Entry tags:

clash of ideologies, environmentalism, links

[BRIEF NOTE] On the joy of the old at the ruination of the young
Decca Aitkenhead's interview with James Lovelock in The Guardian ("'Enjoy life while you can'") has gotten quite a lot of negative reaction in the blogosphere.

Interviewers often remark upon the discrepancy between Lovelock's predictions of doom, and his good humour. "Well I'm cheerful!" he says, smiling. "I'm an optimist. It's going to happen."

Humanity is in a period exactly like 1938-9, he explains, when "we all knew something terrible was going to happen, but didn't know what to do about it". But once the second world war was under way, "everyone got excited, they loved the things they could do, it was one long holiday ... so when I think of the impending crisis now, I think in those terms. A sense of purpose - that's what people want."

At moments I wonder about Lovelock's credentials as a prophet. Sometimes he seems less clear-eyed with scientific vision than disposed to see the version of the future his prejudices are looking for. A socialist as a young man, he now favours market forces, and it's not clear whether his politics are the child or the father of his science. His hostility to renewable energy, for example, gets expressed in strikingly Eurosceptic terms of irritation with subsidies and bureaucrats. But then, when he talks about the Earth - or Gaia - it is in the purest scientific terms all.

"There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that's just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we'll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That's the source of my optimism."

What would Lovelock do now, I ask, if he were me? He smiles and says: "Enjoy life while you can. Because if you're lucky it's going to be 20 years before it hits the fan."

There's a few things that I find potentially objectionable about Lovelock's argument, like the assumption that it's completely futile to try to do anything about the environment and we may as well do whatever we want in the interim, or the equation of the current day with the jolly eve of the Second World War (death camps and V-2s and panzers, oh my!). I also wonder if, in his interview, Lovelock evidenced a sort of bias against the younger generations like myself, a sort of almost happy resignation to the fact, imagined or otherwise, that my age cohort is going to take it in the neck. That what I get, but I might be projecting from other conversations I've had with other, older people who have come to that same conclusion.

It's not surprising, I suppose, that the inventor of the Gaia hypothesis would be willing to countenance the idea of inevitable doom meted out by a superior entity. What sort of person would sound as borderline pleased by that in the way that he seems to sound?