I don’t know if he is a grandfather. I would imagine he has friends though. I wonder if he’d be willing to look his friends’ children or his own grandchildren in the eye and say “I don’t think nine billion is better than one billion.” You or your children, Lovelock seems to be saying to this imaginary child, might one day inhabit a world of unimaginable horrors and your whole life might be a daily struggle for existence but in the end all your misery, all your terror, all those wasted lives might turn out to be “an enormous benefit.”

In an interview published in The Guardian, Lovelock offers us another glimpse at the well-spring of his optimism.

“There have been seven disasters since humans came on the earth, very similar to the one that’s just about to happen. I think these events keep separating the wheat from the chaff. And eventually we’ll have a human on the planet that really does understand it and can live with it properly. That’s the source of my optimism.”

I just want to make sure I have this correct. Lovelock’s optimism is rooted in the death of billions of humans, oceans turned into acidic dead zones and species loss on a scale never seen before in geological history. All so someday in the distant future, a race of humans can crawl out from this ecological wasteland and learn to live in perfect balance with the natural world.

I’d hate to catch him when he’s in a pessimistic mood.

http://pcillu101.blogspot.com

yes, through a glass darkly, good headline