Abstract
A recent talk by John Urry on environmental issues and social theory cited James Lovelock’s latest contribution to environmental debates, The Revenge of Gaia in which Lovelock discusses (among other things) positive feedback ‘tipping points’ that can lead to significant changes in climate systems.1 As a sociologist researching symbiogenesis, I am curious about the viscidities of favor that Gaia theory — which Margulis calls symbiosis from space — attracts. Lovelock’s invocation in a sociological venue surprised me: I had understood my current interest in Gaia theory as a late-comer to social scientific discussions that have long abandoned Gaia. And while Margulis believes that Gaia theory is becoming more acceptable in ‘polite scientific society’, the two foremost scientific magazines, Nature and Science, have both labelled Gaia a ‘pseudo-science’ — the kiss of death in most academic communities.2 And in so far as social scientists associate Gaia with new-age goddess worship and failed social and deep ecology movements, Gaia seems to engender a ‘been-there, done-that’ reaction.3 Urry’s presentation prompted me to consider whether social scientists are re-engaging with Gaia theory beyond its significance as a truth-claim within modern environmentalism discourse.
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Notes
John Urry, ‘Order on the Edge of Chaos’, American Sociological Association Conference, (New York, 14 August 2007); James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (New York: Basic Books, 2006).
Stepehen Schneider, James Miller, Eileen Crist, Penelope Boston, ‘Preface’, in Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century, eds. S. Schneider, J. Miller, E. Crist and P. Boston (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), xiii–xvii.
Alan Irwin, Sociology and the Environment: A Critical Introduction to Society, Nature and Knowledge (Oxford: Polity Press, 2001), 180.
John Urry, Sociology Beyond Societies: Mobilities for the Twenty First Century (London: Routledge, 2000), 18.
Warren M. Hern, ‘Why Are There So Many of Us? Description and Diagnosis of a Planetary Ecopathological Process’, Population and Environment: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies 12, no. 1 (1990): 9–39.
See David Strahan, The Last Oil Shock: A Survival Guide to the Imminent Extinction of Petroleum Man (London: John Murray Publishers, 2007)
Vaclav Smil, The Earth’s Biosphere: Evolution, Dynamics, and Change (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002)
James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity (New York: Basic Books, 2006)
E.O. Wilson, The Creation: An Appeal to Save Life on Earth (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007).
Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, ‘The Atmosphere as Circulatory System of the Biosphere — The Gaia hypothesis’, CoEvolution Quarterly 6 (1975): 30–40
Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, ‘Is Mars a spaceship, too?’, Natural History 85 (1976): 86–90
Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, ‘The View from Mars and Venus’, The Sciences 17 (1977): 10–13
Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock, ‘Atmospheres and Evolution’, in Life in the Universe, ed. J. Billingham (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 79–100
James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, ‘Atmospheric Homeostasis By and for the Biosphere: The Gaia Hypothesis’, Tellus 26 (1974): 2–10
Andrew Watson, James Lovelock, and Lynn Margulis, ‘Methanogenesis, fires and the regulation of atmospheric oxygen’, BioSystems 10 (1979): 293–8.
Hans Peter Duerr, Dreamtime: Concerning the Boundary Between Wilderness and Civilization. Trans. F. Goodman (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987)
Alphonso Lingis, The Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994)
Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal. Trans. K. Attell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004)
Peter C. van Wyck, Primitives in the Wilderness: Deep Ecology and the Missing Human Subject (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997).
James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back — and How We Can Still Save Humanity (Santa Barbara, CA: Allen Lane, 2006).
Andrew Free and Nicholas Barton, ‘Do Evolution and Ecology Need the Gaia Hypothesis?’ Trends in Ecology and Evolution 22, no. 11 (2007): 611–19.
C. Barlow and Tyler Volk, ‘Gaia and Evolutionary Theory’, BioScience, 42 (1992): 686–93.
Margulis quoted in Lawrence E. Joseph, Gaia: The Growth of an Idea (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 7.
Paul Lowman and Neil Armstrong, Exploring Earth, Exploring Space (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 279.
Tyler Volk, ‘Gaia is Life in a Wasteland of By-products’, in Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century, eds. S. Schneider, J. Miller, E. Crist and P. Boston (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004), 27–36
James Lovelock, ‘A Physical Basis for Life Detection Experiments’, Nature 207, no. 4997 (1965): 568–70.
Andrew Free and Nicholas Barton, ‘Do Evolution and Ecology Need the Gaia Hypothesis?’ Trends in Ecology and Evolution 22, no. 11 (2007): 611–19.
James W. Kirchner, ‘The Gaia Hypothesis: Can It Be Tested?’ Review of Geophysiology 27 (1989): 223–35.
Timothy M. Lenton, ‘Clarifying Gaia: Reflection With or Without Natural Selection’, in Scientists Debate Gaia: The Next Century, eds. S. Schneider, J. Miller, E. Crist and P. Boston (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004), 16.
See Timothy M. Lenton, ‘Gaia and Natural Selection’, Nature 394 (1998): 439–47
For the counter-argument that reproduction is spatial replication and metabolism is temporal replication see Vilmos Csányi, Evolutionary Systems and Society (Durham, DC: Duke University Press, 1989)
Vilmos Csányi and George Kampis, ‘Autogenesis: The Evolution of Replicative Systems’, Journal of Theoretical Biology 114 (1985): 303–21.
V. Csányi, Evolutionary Systems and Society (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989)
V. Csányi, and G. Kampis, ‘Autogenesis: The Evolution of Replicative Systems’, Journal of Theoretical Biology 114 (1985): 303–21.
S. Schneider and R. Londer, The Coevolution of Climate and Life (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 2004)
Stephan Harding, Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia (Totnes, Devon: Green Books, 2006), 226–7.
Peter C. van Wyck, Primitives in the Wilderness: Deep Ecology and the Missing Human Subject (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997).
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© 2009 Myra J. Hird
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Hird, M.J. (2009). Microontologies of Environment. In: The Origins of Sociable Life: Evolution After Science Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230242210_6
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