Dr. Gaia's Bitter Pill

Tim Flannery, Australian scientist and author of The Weather Makers, reviews James Lovelock's The Revenge of Gaia for The Washington Post. Flannery calls the provocative global warming book a "wondrous and novel essay both for what it has to say and for the insight it affords into one of the most ingenious, if eccentric, minds of our age." Ultimately, he says, the book is a must-read that "will surely offend" nearly everyone who does.

Why? Well, for starters, the 87-year-old Lovelock's vision of the future is Apocalypse, plain and simple -- the end of civilization, with only a tiny remnant of humanity surviving to carry on. Is there hope? Yes, says Lovelock, but only if we plunge headlong and without hesitation into a nuclear-powered future. Of other, safer forms of renewable energy he is glibly dismissive. Solar is too expensive, geothermal too meager, wind an abomination that will turn the countryside into one vast power plant. "Vandalism in the name of ideology," is how Lovelock characterizes the wind power boomlet in Europe.

And what of radioactive waste? "One of the striking things about places heavily contaminated by radioactive nuclides is the richness of their wildlife," he writes, pointing to the countryside around Chernobyl as Exhibit A. Furthermore, he says, "The best sites for its disposal are the tropical forests and other habitats in need of a reliable guardian." For any green or environmentalist who assumed that Lovelock, father of the Gaia hypothesis, was one of them, this will come as a cold shower indeed. In the final analysis, he is his own man: an iconoclast.

It's worth noting that, in The Weather Makers, Flannery leans heavily on the Gaian view of Earth as a self-regulating entity -- not sentient, mind you, but a functioning super-organism nonetheless. Flannery also shares Lovelock's sense of alarm about out predicament, but advocates neither his harsh prescription nor his extreme pessimism. Still, a certain awe for the older scientist comes through in Flannery's review: A sense that, while we may disagree with Lovelock, and hope to hell he's wrong, he's just too smart to ignore.