Nature, Gaia, Plagues, and People: Three Books on a Path to EcoHealth
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Ó 2012 International Association for Ecology and Health
Book Reviews
Nature, Gaia, Plagues, and People: Three Books on a Path to EcoHealth In my life, I have read many books, though today I can scarcely find time to read reviews. For this essay, I was asked to reflect on three works that have especially influenced my thinking, steering it towards my current understanding of and sympathy with EcoHealth. The first is A Black Bear’s Story (Liers 1962), the second is the first of many books about Gaia by James Lovelock (Gaia: a New look at Life on Earth) (Lovelock 1979), and the third is the historian William McNeil’s Plagues and Peoples (McNeill 1976). A Black Bear’s Story was given to me as a primary school prize in the early 1960s. It is the first substantial story I can remember reading about nature, a book illustrated by drawings of the life of four bears roaming and denning in the Lake Superior wilderness. It was politically incorrect; for example by naming the main characters and endowing them with emotions and consciousness. I particularly recall the first encounter of the male bear (Koda) with man. Later I observed a reaction against the ‘‘anthropomorphising’’ of animals, but I think it may now be more accurate to discuss the ‘‘animalising’’ of humans (de Waal 2009). Today there is overwhelming evidence that nonhuman animals have emotions (as recognised by Darwin), consciousness and that several species use tools (Haslam et al. 2011). Humans have the greatest capacity for language, a particularly dextrous hand, and a comparatively long life, but there is more of a continuum between our own species and others than the great gulf that was formerly proclaimed. I read the second book in this trio (Gaia: a New Look at Life on Earth) when I was a junior doctor, in the late 1980s. At that time I was completely ignorant of the great Russian
scientist Vladimir Vernadsky’s book, The Biosphere (Vernadsky 1998 (first published 1926)), which in many ways heralds Lovelock’s key ideas, and which is suggested by Jacques Grinevald (who wrote the forward to the main translation of Vernadsky into English) to have influenced Lovelock, via discussions he had with his colleague Lynn Margulis, who had read an unpublished translation circulating in the 1970s. Lovelock’s book impressed me because it stressed the connectivity of the elements of the Earth system, bringing to life the idea of Earth and its life as a complex, selfregulating, self-organised system. The Gaia Hypothesis initially attracted strident criticism from leading evolutionary scientists, including Richard Dawkins. The name ‘‘Gaia’’ the Greek Earth Goddess, was suggested to Lovelock by his neighbour, the Nobel Prize winning writer, William Golding, author of The Lord of Flies. The linking of a mythological name with a scientific concept seemed enough to alienate some scientists. Some critics of Lovelock also claimed that he had imputed a consciousness to the Earth system, a ‘‘ghost within the machine’’. However, Lovelock repeatedly explained this was a false interpre
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