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from Natural Life magazine,
September/October 2010
From the Editor's Desk
 Adapting
to Climate Change or Solving It: Both Require Hope
One of my summer activities was to reduce the considerable height of the pile of
unread books sitting on my coffee table.
Unfortunately, some of the resultant
reading wasn’t your light beach chair stuff. In fact, some of it was downright
depressing. James Lovelock’s The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning
(Penguin, 2009) is a case in point. Lovelock, now in his 90s, is an independent
British scientist, inventor, author, and originator of the Gaia hypothesis,
which says that the biosphere is a self-regulating entity with the ability to
keep Planet Earth healthy. In this latest book, he describes his belief that
although the earth will survive global warming, “our wish to continue business
as usual will probably prevent us from saving ourselves.” So, says Lovelock, we
must adapt as best we can and try to ensure that enough of us survive to allow a
more capable species to evolve. To his mind, part of “business as usual” is what
he calls our useless fixation on conventional green ideas such as the use of
solar and wind energy. And the solution, he says, is nuclear energy, which isn’t
the only challenging idea he puts forth in this blunt little book.
Another thought-twisting book from my pile contradicts Lovelock’s put-down of
clean energy, but offers its own controversial viewpoint. As fat as The
Vanishing Face of Gaia is slim, and as hopeful as Lovelock’s book is bleak,
Aftershock: Reshaping the World Economy After the Crisis by Phillippe Legrain
(Little, Brown, 2010) is an incisive assessment of the global economic crisis
and the post-crisis world. Legrain, who is a writer, commentator, and consultant
specializing in global economic issues looks at what went wrong, and how to
learn from past mistakes to create a fairer, richer, greener world.
Part of the
solution, Legrain writes, is the replacement of fossil fuels with clean sources of
energy like wind, solar, and others. Interestingly, he notes that the clean tech
industry is global in nature, with money and markets that cut across national
boundaries. That leads to what is, for me, one of the challenging aspects of
this book: the idea that localism, therefore, “is the true enemy of the planet.” Legrain defines localism as “a closing of borders, societies, and minds” that
would inhibit our progress towards finding new ways to clean our air, eliminate
wars over oil, and improve everyone’s standard of living. (For Legrain, the goal
is not to reduce the Western standard of living, but to improve that of the rest
of the world...and he also embraces consumerism as the path to sustainability,
which I also find challenging.)
The fact is – notwithstanding Lovelock’s successful prediction and observation
of many changes to Gaia over the past fifty years – that nobody has a crystal
ball. So whether we see job number one to be reversing climate change or
adapting to it, the sorts of lifestyle changes we write about in Natural Life
are crucial to our future. And, for us, those changes include the enthusiastic
embrace of small-scale solar and wind, which we write about in this issue.
What’s even more important – and perhaps a bigger challenge than mounting solar
panels on our roofs or growing our own food – is for all of us to rediscover
some optimism about the future. Change is upon us. We can choose to see it as
frightening and incapacitating, or we can embrace the opportunities and move
forward with hope towards a more sustainable world.
Natural Life Editor
Wendy Priesnitz
Read Wendy Priesnitz's
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