The Medea Hypothesis

The bad news is that it will end in 500 million years.

The Medea Hypothesis by Peter Ward

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This book is about refuting the Gaia Hypothesis (the “GH”) which is a thesis that undoubtedly deserves refutation. The most scientific form of the GH is that the biosphere is a complex system with innumerable feedback systems such that it is able to offset and adjust itself to correct environmental perturbations. The most extreme form of the GH is that the biosphere is itself a living organism that deliberately adjusts environmental conditions to encourage and promote life.

Ward confronts the GH with the Medea Hypothesis (the “MH”), which argues the contrary: Mother Nature will kill us all in the end. The MH is named after the female lead in Euripedes play “Medea.” Medea was famous for the lengths she went to get revenge on her husband Jason (of Jason and the Argonauts - this the “and they lived happily ever after” part of Greek myths) who dumped Medea in favor of a marriage with the King's daughter. Medea arranges to kill Jason's new wife, the king, and, for good measure, her infant sons with Jason. Hence, Medea refers to mothers who kill their children.

This book is an extended walk through a lot of heavy, speculative science. Ward makes some strong points to refute the GH, such as “what about all those extinctions caused by the evolution of organisms that polluted their environment with toxic oxygen?” He cursorily examines the great extinctions, including the entirely hypothetical massacre of every organism that didn't have our kind of DNA, to show that the smoking gun was probably held by some evolutionary change. He also points to statistical modeling which suggests that the biomass of Earth has been declining since the Golden Age when unicellular bacteria ruled the Earth two billion years ago.

This is all surprising, “gosh-wow deep time” stuff, which I enjoy, but I feel like I got shorted. I thought I would be getting more information on these past extinctions than I actually got.

Ward turns to the future. This section is also fascinating in a “gosh-wow” science kind of way. Apparently, life on Earth is heading for its self-made apocalypse in the next 500 million years. Notwithstanding the CO2 problem of the current age, the long-term trend has been and will continue to be, the depletion of CO2 from the atmosphere. Right now, CO2 is a trace gas, but a billion years ago it was as much as 30% of the atmosphere. In the future, plants will take it out of the air below the threshold to keep plant life alive. That factor along with weathering of rock will make CO2 almost entirely absent, at which point, plants die taking with them everything else.

In short, all is doomed. Mother Nature will killl us all.

Ward ends the book with an opposite crisis, anmely global warming and the parade of horribles that we can expect in the next 300 years. This image of planet-changing catastrophe fits well in his Medea Hypothesis. His advice ultimately is that while it might be nice if humans could retreat to a pre-civilized state, ultimately it will be only human ingenuity that can save the world, so let's get the boffins to and do their engineering thing.

In broad outline, this is the kind of “gosh-wow” thought provoking science text that I enjoy. I'm convinced by his argument. There were nuggets of information that I will cherish and share. However, in practical experience, I found the book a bit of s slog and its global warming ending was more than a bit preachy.

On the other hand, the MH is a challenge to romantic ecological mystics. Ward writes:

“The main message of the environmental movement is that if we “return to nature,” or turn the world back to its state before humanity evolved—in other words, stop pirating the Earth's natural processes and resources for our short-term benefit and instead try to return to something resembling our relationship to the planet before we “took control” of nature—the Earth will eventually clean up our mess and save us from ourselves.”

But the MH says otherwise.

Likewise, concerning another romantic ecological mystical movement, namely “Deep Ecology,” Ward writes:

“Deep Ecology believes that all organisms are equal: Human beings have no greater value than any other creature, for we are just ordinary citizens in the biotic community, with no more rights than amoebae or bacteria.
This certainly sounds reasonable. But the paradigm shift described at the start of this chapter deals exactly with this point and turns it on its head: we are not ordinary citizens. We are the only hope to keep Earth life alive.”

Well, no...it didn't sound “reasonable” to me, but I was already ahead of Ward on his conclusion. I'm not a fan in any way of people who casually discuss regulating human population as if it wouldn't involve well-ordered genocide.

Nonetheless, Ward's attack on romantic environmental mysticism is useful. Couple this argument with the historical insights from “Apocalypse Never” by Michael Shellenberger, who demonstrates how human ingenuity has solved ecological problems, lose the human-hating bits and this book wouldn't have annoyed me in the end.