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Praise be to Gaia: Reviews of Here on Earth and The Legacy

Jack Nicholls December 07

I am not without hope, for I believe that as we come to know ourselves and our planet we will be moved to act.
–Tim Flannery, Here on Earth

I believe that we are capable of even greater things, to rediscover our home, to find ways to live in balance with the sacred elements, and to create a future rich in the joy, happiness and meaning that are our real wealth.
–David Suzuki, The Legacy

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It is December, and weary negotiators are gathering in Cancun for their sixteenth annual attempt to hammer out a deal on climate change. For two decades now, scientists have been warning that humanity teeters on the edge of catastrophe. Yet with each year that passes, more carbon builds up in the atmosphere, the oceans become more acidic, and more forests are razed. Our inaction is also compounding another problem, one yet to receive the public recognition it deserves: it is leading to a dangerous proliferation of celebrity science books on the environment. If something is not done soon, these books will choke our libraries, bury our bookstores, and irreversibly depress our adolescents.

The latest high-profile releases in this genre come from Tim Flannery and David Suzuki, who between them have already racked up over fifty publications. Flannery’s Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope and Suzuki’s The Legacy have a great deal in common. Both opt for a sweeping history of humanity’s troubled relationship with our planet, from man’s first exodus from Africa until the present day. The books ask, ‘how have we historically interacted with our environment?’ and, ‘can we do things differently in the future?’ Unsurprisingly, the answers seem to be ‘destructively’ and ‘maybe’.

Flannery’s Here on Earth: An Argument for Hope is the longer and more scientific of the pair. It promotes the ‘Gaia Hypothesis’, espoused by James Lovelock, which postulates that our planet should be thought of as a single, self-regulating organism. As Flannery admits, this is a pretty marginal theory among the scientific community, and he stresses that the term ‘Gaia’ should not be taken literally to mean a sentient being. To Flannery, a Gaian future is one where humanity coexists harmoniously and sustainably with our planet. He then contrasts this with the more cynical ‘Medean hypothesis’, (named, somewhat arbitrarily, after the filicidal mother from Greek mythology), which holds that species which are too successful at reproducing are doomed to destroy themselves. Does humanity face a Gaian or Medean future? Well, Flannery doesn’t really know, so after an often-fascinating amble through our environmental history his conclusion is little more than a shrug of the shoulders.

The Legacy covers much the same ground, although more concisely. The book is adapted from a ‘final lecture’ Suzuki gave this year, and whether or not it does prove to be his swan-song, it is a distillation of a lifetime of thought on the environment. It is also a very personal book, and Suzuki does not hesitate to remind us that he is now an ‘elder’ facing his own impending death. His personal reminiscences, of days when the rivers were stocked with fish and Suzuki could bike down to the local swamp, are among The Legacy’s most powerful passages. The strength of his writing makes old ideas interesting again, but ultimately The Legacy contains little that Suzuki has not said before. We are poisoning the planet. We should stop doing it.

For me, Here on Earth and The Legacy are more notable for what they say about the state of the environmental movement than they are on their own merits. In relegating climate change to the sidelines, these books mark a new trend in popular environmentalism. In recent years, all the environmental bestsellers focused on global warming, and in particular on the technological and social changes needed to combat it. George Monbiot’s Heat, Al Gore’s Our Choice, James Hansen’s Storms of my Grandchildren and Flannery’s own The Weather-Makers offered a host of practical suggestions to policy-makers, and for a while there was a palpable feeling in the air that ‘we had the answers’. As Flannery himself writes in Here on Earth: ‘I’d never felt as optimistic about the prospects of humanity overcoming its greatest challenge as I did in September 2009’.

What came next, of course, was the grand shemozzle that was the Copenhagen Conference. The failure to negotiate a binding climate treaty at that summit stalled international negotiations in their tracks; and in subsequent months both the Australian and US governments abandoned their attempts to move emissions reduction legislation through hostile legislatures.

The result has been a receding of society’s expectations that anything can or will be done about the most serious environmental crisis in our history. Suzuki and Flannery, both writing in the aftermath of Copenhagen, cannot help but be aware of this. Their response has been to shift emphasis, to promote a more spiritual perspective of our planet. Here on Earth and The Legacy do not offer detailed solutions to our current problems, although both urge a reformation of our economic thinking. Rather, the books offer a kind of amorphous optimism. It is love, both authors tell us helpfully, that shall bind us together and bring about the changes we need.

Suzuki has the knack for making this stuff resonate, and I’ll admit to wiping away a few tears by the end of The Legacy. Flannery, though, is attempting something a little more hard-nosed, and his argument for hope would have been the stronger with a more definitive framework for how we can become a Gaian species.

Is this the approach that the environmental movement needs right now? I am not sure. I suspect that, rather than inspiring new converts, these books will sell mainly to lapsing environmentalists looking to renew their faith. Suzuki and Flannery decry our consumer culture, and in that spirit I would personally recommend these books only to that shrinking segment of the population which has not encountered these ideas before. Of course, Christmas is approaching. Suzuki’s book in particular, small and elegant as it is, would make an excellent stocking-stuffer for a family member in need of an environmental epiphany. Distributing a few copies to the negotiators at Cancun couldn’t do any harm either.


 

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