Lovelock, the furious (green) prophet
by asi
As part of my work on the EST account, I browsed some ‘green’ literature and picked up James Lovelock’s recent book, The revenge of Gaia. He has an astonishing perspective on the fate of earth, which, (In a nutshell), he views as a single, self regulating system (Gaia as a metaphor for the living earth) comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components, which apprears to have the unconscious goal of regulating the climate and chemistry at a comfortable state for life. And we humans are abusing the earth and pushing Gaia to a point where soon we won’t be welcome here anymore. Man…if half of his theory is accurate, we’re totally screwed. Seriously.
What i find interesting here,(more of a frustrating, actually) from a social-psychological point of view, is the billion dollar question – why are we, as humans, so slow to react? why are we so resistant to change? Why are we so bloody stupid and ignorant sometimes? These questions of course are extremely relevant to many other human affairs, like the march of folly to war in the name of whatever, or the fact that we’re sitting comfortably on our white asses, drinking skinny soya latte, and cherish our ipods more than we cherish other human beings that die in their thousands every day from Aids or hunger (I’m no exception apart from the latte – prefer strong espresso). And Lovelock, probably too old and too worried to give a damn about political correctness, like one of these furious prophets from the Bible, gives his spot-on explanation:
"We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruelest of ways for the good of our tribe….Tribal behaviour is surely written in the language of our genetic code, or why else would we as a mob or a crowd do the evil things that only psychopath would do alone?"
I think that in the case of the environment or adopting ‘green’ bahaviour, we simply haven’t reach the ‘tipping point’ as Gladwell suggets in his book. Ignorance mixed with lack of social-national prioritization hold this issue on the outskirts of mainstrem. Apparently, we are very very slow to react in the absence of eminent danger, and care for the environment hasn’t reach this wonder threshold, that moment when ideas, trends or social behaviours tip and spread like wildfire. I hope it will happen soon – gosh, that Lovelock really scared me…
Sometime, when i read a good, eloquent piece of humanism (that is, something that some very clever person wrote with the aim of a change for good) I have this childish hypothetical thought of what if all human beings would have read that book? would that make the change? is it only ignorance that holds us from making this world a better place or is Lovelock’s rightly argues that our destructive tribalism still determines our collective thinking and behaviour?
I think there is far simpler explanations to do with need for governments to institute change at a macro level whilst preserving national interests [we don't need to go into some half-baked biological determinism]. pushing the opportunity cost of not instituting the changes becomes more difficult when the scientific community disagree on the ‘cost’ itself, not to mention the difficulty of selling the ‘cost’ over an epoch, over more than a generation when we’re so used to short-termist solutions. in short: we’re screwed. to mitigate the awfulness of it all we could do worse than get some bloody good comms/brand people to actually sell it into the world as a whole…. a big brief.
I guess I must still be a child because I always wonder how the world would be like if we all thought the same in terms of just simply being kind to one another. Is that too much to ask these days? I’ll definitely have to check out Lovelock’s book. Thanks for sharing!