Lady Gaia Speaks

By Patricia Finney

What does the planet think?

Lady Gaia is an organism made up of every living thing, from prions and viruses to blue whales and red sequoias, and in this imaginative tour de force of a polemic against human-made global warming and habitat destruction, Patricia Finney gets the views of the world we should love, on our prospects for survival,

• Language: English
• Publisher: Climbing Tree Books
• Release date: Sep 13, 2018
• ISBN: 9781909172401

Book preview

9781909172401.Cover.jpg

First published 2018

Copyright © 2018 Patricia Finney

EPub ISBN 978-1-909172-40-1

More books by Patricia Finney may be found at

www.climbingtreebooks.com

Published by Climbing Tree Books Limited,

Truro, Cornwall, UK

Typeset by Grace Kennard, Penryn, Cornwall

All rights reserved. No reproduction permitted without the prior permission of the publisher.

She’s about 3.5 billion years old. She extends deep into the rocks of the planet and perhaps a mile or three up into the stratosphere where bacterial spores float. She is not a cuddly little old lady, nor is she a beautiful and kindly woman. She is mostly bacterial and always has been, formed of a complex mixture of prions, viruses, bacteria, algae, fungi, prokaryotes, eukaryotes and – over only the past 350 million years, the last tenth of her life – a tiny percentage of multicellular creatures, from the tiny hydra to the blue whale, from the tiny filaments of slime moulds to the red sequoias.

In about 2 billion years from now she will die as the sun switches to fusing helium not hydrogen and starts to swell. Soon even the deep-sea chemo-eating bacteria will die as her seas boil into space. Perhaps deep in her rocks, some bacteria will survive.

Some time after that the sun will simply swallow her planet. Everything is temporary.

We humans have been here for a tiny sliver of time – as a species for perhaps 500,000 years on current knowledge. In the last 200 years we have started radically to alter her atmospheric chemistry, taking her rapidly back to a time when there were no ice caps and the whole world was hot. Everything is temporary, especially climate.

Our arrogance knows no bounds. We’re afraid that we might kill her. It doesn’t seem to occur to us that she’s survived a lot worse in the last 350 million years since multicellular life started disrupting her calm bacterial equilibrium. Think of the Permian Great Dying when 95% of species died, or the famous asteroid strike 65 million years ago. Species come and go, she might reassure us. I will live as long as the sun behaves himself.

What else might she say to us? In my earlier book, Arguments with Our Lady Gaia [Climbing Tree Books, 2013; published as an ebook under the pseudonym Rose Wagner], I’ve imagined an enormous ancient planetary organism, as in James Lovelock’s marvellous books, and imagined what she might say to our teeming billions. Maybe that is what I’m doing as I set out here to write whatever Our Lady Gaia wants.

Or perhaps I’m channelling something, doing the woo-woo thing that claims direct contact with angels and guides and alien species. If them, why not the planetary organism herself? Don’t we all carry trillions of her bacteria in our guts and on our skin? Why shouldn’t we be able to talk to the vast being of which we’re