Gaia's appeared on the board. Can I just say how very Gaia the volcanic ash thing was?

[Zix]

I mean, really. What with that and the oil spill it's like mom's sitting drumming her fingers patiently on the table saying "right, okay, you guys really just don't seem to be GETTING THE POINT. M'kay? What have we learned about OIL, boys and girls?"

It's exactly like that hurricane that passed through Florida a few years ago (I think it was Florida, am I mistaken? I'm not talking about Katrina, am I?) in a zig zag smashing up all the repub districts and not the dem ones!

It's like she's just not even trying to pretend! "HelllOOOO, Humanity...."

[aquart]

1. "Was"? Is.

[Zix]

2. Mmm, I guess. It's calmed down, we've been told over here...

[aquart]

8. Then why do they keep closing airports in Britain and Ireland?

It not only ain't over, the other one is starting to kick.

[Zix]

3. Also, does that observation constitute agreement?

:D :P

[tavalon]

4. BTW, the Gaia theory was hijacked by New Agers

While I myself practice an earth based religion, the "bunnies and light" aspects that come along with that grate on me. I call it NewAge SewAge. Most universities are intensely studying Lovelock's theory but they've changed the name to Earth Systems Interactions, because of the new agey aspects that grabbed onto his theory.

It's quite obvious that Earth isn't some dead rock upon which everything just sprang up, independently. It's a tight, highly complex system of checks and balances and I don't think we'll have enough time on this earth to fully understand just how complex and interlocked an organism it really is. Too bad, because the scientific understandings that are confirming Lovelock's theories are coming fast and furious. If we just had a few hundred years more, we might just have figured her out.

[Zix]

5. Yar, v v much so, mores the pity.

The scientific ideas behind his theory shouldn't really have been at all controversial, he was describing nothing more weird (or less weird) than a highly developed system of interlocking homeostases. There was nothing strange about that idea to me, when I heard it as a teenager, and now that I'm older and considerably more "woo", if you like, the Gaia hypothesis is something that I don't really regard as a spiritual one but a simple biological one.

I'd actually propose that the opponents of Gaia were primarily motivated by knee-jerk anti-spiritualism rather than an any particularly illogical flaw in Lovelock's theory.

[tavalon]

6. Funny thing though,

I first read about Lovelock's theory in The Green Egg (Church of All Worlds magazine) so I could have ended up as one of those mindless followers if I didn't read up on it further. But, come to think of it, I make a lousy mindless follower. I was raised Southern Baptist and left them when I was 19 because I was being expected to be mindless and subservient, two things I really suck at.

[Zix]

7. One wonders what other reasonable scientific ideas have been co-opted by the credulous...

...thus delegitimising them in the eyes of the "critical"...