from Natural Life magazine, September/October 2010
From the Editor's Desk
Adapting to Climate Change or Solving It: Both Require Hope
By Wendy Priesnitz
 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 challenging, if not 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 Magazine 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.
Wendy Priesnitz is the co-founder and editor of Natural Life Magazine. She is also the author of 13 books and a journalist with over 40 years of experience. This editorial was published in 2010.
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