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Gaia: Arguments with Our Lady Earth
An excerpt from my book “Arguments with Our Lady Gaia” published under the pen name Rose Wagner
In the summer of 2008, I was struggling to get a coffee shop business started and failing — mainly because there was little to no footfall in the small depressed Cornish town with its ring of superstores where I’d set up shop for all the wrong reasons. So I had a lot of time on my hands. I’m a writer and I was familiar with the feeling of having a large amount of… book in my head, waiting for me to write it, although this felt a bit different, a bit odd.
Also I didn’t know what the subject was except that it was about something that had fascinated me for a long time — James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, the idea that the Earth is a living organism which alters its internal conditions to favour life, just as we keep our internal conditions at the right temperature and pH to keep our cells happy.The fact that this happens in the atmosphere and throughout the various ecologies of the Earth has been scientifically established — no atmosphere should have as much oxygen in it as ours does because oxygen is a highly reactive gas that doesn’t stick around unless something is producing it. Any time we find a planet going round another star that has a lot of oxygen in its atmosphere; we’ll know we’ve found another planet with life on it.
