It has been a wonderful Christmas in warm sunny Naples Florida. We are at my mother in laws staying in a beautiful condo on the Gulf of Mexico with my wife, mother and more family to come later. The food has been great and I received several books on science as presents including Lovecock’s latest rendition of his original book on Gaia. I am a believer in Gaia or that all the biology of Earth forms a single mega-organism. Often, commuting down route 128 I have felt like a mindless corpuscle being swept along as a small part of some gigantic organism. We are ourselves composed of billions of relatively independent living organisms. Although the environments are artificial, each can live independently of our body in the proverbial Petri plate. So why not accept the mega organism Gaia which is also composed of individual organisms all working together to make the Earth compatible with existing life? There is considerable evidence that for over 2 billion years life has been altering the environment to keep it compatible with living organisms. The Earth is chemically out of balance and kept that way be living organisms. There are many concerns today about our effect on the environment and our pushing it away from some “natural” state. Pushing the environment away from some “natural” sate is what life has been doing for the last 2 billion years. I am not for every change our species has wrought on the Earth but we should be careful that our environmentalism doesn’t create more problems than it solves. In Brazil there has been a push for ancient slash and burn farming rather than modern fertilizer based agriculture. This has resulted in thousands of ancient species being eliminated by destruction of the ran forest. It would have been better to farm less land intensively and left the rain forest alone.
Yesterday I was out on the Gulf with 20 other people supposedly deep sea fishing. No fish was hurt. Not a one of us caught anything and some lost. The sea was very rough with swells higher than the boat. Our trip out was directly reminding me of past experiences on horses who were intent on my removal. Our deranged captain was providing a ride similar to that on a bucking bronco. It was amazing that the guy next to me could throw up so much and for so long. Counting the bait that was lost and the digestive juices expelled, we put more in than we took out. The fish had nothing to fear. I did see one large sea turtle but other than the pelicans and sea gulls, no other sea life.
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