Author: Peter Ward
A provocative look at the history of our living planet. Ward offers a distinct perspective and argues strongly that the only intelligent choice is to manage ourselves and the environment. The Medea Hypothesis will cause anyone who cares about the environment to think differently.
Ward holds the Gaia Hypothesis, and the thinking behind it, responsible for encouraging a set of fairy-tale assumptions about the earth, and he'd like his new book, due out this spring, to help puncture them. He hopes not only to shake the philosophical underpinnings of environmentalism, but to reshape our understanding of our relationship with nature, and of life's ultimate sustainability on this planet and beyond.
Seems like attention seeking. The Gaia hypothesis is a) a model used to understand the behavior of the planet as a whole b) accounts for major disturbances as a kind of infection that it fights and/or adapts to overcome to allow life to carry on, not necessarily that humans are the cause.
The fact that life has survived for this long shows that the model has merit, but of course physical reality can surely allow life to extinguish at some point. Even Gaia can't be immortal, and I doubt that this is part of the hypothesis.
