https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/gaia-versus-the-anthropocene-a-conversation-with-dorion-sagan/

One of my mentors/heroes… not to mention his parents…

“A single strand of coded protein packed in a fatty shell — so small that it is almost immune to gravity — is changing humanity as we know it. What is happening? If we approach this question from the perspective of ourselves alone, it appears that we are under attack. But there are many other perspectives to consider, including the planet’s, whose interconnected ecosystems may be far more “intelligent” than our technologies. Could it be possible that the latest version of coronavirus is the biosphere’s response to the accelerating mass extinctions, habitat destruction, and global warming that we have caused?

To explore this matter further, I conducted a series of conversations with ecological theorist Dorion Sagan, whose work poses fresh, post-Neo-Darwinist views of life, evolution, sexuality, climate change, microbiology, and consciousness. The result is a work in progress entitled Laniakea: The Next Step in Gaia Theory, from which this interview is excerpted.

Dorion Sagan is the author or co-author of 25 books, including several with biologist Lynn Margulis on planetary biology and evolution by symbiosis. He has also worked with Eric D. Schneider to popularize the thermodynamics of life, and with Josh Mitteldorf on the biology of aging. His work has appeared in Natural History, The Smithsonian, The New York Times, The New York Times Book Review, Wired, Cabinet, The Skeptical Inquirer, The Ecologist, The Environmentalist, Co-Evolution Quarterly, The Whole Earth Review, The Times Higher Education Supplement, and the Los Angeles Review of Books, among others. With his parents Carl Sagan and Lynn Margulis, he is author of the entries for both “Life” and “Extraterrestrial Life” in the Encyclopædia Britannica.

GREG RUGGIERO: What is the Gaia theory and why is its view of evolution and life important today?

DORION SAGAN: Gaia describes a living Earth, an idea with precedents in natural science and philosophy for 2,500 years, and longer in many indigenous belief systems. As a scientific discovery, however, Gaia dates back to the collaboration of atmospheric chemist James Lovelock with my mother, the microbiologist Lynn Margulis, in 1970. Lovelock, who shared an office at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab with my father, Carl Sagan, was struck by the spectroscopic data coming in from Mars: its atmosphere was almost entirely carbon dioxide. This was in striking contrast to Earth, whose atmosphere is very complex, and contains many compounds that should not even exist given the ordinary rules of chemical mixing. It struck Lovelock that these gases were coming from life and that, just from looking at Earth’s atmosphere, extraterrestrials would be able to tell that there was life here. The atmosphere was a kind of external circulatory system, an extension of the biosphere — as spectacularly alive chemically as would be the sight of a seashell on an otherwise sandy beach. He even recommended that NASA save their money and not continue on the Viking mission, for which he had been retained as a scientific instrument maker, as there was clearly no life on Mars.

My father didn’t agree but he graciously introduced Lovelock to his ex-wife, and the two, combining Lovelock’s knowledge of atmospheric chemistry with her vast knowledge of microbial ecology, developed Gaia theory proper. In my estimation, it is the most important discovery in the history of NASA and the US space program, and in retrospect Margulis and Lovelock should have shared a Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for it. The biosphere has a physiology. We are part of a vast living system. Earth is no more a rock with some life on it than you are a skeleton infested with cells. Nonetheless, and although Lovelock continues to see nothing wrong with describing Earth’s surface as an organism, Margulis was more careful, pointing out that no organism recycles its own wastes. In this sense the biosphere is something more, a supra-organism. Not only is our atmosphere’s chemistry regulated as strikingly as your blood is, but so probably are other environmental variables, such as marine salinity and global temperature. But this is not a machine we are talking about, it is more of a planetary body, whose parts are organisms themselves.

The genesis of the Gaia idea is the recognition that the biosphere is a thermodynamic system, and our Earthly atmosphere is out of chemical equilibrium. The global biosphere is a colossus; it has come back from five mass extinctions, not including the global die-off two billion years ago when green bacteria mutated to use water as a hydrogen donor in photosynthesis, resulting in oxygen increasing from far less than one percent to 20 percent of the atmosphere. This drove then dominant anaerobic life underground, turned Earth blue (because of the light-scattering properties of oxygen), and gave future beings like us something to breathe. But these green beings that scorched the planet, producing uranium and iron oxides in Earth’s crust, did not destroy it; they became the symbiotic green parts of algae and plants. These are a few of the basic facts of life that everybody on the planet should know.

The biosphere, composed of countless living bodies, has multiple forms of environmental “cybernetic” feedback, most of them doubtlessly not modeled by the IPCC [the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] or others. Can you consciously and deliberately make your kidneys function? Are you conscious of the blood flow through your arteries? We are just one of an estimated 30 million extant species, over 99 percent of which are now extinct. We are growing exponentially (there are over twice as many people as when I was born), but this cannot last. Even more worrisome is our warming of the planet, literally an example of global thermodynamic dysfunction insofar as it impairs the ability of living beings to continue accessing the concentrated energy of the sun and exporting entropy as heat into space. Green beings — cyanobacteria and plants — basically own the means of production. We and all animals are freeloaders. The biosphere has lasted well over three billion years. It absolutely does not need us. But we, “mammalian weeds,” as my mother said, cannot live without Earth’s living surface. We depend on the metabolic diversity of bacteria to recycle wastes into food, and on plants to produce food from water, air, and light. Gaia augurs a biological Copernican revolution in how we see ourselves. We are not alone, neither within our bodies nor as parts of ecosystems.”