1. |
Variation 1
03:05
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1. Introduction
Lewis Thomas: Prologue on the Moon
Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming membrane of bright blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberent thing in this part of the cosmos. If you could look long enough, you would see the swirling of great drifts of cloud, covering and uncovering the half-hidden masses of land. If you had been looking for a very long, geologic time, you could have seen the continents themselves in motion, drifting apart on their crustal plates, held aloft by the fire beneath. It has the organized self-contained look of a creature alive.
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2. |
Variations 2-3
05:17
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2. [instrumental - the birth of the orchestra]
3. Lovelock: The Idea, with first Chorale
The idea that the Earth is alive is at the outer bounds of scientific credibility, and Gaia theory is as out of tune with the broader humanist world as it is with established science. The idea is probably as old as humankind. But its first expression as a fact of science was by James Hutton. He is rightly remembered as the father of geology, but his idea of a living Earth was forgotten, or denied.
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3. |
Variation 4
01:33
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4. Eiseley’s Drama 1
It is an old idea in western thought, that man the microcosm reproduces in miniature the events of the macrocosm. It has been contended that James Hutton, as a medical man, applied this idea to the earth, treating it as a living organism with circulation, metabolism, and other correspondences to the organic world. It has been termed Hutton’s secret.
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4. |
Variation 5
02:31
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5. Lovelock: The Secret Aria
Just as we can hear the pulse, the blood pressure, the electrical activity of the heart, without interfering with the normal physiology of a human subject; so can we observe the circulation of the air, the oceans and the rocks. We can measure the seasonal pulsing of the carbon dioxide of the air as the plants breathe it in and the consumers breathe it out. We can follow the course of essential nutrients from the rocks to the ocean to the air and back again, and see how at each step different but interlinked systems are affected.
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5. |
Variation 7
06:35
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7. Lovelock: What is Gaia?
The name Gaia is not a synonym for the biosphere. Still less is Gaia the same as the biota, which is just the collection of all living things. The biota and the biosphere taken together form part but not all of Gaia. Just as the shell is part of a snail, so the rocks, the air and the oceans are part of Gaia. There is no clear distinction anywhere on the Earth’s surface between living and nonliving matter. There is merely a hierarchy of intensity going from the ‘material’ environment of the rocks and the atmosphere to the living cells. At some time early in the Earth’s history before life existed, the solid earth, the atmosphere, and the oceans were still evolving by the laws of chemistry alone. It was careering, downhill, to the lifeless steady state of a planet almost at equilibrium. Briefly, in its headlong flight through the ranges of chemical and physical states, it entered a stage favorable for life. At some special time in that stage, the newly formed living cells grew until their presence so affected the Earth’s environment as to halt the headlong dive towards equilibrium. At that instant, the living things and the rocks, the air and the oceans, merged to form the new entity, Gaia. Just as when the sperm merges with the egg, new life was conceived. Life is a planetary-scale phenomenon. On this scale it is near immortal and has no need to reproduce. There can be no partial occupation of a planet by living organisms. It would be as impermanent as half an animal. The presence of sufficient living organisms on a planet is needed for the regulation of the environment. Where there is incomplete occupation, the ineluctable forces of physical and chemical evolution would soon render it uninhabitable.
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6. |
Variation 8
00:42
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8. Eiseley’s Drama 3
Erosion was beginning to be faintly glimpsed as a power at work in nature, and there was persistent wonder about fossils, which were then called “formed stones.” The change which was to pass over human thinking, however, began in the skies -
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7. |
Variation 9a
02:11
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9. Lovelock - the Atmosphere Quartet
9a I. Infrared Signal Allegro
The concept that the earth is actively maintained and regulated by life on the surface had its origins in the search for life on mars. The messages that Viking returned to the earth only brought the chill news of life’s absence. We then looked at the Earth with fresh eyes, and found many things, including the radiation from the Earth of an infrared signal characteristic of the anomalous chemical composition of the atmosphere. This unceasing song of life is audible to anyone with a receiver, even from outside the solar system.
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8. |
Variation 9b
02:56
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9. Lovelock - the Atmosphere Quartet
9b. II. The Chemical Cappella
The least complex and most accessible part of a planet is its atmosphere. Mars’ and Venus’ are dominated by carbon dioxide, with only small proportions of oxygen and nitrogen. But more important, both have atmospheres close to the chemical equilibrium state. The Earth, by contrast, has an atmosphere dominated by nitrogen and oxygen. A mere trace of carbon dioxide is present, far below the expectation of planetary chemistry alone.
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9. |
Variation 9c
03:00
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9. Lovelock - the Atmosphere Quartet
9c. III. Stained Glass Aria
We all take our first breath of life sustaining air and from then on take it for granted. We are confident it will be there to breathe as constant in composition as the Sun is constant in its rising and setting. Air is invisible, almost intangible, but if you look at it from above, from space, you see it as something new, something unexpected. It is the perfect stained glass window of the world, but it is really also a strange mixture of unstable, almost combustible gases. My flash of enlightenment was that to keep constant something must be regulating it and that life at the surface somehow was involved.
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10. |
Variation 10
01:03
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10. Eiseley’s Drama 4
Hutton saw a bit of soil carried away by a mountain brook, he saw the wind endlessly polishing and eroding stones on the high flanks of the world. If a leaf fell he knew where it was bound, and multiplied it mentally by ten thousand leaves in ten thousand thousand autumns. For him and him alone, the water dripping from the cottagers’ eaves had become Niagaras falling through unplumbed millennia. Every particle in the world was hurrying somewhere. “Nature,” he wrote simply, “lives in motion.”
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11. |
Variation 11
01:22
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12. |
Variation 14
01:31
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14. Lovelock: The Chain of Events
The early reaction, soon after the Gaia hypothesis was introduced in the early 1970s, was ignorance in the literal sense. For the most part the Gaian idea was ignored by professional scientists. Gaia had first been seen from space and the arguments used were from thermodynamics. To me it was obvious that the Earth was alive in the sense that it was a self-organizing and self-regulating system. To Ford Doolittle, from his world of molecular biology, it was equally obvious that evolution by natural selection could never lead to “altruism” on a global scale. To many scientists Gaia was a teleological concept, one that required foresight by the biota. This was a final condemnation. Teleological explanations, in academe, are a sin against the holy spirit of scientific rationality.
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13. |
Variation 15
01:08
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15. Eiseley’s Drama 6
When the Divine Maker was retired from the earthly scene by science, leaving only secondary causes to operate nature for him, men, animals, and the celestial machine were no longer to be quite what they had been in the days of supernatural intrusion. The Microcosm would no longer repeat the Macrocosm. The celestial clocks would no longer chime in perfect order.
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14. |
Variation 16
03:52
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16. Lovelock: The Colligative Chorale
All collections of living things show properties unexpected from a knowledge of a single one of them. Homeostasis is a colligative property of life. All forms of life incessantly modify the physical and chemical environment. Gaia is forever changing as life and the Earth evolve together.
(end of Act I)
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15. |
Variation 17
00:39
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17. Lovelock: Top Secret Instincts
The concept of Gaia is entirely linked with the concept of life. I have long thought that the answer to the question “What is life?” was deemed so important to our survival that it was classified “top secret” and kept locked up as an instinct in the automatic levels of the mind.
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16. |
Variation 21
00:24
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17. |
Variation 22
01:05
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22. Lovelock Interlude: to Emily, a love song
[One critic referred to my first book scathingly as a fairy story about a Greek goddess. In a way he was right. It was also a long letter to a yet unknown love.............]
Emiliana huxleyii, known by her friends as Emily, is one of the more important parts of the biota. Blooms of these phytoplankton cover parts of the sea; their presence powerfully affects the environment, through their capacity to facilitate the removal of carbon dioxide from the air, and their production of dimethyl sulfide, which acts to nucleate clouds on the sea. Anything affecting the cloud cover over the seas could powerfully affect the climate of the Earth. Calculations to estimate the effect that the present natural emissions of dimethyl sulfide could have suggest that it is comparable to the whole carbon dioxide greenhouse, but in opposition to it. Dimethyl sulfide, made by Emily, is also now known to be the major bearer of the element sulfur to the land from the sea (a mineral without which we cannot live - Emiliana - Emily - Emily, my love!).
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18. |
Variation 24
03:27
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24. Lovelock; Following the thread
If Gaia exists, the relationship between her and man, a dominant animal species, and the possibly shifting balance of power between them, are questions of obvious importance. But this is really written more to stimulate. Gaia theory is for those who like to walk and stare, or simply stand, to wonder about the Earth and the life it bears, and speculate about the consequences of our presence here.
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19. |
Variation 25
06:17
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20. |
Variation 26
02:31
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26. Eiseley’s Song II; In the Willow Thicket
Species died irregularly like individual men over the long and scattered waste of eons. And they must be replaced in as scattered a fashion as their deaths. Creation and its mystery could no longer safely be relegated to the past. It might now reveal itself to man at any moment in a farmer’s pasture, or a willow thicket. By the comprehension of death man was now beginning to glimpse another secret. The common day had turned marvelous. Creation - whether seen or unseen -must be even now about us in the prosaic world of the present.
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21. |
Variation 27
00:57
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27. Eiseley’s Drama 10
The individual variation which all organisms revealed, the hereditary alterations produced by the breeder’s art, the unreturning fossils in the rocks, were finally combined in the minds of Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace with the world of competitive struggle, with the concepts of adaptation and plenitude which were now seen to eternally jostle the living in and out of existence.
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22. |
Variation 28
01:29
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28. Lovelock’s Variation: Adapting Darwin
Evidence shows the earth’s crust, oceans, and air to be either directly the product of living things or else massively modified by their presence. Consider how the oxygen and nitrogen of the air come directly from plants and microorganisms, and how the chalk and limestone rocks are the shells of living things once floating in the sea. Life has not adapted to an inert world determined by the dead hand of chemistry and physics. We live in a world that has been built by our ancestors, ancient and modern, and which is continuously maintained by all things alive today. Organisms are adapting in a world whose material state is determined by the activities of their neighbors. On a planetary scale, the coupling between life and its environment is so tight that the tautologous notion of adaptation is squeezed from existence.
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23. |
Variation 29
00:42
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24. |
Variation 31
03:13
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31. Lovelock: The Redwood Chorale
You may find it hard to swallow the notion that anything as large and apparently inanimate as the Earth is alive. Surely, you may say, the Earth is almost wholly rock and nearly all incandescent with heat.
Let the image of a giant redwood tree enter your mind. Surely alive, but 99 percent dead. The great tree is an ancient spire of dead wood, made of lignin and cellulose by the ancestors of the thin layer of living cells that constitute its bark. How like the earth, and more so when we realize that many of the atoms of the rocks, far down into the magma, were once part of the ancestral life from which we all have come. Let the image of a giant redwood enter your mind.
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25. |
Variation 32
11:37
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32. Lovelock: The Gaian Variations, or Divisions of the Ground
It took the view of the earth from space to give us the personal sense of a live planet on which the air, the living things, the oceans, the rocks, all combine in one as Gaia.
As we move in towards the Earth from space, first we see the atmospheric boundary; then the borders of an ecosystem such as the forests; then the skin or bark of living animals or plants; further in are the cell membranes; and finally the nucleus of the cell and its DNA. If life is defined as a self-organizing system characterized by an actively sustained low entropy, then, viewed from outside each of these boundaries, what lies within is alive.
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Nathan Currier New York, New York
Nathan Currier has won many awards, such as the Rome Prize, Guggenheim and NEA.
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