Monthly Archives: July 2022

By Michael F. Duggan

Science has lost another giant. James Lovelock, the Gaia guy is gone at 103.

I have to admit that when I first heard of the Gaia hypothesis, I didn’t like it. It had been explained to me imperfectly and seemed too broad, too metaphysical. It did not strike me as a scientific theory at all, but rather, at best, was an untestable metatheory, an organon. But the more I read, the more impressed I became. Besides, taken as a natural historical description, evolution is also untestable (although both ideas have elements that can be tested; Lovelock, with Andrew Watson, devised the Daisy World model in 1983 to test the idea of self-regulating systems).

The idea is that the Earth’s biosphere is a living, self-regulating system. Analyzing data about the Martian atmosphere while working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory with Carl Sagan in the 1950s, Lovelock noticed that “unlike Earth’s blanket of gases, Mars’s atmosphere was locked into the same kind of dead chemical equlibrium as as that of Venus.” (Frank 2018, 124). “It came to me suddenly, like a flash of enlightenment, that [for the chemistry of Earth’s atmosphere] to persist and keep stable, something must be regulating it… It dawned on me that somehow life was regulating the climate as well as the atmosphere. Suddenly the image of the Earth as a living organism able to regulate its temperature and chemistry at a comfortable steady state emerged in my mind.” (Frank, 2018, 124). Far from being New Agey murk, this was the recognition that the biosphere regulates itself as a steady state rather than chemical equlibrium. The name Gaia was suggested to him by William Golding of The Lord of the Flies fame (Gaia is the Greek Earth goddess). (Frank 124-25). Sagan’s wife, Lynn Margulis (1938-2011) helped develop the idea and pushed for its acceptance.

As Adam Frank explains in his book, Light of the Stars, the implications of this idea are huge. Photosynthetic bacteria produce oxygen that keeps the Earth’s atmosphere at a steady state with around 21% oxygen. “But why did oxygen levels rise up to 21% and nor further? This is an important question, because if the concentration of oxygen in the air were to climb as high as 30 percent, the planet would become a tinderbox. Any lightning strike would create fires that wouldn’t stop.” (Frank 2018, 126). It all had to do with negative feedback from the living world. I now believe that the Gaia hypothesis was one of the greatest ideas of the 20th-century.

As I have written before, Lovelock’s and Margulis’s ideas of a self-regulating biosphere are highly suggestive and even more relevant in a time of pandemic. What if we have it all backward? What if the planet is the fevered patient, that we are the pathogen or imbalance, that COVID-19 is the planet’s immune response, and the vaccines and antivirals is the disease trying to outsmart the immune response?

By Michael F. Duggan

Eighty-five years ago this Tuesday, Gerda Taro (1910-1937), “The Girl with the Leica” (she also used a Rollei), was killed during the Loyalist retreat at the Battle of Brunete in the Spanish Civil War. She is believed to be the first female photojournalist killed in combat.

The Spanish Civil War (1936-39) was a particularly vicious conflict; civil wars usually are. In terms of atrocities, modern armor, and strategic bombing—to include the bombing of civilians—it was a dry run for World War II. On one side were the Loyalists or Republicans who represented the legitimate government of the Second Spanish Republic. They were supported by an assortment of anarchists, democrats, socialists, and communists representing the Popular Front as well as the foreign volunteers of the International Brigades (e.g the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, whose last known surviving member, Delmer Berg, died in 2016). They were also supported by Mexico and the Soviet Union. On the other side were the Nationalists of General Francisco Franco, who launched a coup in July 1936. The Nationalists were supported by fascist Italy and Nazi Germany. The Nationalists won, and Franco governed Spain until his death in 1975.

The journalists who covered the war included Claude Cockburn, John Dos Passos, Floyd Gibbons, George Seldes, George Orwell, and Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn, to name a few.

Taro’s real name was Gerta Pohorylle. She was born in Stuttgart on August 1, 1910 to Jewish parents. She fled Nazi Germany in the early 1930s and relocated to Paris where she met a young Hungarian photographer named Endre Friedmann. She would change her name to Taro (after a Japanese painter); Friedmann changed his name to Robert Capa. In 1936 the pair traveled to Barcelona to cover the war in Spain. Like all war photographers, Taro shot the war from the front, distancing herself from Capa (who had proposed to her) and working alone. It has been suggested that Taro actually took the “Falling Soldier” (“Loyalist Soldier at the Moment of Death”) photograph attributed to Capa, and one of the most famous war photographs of all time.

There are two different accounts of the accident that resulted in her death. The first states that on July 25, 1937, she was standing on the runningboard of a car carrying wounded when a tank crashed into it. The other account holds that a tank backed up without warning, running over her.¹ She died the following day. Six days later, on the day she would have turned 27, there was a parade in her honor in Paris. She is interred at the Cimetiere du Pere-Lachaise.

Capa went on to cover WWII, taking some of the most well-known photographs of the D-Day landing and became a legend. After the war he reported from the USSR and Israel during its founding. He was killed by a landmine on March 25, 1954 near Thai Binh during the First Indochina War.

In 2010, a suitcase turned up with more than 4,000 previously unpublished negative images by Capa and Taro (126 rolls of film). They are the subject of the 2011 film, The Mexican Suitcase.

Note
Mark Kurlansky, The Importance of Not Being Ernest, (Coral Gables, FL: Books & Books Press, 2022), 119.

By Michael F. Duggan

When I was in fourth grade, my teacher, Mrs. T_______, a tough-minded holdover from the late Cretaceous Period, made us do the famous under-the-desk, “duck and cover” drills on Wednesdays at 11:00 AM when the country tested its air raid sirens. The logic being that the protective qualities of our diminutive fourth grade desks would shield us from the dozens of multi-megaton ICBMs the Soviets had targeted on the Greater Washington D.C. area. It was the early 1970s, and most teachers had abandoned the practice years before.

With no end to the fighting in sight in the Russo-Ukrainian War, New York City issued a public service announcement last week that is essentially a 2022 version of a 1950s Civil Defense primer on what to do when the bombs fall. Although the benefits of ducking and covering in a Manhattan highrise condo would likely be of dubious value in the face of a strategic nuclear barrage, it looks as if one jurisdiction has come to realize the apocalyptic danger of the escalating situation between NATO and Russia in Ukraine.

By Michael F. Duggan

This past week, my girlfriend and I spent a few days in Rhinebeck. It was our first getaway alone since the beginning of the pandemic.

After taking in the town, a day trip to the Catskills, and a sighting of a celebrity writer in a local restaurant, we were up for the main event: a 1920s-theme lawn party/annual fundraiser at Wilderstein, Margaret “Daisy” Suckley’s Queen Anne-style river house a few miles south of town. Suckley was Franklin Roosevelt’s distant cousin and confidante, and the subject of the charming, if inaccurate, 2012 film Hyde Park on Hudson (Olivia Coleman, Bill Murray, Laura Linney, Samuel West).

When Daisy died at the age of 99 in 1991, they found a suitcase full of letters and diaries under her bed. It seems that Roosevelt’s cousin, dismissed by his handlers as the “little brown mud wren,” was actually the ultimate fly on the wall—a keen observer who wrote down everything. Unlike everybody else, Suckley wanted nothing from Roosevelt besides friendship, and was discreet. He trusted her and confided in her. The collection of her letters and diaries, Closest Companion (Geoffrey Ward, ed., 1995), is an invaluable contribution to the historiography of the Roosevelt administration.

Rescued from demolition and dilapidation in the 1990s, Wilderstein is now a privately-operated historical site, not state or federal. So if you are looking for a for a non-profit organization for a tax-deductible donation in historical preservation, I recommend the Wilderstein Historic Site. It is administered by a good bunch and the house is one of the best Victorians I have ever seen (originally built in a Federal or Italianate style).

More importantly, Margaret Suckely is a significant historical witness and deserves to be remembered in her own right (she also gave Fala to FDR). Anybody planning a trip to or through the Mid-Hudson Valley should stop by, take the tour, and enjoy the trails on the property and the spectacular view of the river from the lawn, it is the best I have seen and better than the one shared by Franklin and Eleanor at Hyde Park.

The address is:
Wilderstein Historic Site
330 Morton Road/PO Box 383
Rhinebeck, NY 12572

By Michael F. Duggan

In recent days, there have been reports of rockets landing in Russia. Lithuania has now said that it would deny Russian overland access to its Baltic enclave, Kaliningrad, in essence, denying Russia access to its own territory. Russia has declared that it would respond (it would be ironic if Russia implemented a strategy modeled on the Berlin Airlift to resupply this territory).

When I observed to a friend that there are now multiple avenues for a possible catastrophic escalation between NATO and Russia, he replied “Possible escalation? The real question is how can it not escalate?”