Interview with James Lovelock

I've been wanting to read the Gaia books for a while but not managed to get round to it... hopefully I will when I have the space to acquire a few more books rather than living out of a backpack!

Anyway, the John Humphries did an interview with James Lovelock that was broadcast yesterday here.

I like it. While I believe "we should" be changing our behaviour, and rapidly, I now accept that how humanity has grown is entirely "natural" in terms of energy availability, and that the changes I would like to see are "unnatural" or, perhaps, enlightened.

We need an immediate reason to change, and we don't have one that appeals to our sense of urgency - Tesco's will still be there tomorrow, and petrol isn't going to run out this week, this month, or this year.

I also realise and accept that, even though I feel I am relatively well aware of the issues concerning our planet, I would probably still be doing an office job if not for a number of converging factors - feeling a need for change is a large one, but catalysed by disliking the whole that is office life as someone not quite a programmer not quite anything specific had a large effect, meeting my fiancee had a huge effect... how can I expect other people who don't have as many pushes and pulls to be interested?

Society will, most likely, collapse when a lack of resources becomes acute, and not before. When life can go on as normal, it will probably do so.

Lovelock's 20-30 years (before significant change) is interesting - further into the future than I'd thought, considering most scientists seem to place peak oil at sometime between 2008 and 2016.

Interesting times are a'comin'!