Hope Beneath Our Feet_ Restoring Our Place in the Natural World - Martin Keogh [26]
Vicki
Vicki Robin is co-author with Joe Dominguez of the international bestseller Your Money or Your Life: Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence (Viking Penguin, 1992), available now in ten languages, and recently updated for the twenty-first century (Penguin Putnam, 2008). Vicki is also an active social change agent. She is co-founder of the New Road Map Foundation, the Center for a New American Dream, Sustainable Seattle, Conversation Cafes, the Simplicity Forum, the Turning Tide Coalition, Let’s Talk America, and currently Transition Whidbey. She serves on the board of Transition U.S.
A Way Forward in an Uncertain Future
SUSAN FEATHERS
It has been nearly three decades since James Lovelock published a scientific premise for the earth as a living organism. He based his work on observations that show a self-regulating zone of life called the “biosphere.” Gaia: A New Way of Viewing the Earth suggested that living communities regulate the life functions of a living planet.
Human beings are mostly unaware of how temperature, recycling, energy flow, and population are managed on earth, yet humans affect outcomes and are affected in turn by them.
Consider what Lovelock observed about the differences in atmospheric composition among “dead” planets and a “living planet.” Planets with high concentrations of carbon dioxide in their atmosphere (Venus and Mars) are either broiling or ice blocks. They contain little or no life. Earth’s surface temperature before the advent of life averaged about three hundred degrees Celsius. With the current envelope of life on Earth, the average temperature is thirteen degrees Celsius.
Organisms evolved in oceans that began to remove carbon dioxide from the air and give off oxygen. Gradually nitrogen and oxygen replaced carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. A hydrologic cycle formed, and Earth began to cool to conditions that allowed life as we know it to proliferate.
For nearly two billion years the plankton of the oceans, lakes, and later trees and land plants of Earth sequestered carbon from the air, incorporating it into their forms. As life evolved into more complex forms, animals—passing carbon they ingest from plants or plant eaters consumed—deposited more carbon into “sinks” as their bodies and waste were incorporated into the earth’s crust. These accumulations of life forms, whether sinking to the bottom of the sea or dissolving into the crust of land over time, were gradually transformed into rich, black strata: oil and coal.
For a long, long time this was true. Life followed five principles of self-regulation:
– Use of a non-polluting, unlimited energy source;
– Recycling of matter through food webs;
– Preservation of biodiversity in genes, kinds of creatures, habitats;
– Fine control of populations to stay within carrying capacity;
– Change in response to new conditions (evolution).
Then came the conscious being, the human, whose brain began to question how things worked and whose ingenuity mimicked nature. A certain kind of wisdom grew as men and women observed nature’s ways and lived accordingly.
Things began to happen in one or two places in the world as man’s knowledge grew. Man wondered if combusting oil or coal could help us get things done. And as the pundits say, the rest is history.
A relatively small percent of the total human population has been putting that store of carbon back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide emissions, and the earth’s biosphere is heating up as a consequence.
For readers aware of the dynamic behind the human carbon footprint, it is very frustrating to live beside so many fellow countrymen and women seemingly unconcerned. Recently a woman I met stated that the warming of the earth’s surface was “going to happen anyway, and besides, man as a species is not going to be here forever.”
Statements like that tell