The Medea Hypothesis: Is Life on Earth Ultimately Self-Destructive?
by Peter Ward
None of the apocalyptic disasters and villains Hollywood has imagined can compare to what Peter Ward argues is the real killer. “[T]here is a killer on the loose capable of planetary-scale catastrophe,” he writes. “The killer is life itself. If left unchecked, it will hasten the ultimate death of all life on Earth….
James Lovelock: In Search of Gaia
by John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin
In the early 1980s, as his wife slowly succumbed to cancer and as his grandest scientific theory suffered withering criticism, James Lovelock began to have regular chest pains.
Lovelock — the originator of Gaia theory, which argues that the Earth is something like a single living cell, working to stay alive — ignored the pain, popped some pills, and went about his work….
by Craig Arnold
Speeding across the wide white
slate of the salt flat once you passed a car
flipped over you saw the skidmarks
Here the driver took the curve too fast
fishtailed across the shoulder here he startled
pulled the wheel too hard spun
suddenly into a blank without horizon
leaving a long scar in the crystal crust
Matthea Harvey, this year’s winner of the Claremont Graduate University’s Kingsley Tufts Award, is author of three books of poetry and a teacher of poetry at Sarah Lawrence. She stopped by Zócalo’s offices to read from Modern Life, a New York Times Notable Book of 2008….
by Craig Arnold
You are the hummingbird that comes
a pure vibration wings a blur
propeller-burring a million beats
to keep still the world’s littlest pivot
spinning the heaven’s hemisphere
as a wineglass with a wet finger
ArticlesFeuilletonFriday, December 3, 2010 How One Family Created Chinese America
PoetryThis week in L.A.From the green room
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