medicine for a feverish planet: kill or cure?

James Lovelock talking about planetary scale engineering, or ‘medicine’ to cure an ailing planet, in the UK Guardian.

What are the planetary health risks of geoengineering intervention? Nothing we do is likely to sterilise the Earth, but the consequences of planetary scale intervention could hugely affect humans.

Putative geoengineers are in a position similar to that of physicians before the 1940s. The author-physician Lewis Thomas remarkably described in his 1983 book, The Youngest Science, the practice of medicine before the Second World War. There were only five effective medicines available: morphine for pain, quinine for malaria, insulin for diabetes, digitalis for heart disease and aspirin for inflammation and very little was known of their mode of action. For almost all other ailments, there was nothing available but nostrums and comforting words.

At that time, despite a well-founded science of physiology, we were still ignorant about the human body or the host–parasite relationship it had with other organisms. Wise physicians knew that letting nature take its course without intervention would often allow natural self-regulation to make the cure. They were not averse to claiming credit for their skill when this happened.

I think the same may be true about planetary medicine; our ignorance of the Earth system is overwhelming and intensified by the tendency to favour model simulations over experiments, observation and measurement.

One thing to consider is that now in the US and probably most of the western world, the biggest illness is iatrogenic disease. That is, more people get ill from the side effects of treatment to cure another illness, than any other disease. That is the shape of modern medicine, that seems to be more about making money for the pharma companies, than any true notion of good health. Geoengineering could be the same.

Perhaps the saddest thing is that if we fail and humans become extinct, the Earth System, Gaia, will lose as much as or more than we do. In human civilisation, the planet has a precious resource. We are not merely a disease; we are, through our intelligence and communication, the planetary equivalent of a nervous system.

We should be the heart and mind of the Earth not its malady. Perhaps the greatest value of the Gaia concept lies in its metaphor of a living Earth, which reminds us that we are part of it and that our contract with Gaia is not about human rights alone, but includes human obligations.

That we do agree with. We should be replacing diverse forests, and helping the earth, not tearing them down and at best replacing them with monocultures.