Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
with short-term constraints on their economies. In almost every country in the world, powerful forces have
the ear of government leaders. These are people who often don't want to look past next year's shareholder
reports. They have successfully painted even the most serious and conservative environmentalists as “save
the whales” loonies who are more concerned over a few tiny snail darters or spotted owls than the jobs of
thousands of workers. These are the same special interests and politicians who have stunted research and
development of renewable energy sources and improved, conservation-minded technologies. The simple
truth is that developing these new fields and technologies can create thousands of new jobs in high-growth,
high-tech industries instead of preserving a relatively small number of old jobs in dying businesses.
Twenty years ago, when faced with the first OPEC oil crisis, the United States and the West had an op-
portunity. The industrialized nations could have committed to the development of massive new alternative-
fuels programs, similar in scope to the effort that put men on the moon in the space of a decade. While
some halting movements toward conservation were initiated and some countries have undertaken ambi-
tious energy-conservation programs, a grand design fell by the wayside, the victim of shortsighted reliance
on quick fixes to get the Arabs to lower the price of oil.
When the Iranian political crisis of 1978 sent oil prices skyward once more, America's president Carter
started the United States on a more ambitious synthetic-fuel and solar-energy development program. But
subsequent Republican administrations gutted those programs, expecting private industry to take the lead,
and turning to “market forces” to initiate research and development. Needless to say, twenty years of op-
portunity have largely been squandered. American automakers have been dragged kicking and screaming
through every attempt to improve gasoline efficiency or to switch to alternative-energy autos. Efficient,
high-speed mass transportation has been put at the bottom of the list of the government's priorities. In
1992, Americans are still desperately addicted to foreign energy sources that fuel the greenhouse effect and
leave the American economy exposed to another regional upheaval such as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait.
Then there are people all over the world at the other end of the spectrum, those who are barely subsist-
ing. There is a real difference between the rich industrial nations trying to sustain their comfort level and
poor nations struggling to survive. For families in the poorest countries, the issue is simply to get through
the next day. They don't have time to worry about the ozone hole and the end of the rain forests or the
fact that the cutting of trees for firewood is hastening the spread of deserts and increasing the likelihood of
deadly floods.
Science has increasingly come to understand that the earth is a tightly interconnected collection of or-
ganisms. For every link that is removed or altered, the chain of life gets a little weaker. If we are to make
it as a species without taking too much of creation down with us, we had better start understanding these
connections and working on making them stronger right now.
Who, What, or Where Is Gaia?
Almost every culture has held a view of the earth as a living, all but sentient thing, not simply a place
where life happened to spring up. For want of a better term, we've called it Mother Nature.
In 1972, James Lovelock, a British scientist who had worked for NASA on moon and Mars projects,
gave our living organism Earth a different name: Gaia, the name of the Greek goddess of Earth. In his
topics
Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth
and
The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of the Living Earth
, Love-
lock promoted his hypothesis that the earth is an immense living organism, not simply a big hunk of rock
surrounded by gases. Lovelock's Gaia is self-regulating and self-changing. As Lovelock writes in
The Ages
of Gaia
, “Gaia theory forces a planetary perspective. It is the health of the planet that matters, not that of
