Wonderful op-ed in today’s NY Times on the year of earthquakes. The author, Simon Winchester, writest that 2004 has much in common with 1906, a similar year for seismic happenings across the globe.
Then the article goes deeper:
Plate tectonics as a science is less than 40 years old. It is possible that common sense suggests what science has yet to confirm: that the movement among the world’s tectonic plates may be one part of enormous dynamic system, with effects of one plate’s shifting more likely than not to spread far, far away, quite possibly clear across the surface of the globe..
Makes perfect sense to me. There is only a finite amount of Earth to go around. Did the stirrings at Mt. St. Helens recently predict the coming of the Sumatra quake? Could be. It’s humbling to think what an advanced system it must be, since modern man has yet to crack it. Moving on:
In recent decades, thanks largely to the controversial Gaia Theory developed by the British scientists James Lovelock, it has become ever more respectable to consider the planet as one immense and eternally interacting living system – the living planet, floating in space, every part of its great engine affecting every other, for good or for ill.
Mr. Lovelock’s notion…makes much of the delicacy of the balance that mankind’s environmental carelessness increasingly threatens. But his theory also acknowledges the somber necessity of natural happenings, many of which seem in human terms so tragically unjust, as part of a vast system of checks and balances.
I must admit I more or less buy into the Gaia theory. I believe in chaos, in the fundamental interconnectedness of all things, of really, REALLY complex-yet-deterministic systems. I wonder, though, what the implications truly are for the Gaia theory with respect to environmentalism. If Winchester is quoting Lovelock appropriately, then he’s assuming that mankind is somehow outside the system, ruining what would otherwise be a harmonious, stable planet. But how could that be? Unless man is descended from aliens, then we are part and parcel of Gaia, and therefore what we do to the earth MUST necessarily be part of the Gaia design, not somehow outside or above it.
This all reinforces my long-time theory that mankind’s destruction of nature is, well, completely natural. But we do have intellect, and therefore a choice. I have no doubt we’ll be able to adapt to survive in a desolate, tree-less, garbage-filled planet. But we could choose another future. This is why no one buys those environmentalists who preach apocalypse. It’s not about whether we destroy ourselves, it’s about what kind of survival we choose to have.
Me? I’ll take pristine air and snow-capped mountains any day.
