Excerpts from Lawrence Joseph's book: Gaia; the Growth of an Idea.
(LL = James Lovelock --the father of the green mother! [sorry...] )
Attending the conference:
. . from Lindisfarne: Mary Bateson: daughter of Gregory Bateson and Margaret Mead. Former dean of faculty at Amherst college. Maurice Strong, frmr undrsec'y of United Nations. /John and Nancy Todd, eco engineers, entreprenuers and publishers../ Henri Atlan, french biophysicist./ and 2 Chilean biologists: Francisco Varela and Humberto Maturana, founder of the study of autopoiesis (Self-organization, +maintainence of living systems.)
Thompson, in book: "Gaia, a Way of Knowing: Political Implications of the new Biology.", "Ideas, like grapes, grow in clusters."
Merlin Stone (woman) writes of goddess stuff. Group of women met on Puget island, now called Gaia Island. // Otter and Morning Glory G'zell ("priest/ess of Gaia")
Lovelock lives by River Carey, in St Giles-on-the-Heath, a hamlet on the Cornwall-Deon border, in sw England. Wife Helen+ 4kids! (too many!!) Planted 20,000 trees on his land! Has peacocks and a marble statue of Gaia. [Works like an Edison.] Usta sell his rare blood-type. Co-invented chromatograph. And invented electron capture detector; 1957; palm-size. Sniffs pollutants (in parts per trillion!), CFC's, and hidden explosives. He says Gaia isn't so much an idea as a generator of ideas. A good tool. At JPL, once shared office with Sagan, where he first thought of Gaia. He and Hitchcock did a thought-experimnt: studied earth from Mars. "It must take a lot of work to keep up such a wild disequalibrium." (as our O2 atmosphere.) He first thought to call it the Bio-cyberneic Universal System Tendency/ Homeostasis! William Golding (Lord of Flies) proposed the name "Gaia". Early version of it had a will; planned ahead to control environs. Now prefers "Wisdom of the body". Automatic.
Redwood is 97% dead --all but needles and cambrium. Redwood ratio: 1/33. Rth: 1/33 billion. Life= 18 trillion tons. Carbon-14 is characteristic only of living matter.
Lake Ciso', N Spain, is world's oddest: a bowl of bacteria. Sulphur-eaters, etc. Procaryotes (nucleated) pass on little gift-pacs called replicons that transfer resistance to new toxins (like penicillin).
Along west coast of Baja Cal Norte: Laguna Figueroa: three huge stratified microbial communities thrive in hypersaline intertidal channels. Microbial mats, several acres each. Surface: non-living epidermal layer of evaporite sediment, for protection. just below, blue-green and grass-green cyano-bacteria, aerobic photosynthesizers. Below that, purple anaerobic bacteria, protected from O2, but able to photosyntheize. Bottom: a black layer of sulphur-reducing bacteria convert seawater to hydrogen sulphide. Both upper layers use it for their photosynthesis. "Tissues of Gaia." 200 bacteria species. Also produce lipids that reduce impact of ocean waves.
. . Stromatolites are mats hardened with CaCO. She believes these, 10 Meters high, covered much of earth in proterozoic era, 1.5 to 2 billion years ago. ...were what coral reefs are to today's oceans.
There are 3/4 ton of termites/person on earth. Evolved from wood-eating roach, 1-1.5 Billion years ago. They have 30+ species of micro-organisms in hindgut that co-evolved. She believes that it's happened that two or more species have co-operated so closely that eventually, the offspring lose redundant faculties and merge physically. Is basis for her fame: endosymbiosis!
She'd followed Carl to Berkeley when a former prof at Wisconsin took photo-micrographs of the chloroplasts of an alga --now known to be automonous and self-replicating-- which bear uncanny resemblance to cyano-bacteria. Dedication-time. Newly-divorced, she worked to develop science programs for schools and care for 2 kids, and plot at night. That: such symbiosis is universal, + are direct decendants of independent bacteria. Mitochondria are equal to cloroplasts of plants. Both process O2. Gradually, redundant functions dropped away. First said to be unimportant (have only 1% of cell's DNA), now found to cause many kinds of hereditary diseases. She sees merger; Darwinians see acquisition. To compete, you must co-operate and share the pie. (like a long-lived mobster). (many of these incorporated cells were once enemies.)
Now, an even more extreme tenet: that all cell-hairs --cilia, whipping tails, undulipoda, +other microtubules, are descended from spirochetes. Other tenet has been nearly universally accepted, but she admits she's nearly alone in this.
P 52-3: life and death are no longer absolute. Much as Einstein demo'd that there is no fixed point in the universe, and no immutable standard, Margulis and Lovelock have observed that the boundry line between life and the inanimate environment can't be clearly drawn. LL: "There is merely a hierarchy of intensity..." Redwood is 97% dead material.
p65: Mary Catherine Bateson: "It may be that many people, perhaps all people, can only think about complex wholes--think holistically--but using aesthetic or religious energy." "Gaia is the supersystem. It is intellectually irresistable."
p66. Lichtenstein-based Foundation for Gaia, which LL dismisses as inane. to Gaia Institute, at Cathedral of St John the Devine, NY, NY; founded and encouraged by Lindisfarne members.
P67: Joss and David Pearson: Three elements of Gaian life-style: Science, environmentalism, and spirituality.
70; Margulis: "The Religious overtones of Gaia make me sick!" "...is less harmful than standard religion. It can be very environmentally aware. At least, it is not human-centered."
p86; Margulis: "The Gaia Hypothesis states that the Earth's surface conditions are regulated by the activities of life. Specifically, that the atmosphere is maintained far from chemical equilibrium... with respect to its composition of reactive gasses, oxidation-reduction state, alkalinity-acidity, albedo, and temperature. This environmental maintenance is effected by the growth and metabolic activities of the sum of the organisms, i.e., the biota. The hypothesis implies that were life to be eliminated, the surface conditions on Earth would revert to those interpolated for a planet between Mars and Venus." LL goes farther: sees Gaia right down to the planetary core.
p87: Viscious attack by James Kirchner, young Berkeley theoretical ecologist. Proposed --and for 45 minutes, trashed-- five Gaia hypotheses.
[Most of the scientific debate is about Coevolutionary and Homeostatic Gaia. But we are not bound by Kirchner's set of definitions.]
p90: LL sees 3 Gaias:
p208. Anthony Weston: "Forms of Gaian Ethics". "...hypothesis seems to have no way of valuing individuals. ...clearly irrevelant. [focus of society swings from "me to we".] Whether or not LL and Margulis have been directly influenced by the social philosophies of their time, much as Darwin (some say for his wife's benefit) clung to the doctrines of the Church of England, or as Freud rebelled vs--and yet was defined by-- Victorian ethics, these Gaian exponents of infinite interdependence are hardly immune from the individual-vs-group debate. What makes Gaia of special and enduring interest, however, is not its rhetorical position one way or the other, but that, unlike most modern ideologies and doctrines, human beings, taken in groups or individually, are not at the center of Gaian belief. In the Gaian world-view, we start with the most primitive microbes and end up with the great planetary organism and do manage to include human beings along the way.
What makes the Gaian philosophical perspective unique is that it offers a secular alternative to the doctrine of humanism. Currently, most views of the world fall into two categories: human-centered, or diety-centered. LL rails against the "heresy of humanism" with just as much relish as he denies any religion's mechanisms behind the workings of the living Earth. Gaia may be worthy of spiritual awe or devotion, but not because there is any mystical diety making it all work. The theory's scope is the Earth, and hypothetically, any other planet with life.
P74; Schneider's formal working statement for 88 AGU conference: "The Gaia Hypothesis surmises that interaction between the biota and the physical and chemical environment is of large enough intensity to serve in an active feedback capacity for bio-geo-climatologic control.
P212: There is a very real propensity for gaian whole-earthism to lead to a wooly-minded, touchie-feelie thinking. This tendency, however, does not invalidate Gaia any more than a worst-case extreme might disprove any other reasonable theory.
213: Hughes: "Earth has her own law, a natural law in the original sense of those words; deeper than human enactments and beyond repeal. It is not the justice of human morality; it is written in the nature of things."
216: Spretnak and Capra: Three Green splinters:
1:Visionary-holistic.
2:Eco-Greens.
3:Peace-movement; even including lefties: "red-greens".
217: William Irwin Thompson: (expatriate) The U.N.: "A third house of every nation's form of self-government."
229: 19th century's Henry Ward Beecher: "General laws, rather than creation of each item by fiat will satisfy our notions of divinity." But what role can a creator have in the ...big bang? Not nearly so awesome as the creator of genesis, or even the clockmaker of enlightenment [times], who at least designed the apparatus and wound it up before walking away. What sort of worship is due an entity that set off a cosmic bomb 15 billion years ago, then let matter and energy take their course?
230: Oriana Fallaci, Italian journalist. When she finally decided that she did not believe in god, she was afraid that god would find out.
Bertrand Russell: In "Why I am not a Christian.": "Religion is based, I think, primarily and mainly on fear. It is partly the terror of the unknown, and partly the wish to feel that you have a kind of elder brother who will stand by you in your troubles and disputes. Fear of the mysterious, fear of defeat, fear of death."
232: Fallaci?: "The ease with which the supremecy of the biblical god can be challenged and argued out of plausibility belies the distinct unease that many feel when doing so. For many, inclined to religious belief, 'god' is the revered name for whatever greater spiritual goodness or oneness that exists. By definition profane. Why take a chance?"
Fallaci's faith couldn't be shaken, even by her decision to renounce it. An enviable quandry for as long as it lasted, especially for those who pray that their own faith in God survives their intellectual duty to put it to the test. [Please, God, don't let me use the brain you gave me!!]
233; Cosmologist Brian Swimme: "Suddenly, the human species as a whole has a common cosmic story. For the first time in human existence... a story that is not tied to tradition, or to a political ideology, but that gathers every group into its meanings."
234; Rene Dubos has long held that our salvation depends on our ability to create a religion of nature.
Thomas Berry (somewhat a mentor to Swimme) "Both education and religion need to ground themselves within the story of the universe as we now understand [it] thru empirical knowlege. Within this functional cosmology, we can overcome our alienation and begin the renewal of life on a sustainable basis. This story is a numinous revelatory story that could evoke the vision and energy required to bring not only ourselves but the entire planet into a new order of magnificance."
235: G.K. Chesterton, long ago: "We talk of wild animals, but man is only a wild animal. ...it is exactly where biology leaves off that religion begins."
241: LL (Anglican church): "What if Mary is another name for Gaia? Then her capacity for virgin birth is no miracle or parthenogenetic aberration; it is the role of Gaia since Earth began." [JKH: What is the original development of life on Earth... but a virgin birth?]
252: A definition of life: A system is alive if it obtains energy and vital substances from a changable environment, returns wastes and other toxins to that environment, +maintains the internal chemical and temp conditions necessary to continue this process. Darwinists would add ability to reproduce (except mules,etc); and Gaians would add: the tendency to influence their surroundings.