense became the strong Gaia hypothesis, and the Earth as a self- regulating system became the weak Gaia hypothesis.”

It was easy for opponents to combat the strong hypothesis, and then allow the weak one to wither up a struggle to get traction in the scientific community. One of the main points that Lovelock makes, towards the end, serves as a mirror on the hypothesis itself. Gaia claims that everything is interconnected, i.e. organisms have an effect on the environment, and the environment has an effect on them in this “self-regulatory” system. As a reflection, Lovelock claims that we still have some hurdles to climb:

“We have some distance still to travel because a proper understanding of the Earth requires the abolition of disciplinary boundaries.”

Like Gaia, science needs to be interdependent in order to move forward.