"[James] Lovelock, I continue to be believe, did discover something – about how our unstable atmosphere is stabilized, about how clouds are made, about how land creatures get the iodine they need, and, ultimately, about the kind of world that we live in – a world that makes itself and will in time re-make itself without us, should we render it uninhabitable for creatures like us."

#DavidCayley, 2021

https://www.davidcayley.com/blog/2021/4/1/gaia-and-the-path-of-the-earth

#JamesLovelock #GaiaTheory

"[Ivan Illich] proposed a set of criteria by which tools that people can use for what he called convivial purposes can be distinguished from those tools which, in effect, use people – tools that are too big, too complex, too destructive or too expensive to be controlled. And he insisted that the control of tools was a political decision – not a scientific or a religious one."

#DavidCayley, 2021

https://www.davidcayley.com/blog/2021/4/1/gaia-and-the-path-of-the-earth

Substitute "apps" for "tools" and this takes us down an intriguing path.

"[#Science] is not universal, and it is not the voice of a displaced God called Nature. The sciences are therefore obliged to argue their case rather than to claim that it is beneath their dignity as sciences to enter into vulgar contests of opinion. They must stake their claim in the political arena and reveal the grounds on which their claim rests. These grounds, according to Latour, are persuasive and compelling but they are not beyond argument."

#DavidCayley, 2021

https://www.davidcayley.com/blog/2021/4/1/gaia-and-the-path-of-the-earth

"The position taken by this resistance movement, baldly stated, is as follows:

1/Democracy, progress, and social concord all rest on science.

2/Without science social existence will degenerate into an always potentially violent war of opinion.

3/Trust in science must therefore be preserved and enhanced at all costs.

4/A view of science as plural, fallible, and political can only undermine this trust and should therefore be rejected."

#DavidCayley, 2021

https://www.davidcayley.com/blog/2021/4/1/gaia-and-the-path-of-the-earth

"Things that have no voice still speak. The ravaged wetland that once absorbed spring runoff speaks, often without anyone hearing, as a downstream flood. Microbial antibiotic resistance transforms agriculture and health care. But these matters have no political representation, so long as the sciences believe that their standing, authority and integrity rest on their having nothing to do with politics."

#DavidCayley, 2021

https://www.davidcayley.com/blog/2021/4/1/gaia-and-the-path-of-the-earth

#science #politics

"Television stations also claim knowledge which far exceeds the reach of their vehicles, cameras, and work routines. Though the van was manifestly there in the street beside me and nowhere else, it could claim to be everywhere by virtue of its knowledge. Knowing the universal laws by which news can be identified, the station’s eye was effectively all-seeing, despite the modest appearance and restricted ambit of its rather small van."

#DavidCayley, 2021

https://www.davidcayley.com/blog/2021/4/1/gaia-and-the-path-of-the-earth

"Medicine counts in years of life expectancy. Ecology defends life on earth. In all cases, life is a palpable, measurable and manageable entity – a unit of value. a unit of administration, a unit of political power. Life had been abstracted from persons... The word person describes a unique, storied and bounded destiny; a life is an amorphous instance of something unimaginably general and impossibly indistinct – the ultimate resource."

#DavidCayley, 2021

https://www.davidcayley.com/blog/2021/4/1/gaia-and-the-path-of-the-earth

#IvanIllich