Gaia's evil twin: Is life its own worst enemy?

by Peter Ward

 

THE twin Viking landers that defied the odds to land on Mars in 1976 and 1977 had one primary goal: to find life. To the disappointment of nearly all concerned, the data they sent back was a sharp dash of cold water. The Martian surface was harsh and antibiotic and there was no sign of life.

To two NASA scientists, James Lovelock and Dian Hitchcock, this came as no surprise - in fact, they would have been amazed to see any evidence of life on Mars. A decade before Viking, Lovelock and Hitchcock, both atmospheric scientists, had used observations of the Martian atmosphere to deduce that there could be no life on the planet.

From their research arose one of the most influential, ground-breaking scientific ideas of the 20th century - the Gaia hypothesis, named after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth, a nurturing "mother" of life. But is it correct? New scientific findings suggest that the nature of life on Earth is not at all like Gaia. If we were to choose a mythical mother figure to characterise the biosphere, it would more accurately be Medea, the murderous wife of Jason of the Argonauts. She was a sorceress, a princess - and a killer of her own children.

The Gaia story starts in the 1960s, when Lovelock and Hitchcock showed that the Martian atmosphere was in a state of chemical equilibrium - a stagnant pool of carbon dioxide with a dash of nitrogen but very little oxygen, methane or hydrogen. They contrasted it with our own, which they recognised as being in chemical disequilibrium, with CO₂ and oxygen levels in constant flux. The key driver of this flux is life: photosynthesis exchanges CO₂ for oxygen, and aerobic metabolism does the opposite. Without life, our atmosphere would radically change from the oxygen-rich and life-sustaining gaseous mix we breathe to one in chemical equilibrium - one that, like the Martian atmosphere, would be inimical to life.

Earth's atmosphere is not only in flux, it is welcoming to life, and has been for billions of years. Similarly, Earth's surface temperature, acidity and ocean chemistry seem to have been stable for billions of years, hovering around mean values that allow continued habitability. Pondering these implications, Lovelock began piecing together a novel view of life and its interaction with the planet that hosts it. Although he focused on Earth, his ideas have implications for any habitable planet, and he has spent the rest of his career honing them.

Stated briefly, the Gaia hypothesis is that life as an aggregate interacts with the physical environment in such a way that it not only keeps the Earth habitable but continually improves the conditions for life. It does this through a series of feedback systems similar to biological homeostasis, the mechanism by which living organisms maintain a stable internal environment. Those aspects that most affect the habitability of the planet - temperature, the chemical composition of the oceans and fresh water, and the make-up of the atmosphere - are not just influenced by life, they are controlled by it.

Lovelock's concept has evolved over time, and Gaia has speciated into several different hypotheses (see "The many faces of Gaia"). Within a decade of his first writings he elevated his hypothesis to the scientifically stronger Gaia theory. In the mid-1970s he described his view of things as follows: "The Gaia theory says that the temperature, oxidation state, acidity and certain aspects of the rocks and waters are kept constant, and that this homeostasis is maintained by active feedback processes operated automatically and unconsciously by the biota."

Lovelock eventually began to refer to the planet itself as some kind of superorganism. "The entire range of living matter... from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae could be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of maintaining the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts," he wrote in his 1979 book Gaia: A new look at life on Earth. In other words, the Earth is not simply a planet that harbours life, it is itself alive.

The idea was simple and elegant, and quickly attracted many adherents, both scientists and non-scientists. Some researchers saw in Gaia a new way of thinking about the cycles of organic components and elements. Some followed Lovelock's lead in searching for scientific support for the idea that life regulates conditions on the planet. Some, mainly non-scientists, saw in it a new view of how humans should relate to the planet and the rest of life. Some even found the face of god in the concept.

Gaia continues to generate scientific interest and debate: there have been three international conferences devoted to the hypothesis, the most recent in 2006.

The ground is shifting, though. A number of recent discoveries have cast serious doubt on the Gaia hypotheses. Two lines of research are especially damning: one comes from deep time - the study of ancient rocks - and the other from models of the future. Both overturn key Gaian predictions and suggest that life on Earth has repeatedly endured "Medean" events - drastic drops in biodiversity and abundance driven by life itself - and will do so again in the future (see a timeline of Medean events).

Let us turn first to the deep-time discoveries. One of the most powerful arguments made by Gaia proponents is that planetary temperatures remain steady and equable thanks to feedbacks that are caused, or at least abetted, by life.

 

The single most important of these various "thermostats" is the carbonate-silicate weathering cycle. Because of the constant volcanic activity that is a feature of our planet, there is an unceasing but variable input of CO₂ into the atmosphere. CO₂ is a potent greenhouse gas. Without some way of scrubbing it out, it would build up to the point where the Earth would experience runaway warming that would ultimately cause the oceans to boil away - the fate of Venus some 4 billion years ago.

That scrubbing is provided largely by chemical weathering of silicate-rich rocks such as granite. This weathering drives a chemical reaction with CO₂ that removes the gas from the atmosphere and locks it away as limestone (calcium carbonate).

The rate of this reaction is increased by land plants, whose roots break up rock and allow water and CO₂ to penetrate. Plants also directly remove CO₂ from the atmosphere through photosynthesis.

So far, so Gaian. But as scientists have made ever more precise estimates of past global temperatures, the constancy predicted by Gaia theory has been found wanting. In fact there has been a rollercoaster of temperatures, caused by the evolution of new kinds of life (see a timeline of Medean events).

Around 2.3 billion years ago, for example, Earth endured a gigantic episode of glaciation that lasted 100 million years. It was so intense that the oceans froze completely, creating a "snowball Earth". The cause was life itself.* Around 200 million years earlier, evolution had come up with a novel way to make a living: photosynthesis, the process that uses the energy in sunlight to convert inorganic CO₂ into sugars. Photosynthetic microbes sucked so much heat-trapping CO₂ out of the atmosphere that the planet was plunged into the freezer.

A second episode of snowball Earth, brought about by the evolution of the first multicellular plants, happened 700 million years ago. Much later on, the evolution of land plants gave the climate a double whammy. As well as reducing CO₂ by photosynthesis, their deep roots dramatically increased weathering rates. The result was that soon after the appearance of forests near the end of the Devonian period (416 to 360 million years ago), the Earth entered an ice age that lasted 50 million years. The warm, verdant planet cooled rapidly and vast swathes of life died out. Not a very Gaian result.

In fact, for as long as life has existed it has been well able to devastate itself. Charles Darwin envisaged newly evolved life forms entering the world like a wedge, easing into a narrow vacant niche then expanding it gradually. Some do. But others enter like a sledgehammer, smashing away entire branches of the tree of life as they arrive.

This has been the way since the very earliest life. Around 3.7 billion years ago, we think a "methane crisis" nearly wiped life off the face of the Earth almost as soon as it had got going. Methane-belching microbes filled the atmosphere with a hazy smog that all but blocked out the sun (see a timeline of Medean events).

Perhaps the worst Medean event of all was precipitated by the same biological innovation that led to the first snowball Earth: the evolution of photosynthesis and the concomitant rise of atmospheric oxygen. Until that time, living things could not tolerate oxygen - it was a deadly poison to the microbes that constituted life before 2.5 billion years ago. With the evolution of photosynthesis a weapon of mass destruction was unleashed, creating the first, and perhaps the most extreme, of all mass extinctions. Life was devastated. All that survived were photosynthesisers and microbes that evolved rapidly to tolerate oxygen.

Even more damning to the Gaia hypothesis are new results from the study of the mass extinctions that have occurred since the evolution of animals 565 million years ago, of which there have been five big ones and about 10 more minor ones.

When in 1980 geologists made the ground-breaking discovery that the Cretaceous/Tertiary mass extinction of 65 million years ago was caused by an asteroid hitting the Earth, it soon became orthodoxy that all mass extinctions had been caused by extraterrestrial events: either impacts or, in the case of the Ordovician extinction 443 million years ago, a gamma-ray burst. These events are termed "Gaia neutral", because life has no way of preparing for them.

Researchers quickly identified impact craters apparently associated with mass extinctions, including the huge Permian/Triassic event of 251 million years ago and the Triassic/Jurassic event 200 million years ago. Yet the evidence that impacts cause mass extinctions has not stood up to scrutiny. Most are now seen as "microbial" mass extinctions, caused by huge blooms of bacteria belching poisonous hydrogen sulphide gas (New Scientist, 9 February 2008, p 40). These blooms thrive in the stagnant oceans that arise during intense episodes of global warming, such as the one at the end of the Permian, when prolonged volcanic activity vented vast amounts of CO₂ into the atmosphere. According to Gaia theory, life should have buffered these events. But it did not. Far from being Gaian, their existence seems to strongly support the Medean view, as do many other events in the history of life including, arguably, the human-induced mass extinction that is going on around us now (see a timeline of Medean events).

What of the future? Here too we can refute Gaia, and this is perhaps the most interesting - and shocking - of discoveries. Life seems to be actively pursuing its own demise, moving Earth ever closer to the inevitable day when it returns to its original state: sterile.

Life seems to be pursuing its own demise, moving Earth ever closer to the day it returns to being sterile.

How so? The starting point is that the sun is getting hotter. It has increased in brightness by about 30 per cent over the past 4.5 billion years and will carry on doing so. As the sun continues to burn brighter it will cause global warming, which will translate into increased weathering of silicate rocks - the rate of weathering rises with temperature. This will remove CO₂ ever faster from the atmosphere, aided and abetted by photosynthesis and plant roots.

Calamity strikes

At first, this removal of CO₂ will buffer the solar-induced temperature increase. But there will come a time - possibly as early as 500 million years from now - when there is not enough CO₂ in the atmosphere to support photosynthesis. When that calamitous day arrives, a very pronounced end of the world as we know it will begin.

The changes will be dramatic and catastrophic to life. Plants will wither and die, shutting off the main source of biological productivity and atmospheric oxygen. Animals will quickly follow. The loss of plants will also lead to a renewed build-up of CO₂ in the atmosphere, leading to a runaway greenhouse. Eventually, the temperature of the Earth's surface will exceed that of boiling water, and the last microbe will perish. Earth will be lifeless once more. This is very anti-Gaian, since the theory states that the presence of life on a planet should extend its habitability. The opposite is true.

If these models are correct, life on Earth is already in its old age. The adventure that started 3.8 billion years ago, and is still the only life we know of in the universe, has maybe another billion years to run. The long-term, and terminal, decline of CO₂ in the atmosphere has already started - the effect of burning fossil fuels is just a blip. Gaia is dying. Long live Medea. For now.

Interactive graphic: Medean extinctions throughout evolutionary history

The many faces of Gaia

There are at least three different variants of the Gaia hypothesis

Optimising Gaia

This early interpretation remains one of the "strongest" versions of Gaia theory. It implies that life actively controls environmental conditions, including purely physical aspects of the biosphere such as temperature, oceanic acidity and atmospheric gas composition, such that the Earth remains optimally habitable.

Self-regulating (or homeostatic) Gaia

A more recent and slightly weaker incarnation of the theory. Rather than life actively optimising conditions on the planet, it creates negative feedback systems that keep life-constraining factors such as temperature, and more recently atmospheric oxygen and carbon dioxide levels, within certain ranges.

Superorganism Gaia

The Earth isn't just a physical planet that supports life, it is itself alive. This is the strongest interpretation of the theory and tends to be viewed as unscientific.

Peter Ward is professor of biology at the University of Washington in Seattle. This article is based on his new book The Medea Hypothesis: Is life on Earth ultimately self-destructive? (Princeton University Press)

17 June 2009 from New Scientist Magazine issue 2713. Subscribe and get 4 free issues.

Interactive graphic: Medean extinctions throughout evolutionary history

* New Illuminati comments: Suppositions regarding causes and effects of individual extinction events are works in progress and the true nature of many such events is far from clear. The same applies to all suppositions about the end of the world, scientific or otherwise.

Cataclysm Image - http://a52.g.akamaitech.net/f/52/827/1d/www.space.com/entertainment/downloads/spaceart/images/cataclysm_640.jpg

For further enlightenment enter a word or phrase into the search box @  New Illuminati:

 http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com

or http://newilluminati.blog-city.com  (this one only works with Firefox)

And see

The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com

 New Illuminati – http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com

 New Illuminati on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/pages/New-Illuminati/320674219559  

The Prince of Centraxis – http://centraxis.blogspot.com

This material is published under Creative Commons Copyright (unless an individual item is declared otherwise by copyright holder) – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work & author - and please include a (preferably active) link to the original along with this notice. Feel free to make non-commercial hard (printed) or software copies or mirror sites - you never know how long something will stay glued to the web – but remember attribution! If you like what you see, please send a tiny donation or leave a comment – and thanks for reading this far…

From the New Illuminati – http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com

Gaia's last stand

Climate Change is Everybody’s Business by Helke Ferrie

 

 

“Hurt not the earth, neither the sea, nor the trees . . .” Revelations 7:3

 
When I was a child, the Earth was incomprehensibly huge, solid and eternal. Now it seems as fragile as a Christmas ornament. Within a hundred years most life forms and human civilization may be completely gone, as if they had never existed at all. As I write this, I cannot believe I am actually doing so.

The quantitative figures are simple: last year saw the largest increase of greenhouse gases on record – CO2 and methane (which is 24 times more potent than CO2). In one year they rose by 2.6 parts per million in our atmosphere, bringing the total to 381 ppm – the highest in 30 million years (BBC, March 14). Unless drastic action is taken immediately, we will reach the critical point within four decades, namely 500 ppm. Then greenhouse emissions will have increased average global temperature by possibly five degrees Celsius.

The oceans would no longer support life; the Greenland ice sheets would begin their unstoppable meltdown, splashing giant ice cubes into the oceans and drowning entire countries and the coastal cities of the world; the Atlantic thermohaline circulation current would collapse and stop regulating ocean temperatures and rain and cloud cycles would stop; most of the Earth would become a desert. One leading climatologist, James E. Hansen, director of NASA’s Goodard Institute of Space Studies, says this would “constitute practically a different planet.” (Washington Post, January 29). Maybe “a few breeding pairs of people will survive in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable,” predicts James Lovelock in The Revenge of Gaia, the subject of this article.

Lovelock has three maps showing life’s distribution on Earth – 1) during the last Ice Age when average temperatures were five degrees Celsius less than today, 2) the current Earth, and 3) what to expect in another 100 years. The first map shows life everywhere, even in all current deserts. The third map shows life supported at the tip of South America, a corner of southern Australia, the Himalayan regions of India and Tibet, a sliver of northeastern China, a thin long swath of Siberia, all of Northern Canada, and Alaska.  This understanding of climate change is based on international consensus which is: it’s happening and we did it with “combustion, cows and chainsaws,” as Lovelock puts it. Or, gasoline-powered vehicles and all economic activities causing CO2 production, the beef/poultry/pig industry, agricultural methods that increase methane output, and the relentless deforestation that removes the Earth’s air conditioning system.

The Bush administration has tried hard, and failed, to shut up climatologists. The Washington Post reported on April 6 that the White House requires clearance of all media requests to climatologists through the government first. Press releases coming from climatologists have key words routinely “purged” – terms like “global warming” or “climate change.” The US government wanted them removed even from the proceedings of the Seventh International Carbon Dioxide Conference held in Boulder, Colorado, last fall, but was ignored. NASA’s James Hansen told the New York Times, the Washington Post, and a university audience about this pressure to silence climatologists as being “more like Nazi Germany or the former Soviet Union than the United States.”

Confirmation of the reality of climate change actually comes from President Bush’s decision last year to replace the chairman of the world’s most influential climate policy body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), because oil companies didn’t like their “alarmist” pronouncements about global warming. To the administration’s shock, the successor Bush chose, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, announced that “without very deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions we are risking the ability of the human race to survive.” (World-Watch, March/April, 2006)

LEADING SCIENTIST SOUNDS THE ALARM

 
James Lovelock’s new book is in my opinion the most important book of our time — bar none. Not to take it seriously and act on it would be global suicide, or lunacy, or both. In the book, the end of civilization on planet Earth is projected as a real possibility within a century or so by climatologists on five continents. Alarmed? Damn right I am.

James Lovelock is a British scientist whose CV would take up most of this article. Among his many inventions is the electron capture detector which in the 1970s led him to discover the ozone depletion caused by chlorofluorocarbons. International treaties ended their manufacture. His work with NASA and the first space photographs of planet Earth led him to the insight that planet Earth is a self-regulating living system, just as our bodies are homeostatically regulated within critical limits. Lovelock founded a new discipline now called geophysiology. His friend, Nobel laureate William Golding, suggested the name Gaia, after the ancient Greek earth goddess.

Lovelock explains: “Gaia is the whole system of animate and inanimate parts ... a thin spherical shell of matter that surrounds the incandescent interior; it begins where the crust’s rocks meet the magma of the Earth’s hot interior, about a hundred miles below the surface, and proceeds another hundred miles outwards through the oceans and air to the even hotter thermosphere at the edge of space. Gaia includes the biosphere as a dynamic, physiological system that has kept our planet fit for life for over three billion years ... it is a physiological system because it appears to have the unconscious goal of regulating the climate at a comfortable state for life.”

At first Lovelock was considered a New Age crazy man, but in 2001 the world’s climatologists unanimously put this preamble in their Amsterdam Declaration: “The Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components.” Lovelock comments that “humanity and the Earth face a deadly peril, with little time left to escape ... [because] we live on a live planet that can respond to the changes we make either by canceling the changes, or by canceling us.”

Lovelock wrote his book between the December 2004 tsunami and the drowning of New Orleans, observing that those events, both due to destabilized greenhouse gases, “are nothing compared to what may soon happen; we are now so abusing the Earth that it may rise and move back to the hot state it was in fifty-five million years ago, and if it does, most of us, and our descendants, will die ... I speak as a planetary physician whose patient, the living Earth, complains of fever; I see the Earth’s declining health as our most important concern, our very lives depending upon a healthy Earth ... Even if we stopped immediately all further seizing of Gaia’s land and water for food and fuel production, and stopped poisoning the air, it would take the Earth more than a thousand years to recover from the damage we have already done, and it may be too late even for this drastic step to save us.

We, as a civilization are all too much like someone addicted to a drug that will kill us if continued and kill usif we suddenly withdraw.” The March 2006 issue of Scientific American reported: “If China and India were to catch up [with consumption levels in North America and the EU] then the resources of an entire second planet Earth would be required to sustain just those two economies.”

 

LOVELOCK’S BLIND SPOT

 
Great minds suffer from great blind spots. Mahatma Gandhi was so determined to restore India to its ancient simplicity, he seriously wanted to have the parks surrounding the elegant government buildings in Delhi handed over to farmers to plant vegetables. Dr. Theron Randolph, the father of environmental medicine, initially could not wrap his mind around the concept of detoxification and the need for nutrients in therapeutic doses, believing that in order to cure environmentally induced illness only avoidance of offending substances needed to be taught. Linus Pauling and Dr. Abram Hoffer finally changed his mind.

Similarly, Lovelock is not disturbed by the increase in cancer and recommends that nuclear power, being “clean energy”, is the ideal alternative to all the CO2 producing energy systems. He relegates environmental medicine and the organic movement to mere silliness; he is clueless about pesticides.

It would be foolish, however, not to examine his blind spots carefully. Blind spots in great minds highlight the important ideas these minds produced. What they don’t see clearly makes what they do see clearly even clearer. The sheer enormity of the destruction we may face within less than a century becomes very real when we observe Lovelock dismissing environmental health concerns, a soaring cancer rate, and organic agriculture as mere band-aids. How many people died at Chernobyl does not interest him because billions will be wiped off planet earth if average temperatures increase by five degrees. Nuclear powered generators would prevent this mass destruction but increase cancer rates. “So what?” says Lovelock.

The valuable insight that connects destructive climate change with his obvious ignorance in other matters is this: we are made for the Earth, the Earth is not made for us. We are one item in the biosphere, not its master. Being our true mother, all her children — from bacteria and butterflies to humans — are equally important or potentially annoying to Gaia; we are not her favourites. Expanding on the anthropomorphic metaphor, Lovelock observes: “Like an old lady who has to share her house with a growing and destructive group of teenagers, Gaia grows angry, and if they do not mend their ways, she will evict them.” 

 

 

MINIMIZING THE DAMAGE

 
Lovelock argues that “sustainable development” and “stewardship of the earth” are ludicrous notions. “To expect sustainable development or a trust in business as usual to be viable policies is like expecting a lung cancer victim to be cured by stopping smoking.” Needed instead is “sustainable retreat” and recognition of the arrogance inherent in the concept of stewardship. Lovelock demands that we re-write the Hippocratic Oath to state: “Do nothing that would harm the Earth.” He wants this warning “placed on every bulldozer, chainsaw, and on all energy-using devices [because] the well-being of Gaia must always come before that of ourselves: we cannot exist without Gaia.”

On the other hand, Prime Minister Stephen Harper appears to belong to the family of ostriches which leads most industrialized countries (he just cut programs for minimizing global warming by 40%). This potential global disaster cannot be left to politicians, who are the least qualified. Politicians are never stupid, in my experience, and I have found most of them to be very nice people, but their hands are tied by the economic delusion that celebrates theft on a planetary scale.

Imagine a Prime Minister announcing the need for reduction in energy use such as turning off the lights in all cities, stopping SUV production and phasing in large-scale public transit, stating that meat consumption must be reduced drastically, encouraging organic food, reducing all mining and logging activities, focusing on recycling absolutely everything, implementing waste reduction in packaging, and curbing advertising to cool the fever we call the economy. Imagine him then proudly announcing that any decline in earnings registered on the stock market and in annual GDP constitutes  environmental solvency and shows that civilization is succeeding, not failing. That  would, of course, be the break-out of sanity — it won’t happen.

 

GRASSROOTS ACTION  

 
We must do this ourselves. You and I. Every one of us. We are the consumers and only we can stop it. And apparently we want to: on April 9 the Detroit News reported that 71% of Americans believe global warming is real and caused by humans. Of those, 90% are willing to do whatever it takes to reduce global warming. Here are some suggestions:
 

1. In the December 6, 2005, issue of the Canadian Medical Association Journal the editor reported that “if every household in Canada replaced just one regular light bulb with an Energy Star-qualified compact fluorescent one, the reduction in pollution would be like taking 66,000 cars off  Canadian roads.” They emit 70% less CO2. Energy Star, initiated in 1991, is an international effort involving more than a hundred countries and thousands of businesses. Their website reports that in 2005 Americans switched to such bulbs and similarly designed appliances in such large numbers that the savings in energy costs to the consumer were equivalent to $12 billion (USD) in that one year alone and the reduction of greenhouse gases equivalent to  23 million cars. Last fall I changed all 32 bulbs in our house at a cost of about $300. By this March our monthly billing plan was reduced from $344 to 148. We then gave one of our daughters a big bag of these bulbs for Christmas with similar results. Now that hydro prices are going up, as indeed they must, these bulbs are what you and Gaia need. 
    
2. We decided some time ago to eat fish once a week, and meat at most once a month, and never beef. My culinary skills have vastly improved, I probably grew new brain cells under this creative stress, our meals are better, and the methane that arises from beef production is reduced as well. This planet cannot afford to feed even one billion people on meat, let alone six billion. What’s more important: your hamburger or planet Earth? 
    
3. Last December we placed magnetizers (about $200) on our 15-year old Volvo station wagon. They are the equivalent of chelation therapy for cars, cleaning pipes and hoses of accumulated debris and streamlining fuel flow. By the end of March our fuel consumption had gone from 550 km to 720 km per tank. As well, on February 16 the mandatory emissions inspection report showed drastic reductions in toxic emissions from our car — way below the allowable limits of even a new car. The magnets are easily transferred to a new car. (See Resources at end.) 
    
4. Here is my challenge to you. How would you like to join me in a campaign I have provisionally dubbed “Starlight Only by 2007”? (My e-mail address is Helke@inetsonic.com). The idea is to expand on Toronto Mayor David Miller’s excellent light-reduction program to save birds’ lives. I suggest, in addition, that Toronto to be the first city that turns off its lights after sundown, leaving only the most important street and emergency lights etc., so that one can walk through the city at night and see stars again. The reduction of CO2 emissions would be gargantuan. If Toronto were to do this, all other big cities in the world could do it. Lovelock’s demand to turn off the lights in the world, before Gaia turns the world off for us, would be met. 
    

One World

 

Resources :
R.C. Anderson, Mid-Course Correction
Chelsea Green, 1998. Featured in the documentary “The Corporation,” a Fortune 500 member and pioneer in planet-friendly industry.
E. Kolbert, “The Climate of Man”
three-part series in The New Yorker, April 25, May 2 and May 9, 2005. Best comprehensive survey of climate change.
J. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia
Penguin, 2006. The must-read book of our time.
R. Wright, A Short History of Progress
Anansi, 2004 Massey lectures; a Canadian perspective on global collapse.

 

From http://www.sonnenseite.com/index.php?pageID=72&article:oid=a5161&flash=true

 

images - http://www.alexgrey.com/a-gallery/8-24/gaia.jpg

http://www.mygreenaustralia.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/gaia-6.jpg

http://vitalitymagazine.com

 

 

 

For further enlightenment enter a word or phrase into the search box @  New Illuminati:

@  http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com (or click on any tag at the bottom of the page for direct references)

And see

The Her(m)etic Hermit - http://hermetic.blog.com

 New Illuminati – http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com

 New Illuminati on Facebook - http://www.facebook.com/pages/New-Illuminati/320674219559 

The Prince of Centraxis – http://centraxis.blogspot.com

This material is published under Creative Commons Copyright (unless an individual item is declared otherwise by copyright holder) – reproduction for non-profit use is permitted & encouraged, if you give attribution to the work & author - and please include a (preferably active) link to the original along with this notice. Feel free to make non-commercial hard (printed) or software copies or mirror sites - you never know how long something will stay glued to the web – but remember attribution! If you like what you see, please send a tiny donation or leave a comment – and thanks for reading this far…

From the New Illuminati – http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com