The false benevolence of Mother Nature

last updated 8 January 2015

Drake Bennett

The Boston Globe

Our beloved Earth, it turns out, is quite a nasty place, said Drake Bennett. Romanticists from Thoreau to modern-day environmentalists have posited that this big blue marble is a “gargantuan, self-regulating superorganism,” its parts interacting in perfect ecological balance. Baloney, says paleontologist Peter Ward. In his new book The Medea Hypothesis, he argues that “rather than a supple system of checks and balances, the natural world is a doomsday device careen-ing from one cataclysm to another.” More than 3 billion years ago, for instance, bacteria “created a planet-girdling methane smog that threatened to extinguish every living thing.” Plankton, Ward finds, once bred so madly that they devoured their entire food supply and died en masse, using up all the oxygen in the seas and causing massive extinctions. Twice in prehistoric times Earth’s vegetation ran amok and “sucked so much carbon dioxide out of the air that temperatures plunged,” nearly killing off everything alive. “In other words, it’s not just human beings, with our chemical spills, nuclear arsenals, and tailpipe emissions, who are a menace. The main threat to life is life itself.”