Learning to Listen to the Land represents the sounding of an alarm. It's authors call on us to recognize the consequences of our actions, and inactions, and to develop a sense of connection with the earth.
Learning to Listen to the Land represents the sounding of an alarm. It's authors call on us to recognize the consequences of our actions, and inactions, and to develop a sense of connection with the earth.
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
Learning to Listen to the Land represents the sounding of an alarm. It's authors call on us to recognize the consequences of our actions, and inactions, and to develop a sense of connection with the earth.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781610912846 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Island Press |
| Publication date: | 04/22/2013 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 295 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Bill Willers is an author of several conservation books, a teacher, and works with the Superior Wilderness Action Network. He also attends and teaches workshops at environmental conferences.
Read an Excerpt
Learning to Listen to the Land
By Bill Willers
ISLAND PRESS
Copyright © 1991 Island PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61091-284-6
CHAPTER 1
The Earth as a Living Organism
James E. Lovelock
The idea that the Earth is alive may be as old as humankind. The ancient Greeks gave her the powerful name Gaia and looked on her as a goddess. Before the nineteenth century even scientists were comfortable with the notion of a living Earth. According to the historian D. B. McIntyre (1963), James Hutton, often known as the father of geology, said in a lecture before the Royal Society of Edinburgh in the 1790s that he thought of the Earth as a superorganism and that its proper study would be by physiology. Hutton went on to make the analogy between the circulation of the blood, discovered by Harvey, and the circulation of the nutrient elements of the Earth and of the way that sunlight distills water from the oceans so that it may later fall as rain and so refresh the earth.
This wholesome view of our planet did not persist into the next century. Science was developing rapidly and soon fragmented into a collection of nearly independent professions. It became the province of the expert, and there was little good to be said about interdisciplinary thinking. Such introspection was inescapable. There was so much information to be gathered and sorted. To understand the world was a task as difficult as that of assembling a planet-size jigsaw puzzle. It was all too easy to lose sight of the picture in the searching and sorting of the pieces.
Biodiversity (Washington, D.C.: National Academy Press, 1988).
When we saw a few years ago those first pictures of the Earth from space, we had a glimpse of what it was that we were trying to model. That vision of stunning beauty; that dappled white and blue sphere stirred us all, no matter that by now it is just a visual cliché. The sense of reality comes from matching our personal mental image of the world with that we perceive by our senses. That is why the astronaut's view of the Earth was so disturbing. It showed us just how far from reality we had strayed.
The Earth was also seen from space by the more discerning eye of instruments, and it was this view that confirmed James Hutton's vision of a living planet. When seen in infrared light, the Earth is a strange and wonderful anomaly among the planets of the solar system. Our atmosphere, the air we breathe, was revealed to be outrageously out of equilibrium in a chemical sense. It is like the mixture of gases that enters the intake manifold of an internal combustion engine, i.e., hydrocarbons and oxygen mixed, whereas our dead partners Mars and Venus have atmospheres like gases exhausted by combustion.
The unorthodox composition of the atmosphere radiates so strong a signal in the infrared range that it could be recognized by a spacecraft far outside the solar system. The information it carries is prima facie evidence for the presence of life. But more than this, if the Earth's unstable atmosphere was seen to persist and was not just a chance event, then it meant that the planet was alive—at least to the extent that it shared with other living organisms that wonderful property, homeostasis, the capacity to control its chemical composition and keep cool when the environment outside is changing.
When on the basis of this evidence, I reanimated the view that we were standing on a superorganism rather than just a ball of rock (Lovelock, 1972; 1979), it was not well received. Most scientists either ignored it or criticized it on the grounds that it was not needed to explain the facts of the Earth. As the geologist H. D. Holland (1984, p. 539) put it, "We live on an Earth that is the best of all possible worlds only for those who are well adapted to its current state." The biologist Ford Doolittle (1981) said that keeping the Earth at a constant state favorable for life would require foresight and planning and that no such state could evolve by natural selection. In brief, scientists said, the idea was teleological and untestable. Two scientists, however, thought otherwise; one was the eminent biologist Lynn Margulis and the other the geochemist Lars Sillen. Lynn Margulis was my first collaborator (Margulis and Lovelock, 1974). Lars Sillen died before there was an opportunity. It was the novelist William Golding (personal communication, 1970), who suggested using the powerful name Gaia for the hypothesis that supposed the Earth to be alive.
In the past ten years these criticisms have been answered—partly from new evidence and partly from the insight provided by a simple mathematical model called Daisy world. In this model, the competitive growth of light- and dark-colored plants on an imaginary planet is shown to keep the planetary climate constant and comfortable in the face of a large change in heat output of the planet's star. This model is powerfully homeostatic and can resist large perturbations not only of solar output but also of plant population. It behaves like a living organism, but no foresight or planning is needed for its operation.
Scientific theories are judged not so much by whether they are right or wrong as by the value of their predictions. Gaia theory has already proved so fruitful in this way that by now it would hardly matter if it were wrong. One example, taken from many such predictions, was the suggestion (Lovelock, 1972) that the compound dimethyl sulfide would be synthesized by marine organisms on a large scale to serve as the natural carrier of sulfur from the ocean to the land. It was known at the time that some elements essential for life, like sulfur, were abundant in the oceans but depleted on the land surfaces. According to Gaia theory, a natural carrier was needed and dimethyl sulfide was predicted. We now know that this compound is indeed the natural carrier of sulfur, but at the time the prediction was made, it would have been contrary to conventional wisdom to seek so unusual a compound in the air and the sea. It is unlikely that its presence would have been sought but for the stimulus of Gaia theory.
Gaia theory sees the biota and the rocks, the air, and the oceans as existing as a tightly coupled entity. Its evolution is a single process and not several separate processes studied in different buildings of universities.
It has a profound significance for biology. It affects even Darwin's great vision, for it may no longer be sufficient to say that organisms that leave the most progeny will succeed. It will be necessary to add the proviso that they can do so only so long as they do not adversely affect the environment.
Gaia theory also enlarges theoretical ecology. By taking the species and the environment together, something no theoretical ecologist has done, the classic mathematical instability of population biology models is cured.
For the first time, we have from these new, these geophysiological models a theoretical justification for diversity, for the Rousseau richness of a humid tropical forest, for Darwin's tangled bank. These new ecological models demonstrate that as diversity increases so does stability and resilience. We can now rationalize the disgust we feel about excesses of agribusiness. We have at last a reason for our anger over the heedless deletion of species and an answer to those who say it is mere sentimentality.
No longer do we have to justify the existence of the humid tropical forests on the feeble grounds that they might carry plants with drugs that could cure human disease. Gaia theory forces us to see that they offer much more than this. Through their capacity to evapotranspire vast volumes of water vapor, they serve to keep the planet cool by wearing a sunshade of white reflecting clouds. Their replacement by cropland could precipitate a disaster that is global in scale.
A geophysiological system always begins with the action of an individual organism. If this action happens to be locally beneficial to the environment, then it can spread until eventually a global altruism results. Gaia always operates like this to achieve her altruism. There is no foresight or planning involved. The reverse is also true, and any species that affects the environment unfavorably is doomed, but life goes on.
Does this apply to humans now? Are we doomed to precipitate a change from the present comfortable state of the Earth to one almost certainly unfavorable for us but comfortable to the new biosphere of our successors? Because we are sentient there are alternatives, both good and bad. In some ways the worse fate in store for us is that of becoming conscripted as the physicians and nurses of a geriatric planet with the unending and unseemly task of forever seeking technologies to keep it fit for our kind of life—something that until recently we were freely given as a part of Gaia.
Gaia philosophy is not humanist. But being a grandfather with eight grandchildren I need to be optimistic. I see the world as a living organism of which we are a part; not the owner, nor the tenant, not even a passenger. To exploit such a world on the scale we do is as foolish as it would be to consider our brains supreme and the cells of other organs expendable. Would we mine our livers for nutrients for some short-term benefit?
Because we are city dwellers, we are obsessed with human problems. Even environmentalists seem more concerned about the loss of a year or so of life expectation through cancer than they are about the degradation of the natural world by deforestation or greenhouse gases—something that could cause the death of our grandchildren. We are so alienated from the world of nature that few of us can name the wild flowers and insects of our locality or notice the rapidity of their extinction.
Gaia works from an act of an individual organism that develops into global altruism. It involves action at a personal level. You well may ask, So what can I do? When seeking to act personally in favor of Gaia through moderation, I find it helpful to think of the three deadly Cs: combustion, cattle, and chain saws. There must be many others.
One thing you could do, and it is no more than an example, is to eat less beef. If you do this, and if the clinicians are right, then it could be for the personal benefit of your health; at the same time, it might reduce the pressures on the forests of the humid tropics.
To be selfish is human and natural. But if we chose to be selfish in the right way, then life can be rich yet still consistent with a world fit for our grandchildren as well as those of our partners in Gaia.
CHAPTER 2The Current State of Biological Diversity
E. O. Wilson
Biological diversity must be treated more seriously as a global resource, to be indexed, used, and above all, preserved. Three circumstances conspire to give this matter an unprecedented urgency. First, exploding human populations are degrading the environment at an accelerating rate, especially in tropical countries. Second, science is discovering new uses for biological diversity in ways that can relieve both human suffering and environmental destruction. Third, much of the diversity is being irreversibly lost through extinction caused by the destruction of natural habitats, again especially in the tropics. Overall, we are locked into a race. We must hurry to acquire the knowledge on which a wise policy of conservation and development can be based for centuries to come.
To summarize the problem in this chapter, I review some current information on the magnitude of global diversity and the rate at which we are losing it. I concentrate on the tropical moist forests, because of all the major habitats, they are richest in species and because they are in greatest danger.
Biodiversity (Washington, D.C: National Academy Press, 1988)
THE AMOUNT OF BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY
Many recently published sources, especially the multiauthor volume Synopsis and Classification of Living Organisms, indicate that about 1.4 million living species of all kinds of organisms have been described (Parker, 1982; see also the numerical breakdown according to major taxonomic category of the world insect fauna prepared by Arnett, 1985). Approximately 750,000 are insects, 41,000 are vertebrates, and 250,000 are plants (that is, vascular plants and bryophytes). The remainder consists of a complex array of invertebrates, fungi, algae, and microorganisms (see Table 1). Most systematists agree that this picture is still very incomplete except in a few well-studied groups such as the vertebrates and flowering plants. If insects, the most species-rich of all major groups, are included, I believe that the absolute number is likely to exceed 5 million. Recent intensive collections made by Terry L. Erwin and his associates in the canopy of the Peruvian Amazon rain forest have moved the plausible upper limit much higher. Previously unknown insects proved to be so numerous in these samples that when estimates of local diversity were extrapolated to include all rain forests in the world, a figure of 30 million species was obtained (Erwin, 1983). In an even earlier stage is research on the epiphytic plants, lichens, fungi, roundworms, mites, protozoans, bacteria, and other mostly small organisms that abound in the treetops. Other major habitats that remain poorly explored include the coral reefs, the floor of the deep sea, and the soil of tropical forests and savannas. Thus, remarkably, we do not know the true number of species on Earth, even to the nearest order of magnitude (Wilson, 1985a). My own guess, based on the described fauna and flora and many discussions with entomologists and other specialists, is that the absolute number falls somewhere between 5 and 30 million.
A brief word is needed on the meaning of species as a category of classification. In modern biology, species are regarded conceptually as a population or series of populations within which free gene flow occurs under natural conditions. This means that all the normal, physiologically competent individuals at a given time are capable of breeding with all the other individuals of the opposite sex belonging to the same species or at least that they are capable of being linked genetically to them through chains of other breeding individuals. By definition they do not breed freely with members of other species.
This biological concept of species is the best ever devised, but it remains less than ideal. It works very well for most animals and some kinds of plants, but for some plant and a few animal populations in which intermediate amounts of hybridization occur, or ordinary sexual reproduction has been replaced by self-fertilization or parthenogenesis, it must be replaced with arbitrary divisions.
New species are usually created in one or the other of two ways. A large minority of plant species came into existence in essentially one step, through the process of polyploidy. This is a simple multiplication in the number of gene-bearing chromosomes—sometimes within a preexisting species and sometimes in hybrids between two species. Polyploids are typically not able to form fertile hybrids with the parent species. A second major process is geographic speciation and takes much longer. It starts when a single population (or series of populations) is divided by some barrier extrinsic to the organisms, such as a river, a mountain range, or an arm of the sea. The isolated populations then diverge from each other in evolution because of the inevitable differences of the environments in which they find themselves. Since all populations evolve when given enough time, divergence between all extrinsically isolated populations must eventually occur. By this process alone the populations can acquire enough differences to reduce interbreeding between them should the extrinsic barrier between them be removed and the populations again come into contact. If sufficient differences have accumulated, the populations can coexist as newly formed species. If those differences have not yet occurred, the populations will resume the exchange of genes when the contact is renewed.
Species diversity has been maintained at an approximately even level or at most a slowly increasing rate, although punctuated by brief periods of accelerated extinction every few tens of millions of years. The more similar the species under consideration, the more consistent the balance. Thus within clusters of islands, the numbers of species of birds (or reptiles, or ants, or other equivalent groups) found on each island in turn increases approximately as the fourth root of the area of the island. In other words, the number of species can be predicted as a constant X (island area)0.25, where the exponent can deviate according to circumstances, but in most cases it falls between 0.15 and 0.35. According to this theory of island biogeography, in a typical case (where the exponent is at or near 0.25) the rule of thumb is that a ten-fold increase in area results in a doubling of a number of species (MacArthur and Wilson, 1967).
In a recent study of the ants of Hispaniola, I found fossils of thirty-seven genera (clusters of species related to each other but distinct from other such clusters) in amber from the Miocene age—about 20 million years old. Exactly thirty-seven genera exist on the island today. However, fifteen of the original thirty-seven have become extinct, while fifteen others not present in the Miocene deposits have invaded to replace them, thus sustaining the original diversity (Wilson, 1985b).
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Learning to Listen to the Land by Bill Willers. Copyright © 1991 Island Press. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
About Island Press,Title Page,
Dedication,
Copyright Page,
Epigraph,
Foreword,
Introduction,
PART ONE - Nature and Biodiversity,
The Earth as a Living Organism,
The Current State of Biological Diversity,
Do We Really Want Diversity?,
The Future Is Today,
The End of the Lines,
How Big Is Big Enough?,
From The Arrogance of Humanism,
The Gift of Wilderness,
PART TWO - The Impossibility of Endless Growth,
Apollo's Eye View: Technology and the Earth,
From Nature and Madness,
The Futility of Global Thinking,
From Global Bioethics: Building on the Leopold Legacy,
Why We Have Failed,
From One Life at a Time, Please,
Every River I Touch Turns to Heartbreak,
Overpopulated America,
Waste a Lot, Want a Lot,
Population and Development Misunderstood,
PART THREE - Toward Holism and Sustainability,
Indigenous Peoples Are the "Miners' Canary" of the Human Family,
An Iroquois Perspective,
Restoration and Reunion with Nature,
Searching for Common Ground: Ecofeminism and Bioregionalism,
From Confessions of an Eco-Warrior,
Boundless Bull,
Grass-Roots Groups Are Our Best Hope for Global Prosperity and Ecology,
The Consummate Recycler,
From The Dream of the Earth,
About the Contributors,
About the Editor,
Permissions,
Index,
Also Available from Island Press,
Island Press Board of Directors,