The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity
By James Lovelock
Basic Books, 2007
208 pages

Piggy was right: we must have rules and that is not just to be applied to the English. This morning I buzzed my cell door and it didn’t open as the man at the desk had decided that too many people were taking advantage of his good nature and breaking the rules, so he was letting those out who belonged out: one by one.
And the big rules are not created by us but in some way we must try to formulate what they are and map out our behaviour, so as to conform to these rules.
This non conformity to the rules became painfully obvious to those of us who built on the response of Rachell Carsons’ Silent Spring and created the environmental movement from whole cloth curing the late 60s.
The 1st Earth Day in the spring of 1970 and the subsequent enactment into law of the EPA was the culmination of this first wave of serious environmental work.
From that period, environmentalism became an integral part of my life, but I soon realized that Capitalism would not yield to anything but revolution or collapse and that revolution was a pipedream and collapse, which we are now facing, and what the Revenge of Gaia deals with, would be recognized after it was too late to do anything about, which is the primary message of James Lovelock’s concise book about his conception: Gaia.
Having been fortunate enough to live down the road from this very wise man, for 3 1/2 years, I can deeply feel his sense of loss as the country is desecrated for the sake of ‘filthy lucre’.
I could not visit Lovelock – we have mutual friends – as I was living underground.
The part of Devon – South Hampshire – that I inhabited was a snapshot of the past preserved into the present.
I followed those 3 ½ years with 9 ½ years in a relatively untouched area of South West France, the Charente. Those years in the surroundings wherein nature had not become an aspect of manufacturing food or a theme park became even more poignant in retrospect as I read Lovelock’s elegy for a planet that he feels is headed for a future relatively free of human beings, with a sharply reduced populating living around the poles under the aegis of brutal war.
Steven Mithen, one of our great experts in human prehistory expressed similar sentiments in a recent NYROB review. “The human story is so far without an end, but is probably heading for inevitable global catastrophe.” (October 23, 2009, p. 44)
It is based on a deeper understanding of the ecological context in which we live and a long view, based on scientific data, that is deeply aware of what we are doing to our protective surround. It is a view I share.
It is the main reason I began to move beyond ecology as a primary focus, though I kept my hand in enough to lecture on the environment throughout the 70s and served as the director of the Philadelphia Sun Day Celebration in 1977.
But the crash course in concentrated reading and interacting with ecologists that I did from 1967-1971 made me aware that we could not sustain the energy expenditure that capitalism was slowly making de rigueur, through advertising and deeper study, 1974-6, of development theory only reinforced.
Systems theory made it obvious that the entire biosphere was interconnected and essentially a singly system, thus the concept of Gaia gave me no problem and global warming as human created had been a concern, if expressed in a different way, before the bells began ringing.
The systemic destruction of Gaia that Lovelock is bemoaning has been obvious to me for a long while and when large systems break, the results are not linear.
What that means are many events that we can’t even begin to imagine, most if not all of them negative.
Destruction that will dwarf New Orleans and render our best efforts null and void.
Lovelock’s short book is full of sadness and anger for what we have done to Gaia.
He does not harp upon the massive die off he sees coming, but he is evidently heartbroken about what he sees and the envisioned result of what he sees. So ami, yet I can’t mourn for the going of the shallowness I see everyplace I look and the abject triviality that popular TV culture reflects.
We deserve better.
Perhaps life at the poles will open our eyes to the beauty of this blue earth and trach us to preserve it.
Let the remnant do so.

Hormonal chaos: The Scientific and Social Origins of the Environmental Endocrine Hypothesis
By Sheldon Krimsky
The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002
256 pages

To come to any understanding of the time we lie in the study of stress is essential. It is one of the key factors that must be included in any deep analysis of our increasing hectic and uncertain modern world now everywhere due to cell phones, Twitter and the other great interrupters which now define our life.
There is no escape as many wedding or funeral attendees have found out when U.S. bombs have turned a solemn ceremony into a bloody mess.
As the now deceased Norman Mailer said about fifty years ago: “we live in a time that interrupts the mood of everything alive.”
He thought that interruption was cancerous – an intuitive leap that has turned out to be true, but perhaps ultimately more important are those regulators of mood: our hormones, and the endocrine system that our evolutionary history has created to regulate them.
They help create the internal context in which we live, breathe and act out our daily ritual of living that is now under threat from a global climate change that is partially of our own creation, due to the profligacy of our energy rich life style; a change that some say has gone beyond the point of our ability to stop the catastrophe that massive climate change implies, for the food that sustains us is deeply constrained by the need for the climate it has evolved with.
Bottom line: the provisions that maintain our existence are deeply threatened by the uncertainty introduced into their growing seasons by the climate change now underway.
We have also introduced into our environment endocrine disrupters whose action upon us in the foetal state – a time when millions of biochemical reactions must occur with clocklike precision if a healthy organism, which can reproduce, is to be born and live out an adequate life.
These disrupters, in minute amounts that cause no apparent harm to the adult organism can produce an entire range of problems in the foetus which manifest years later in ADHD, lowered sperm count, breast cancer and a whole host of other problems that “could change the character of human societies.”
The scientific and social process that leads to the awareness of the dangers to our very survival is the theme of Sheldon Krimsky’s book.
In 5 crystal clear chapters he describes the process that lead to public recognition of the threat posed by the unthinking use of chemicals. Chemicals which have been integral to our body and threatening to both our moods and our future.
It would be interesting to know about the body states, with reference to chemical impact discussed in this book, of those who participated in and watched a long gang rape in Oakland during the last week.
Such impulsive, unthinking, uncaring behaviour is indicative of the changes that are “changing the character of human societies” wherein people kill women and children, through the use of suicide bombs or drone propelled missiles as if they were in a computer game.
Our freedom is progressively abused in the name of national security in spite of electing a constitutional lawyer as president.
The dreams of many for a just humane society are bowing in the wind.