For the past few days we have been enjoying cool breezes, blue sky, and clearly defined floating clouds — as if there is not a speck of dirt in the blue firmament above this dirty metropolis.

Such bliss naturally inclines us to settle into a more charitable frame of mind. For weeks a cricket lurking somewhere among the flowerpots on the balcony of my home has been trilling vigorously at night.

To the uninitiated it is a bit monotonous, with little variation, but it has an uncanny soothing effect on me.

As John Keats (1795-1821) wrote in "On the Grasshopper and the Cricket," "The poetry of earth is ceasing never."

We easily forget that we have just survived one of the hottest summers in memory. By August 29 Shanghai had logged 47 hot days (with daily high exceeding 35 degrees), the second most since meteorological record keeping started 140 years ago.

Specialists have been arguing about the cause of this unusual heat, and they can argue well into the next winter.

Self regulating

A couple of days ago one of my colleagues asked: Do you think there is any link between the historical heat and the abrupt coolness?

I could only plead ignorance about the Holy Plan.

Although ancient Chinese sage Lao Tzu once remarked that "Heaven and Earth are ruthless; To them the Ten Thousand Things are but as straw dogs," when we think of it, few of us survivors of the heat can help being grateful for the fact that the earth had not abandoned us.

As we busily fill our leisure time with all kinds of human-made trinkets and toys, we become blind to, or disdainful of, the fair works of nature.

Should we venture outside the human-spun cocoon and experience the thrill of pleasures in the sunset, the billows of clouds, or the voice of the insects, we would have ample reasons to lament what man has made of man, or nature.

As the title of the book suggests, Toby Tyrrell's "On Gaia: A Critical Investigation of the Relationship Between Life and Earth" is a reassessment of James Lovelock "Gaia Hypothesis," where Gaia (Gaea) is the Greek goddess of the earth.

In this hypothesis that is still being modified, Lovelock believes that the entire mass of living and nonliving matter on earth functions together in a complex, interdependent system that can be viewed holistically as a "living entity."

It seems that unconsciously and automatically, life on earth has been conspiring in regulating the global environment in a way that makes life possible.

In this book Tyrrell tries to bring the hypothesis "face to face with modern evidence and undertake a skeptical but hopefully fair-minded evaluation."

After citing cases suggesting nature as a mixture of cruelty and kindness, Tyrrell concludes that the "real world in its natural state can be a savage place."

Here the author himself remembers that as a teenager he had once seen some dogs catching and eating an iguana in the foothills of the Andes.

Good citizenship

While that experience could be traumatic for any teenager, I do not think this "cruelty" in any way contradicts the Gaian view.

The Gaian view of "comfort" must be conceived holistically for, seen individually, the life of any individual cannot escape the cycle of pains of birth, ageing, diseases, and death, as the Chinese saying goes.

If anything, this "cruelty" — diseases, predation, death — is exactly part of the plan of Gaia.

In another case, Lovelock believes that "the strenuous and seemingly perverse efforts of salmon and eels to penetrate inland to places distant from the sea would then be seen to have their proper function [to supply freshwater ecosystems and the land surface with scarce phosphorous]."

Tyrrell observes that "while one can only stand in awe of the breadth of Lovelock’s vision, everything we know about the mechanics of natural selection leads us to the judgment that salmon do not travel inland to spawn for reason of good citizenship, in order to help the planetary biota as a whole."

I think that instead of ascribing this fishy behavior to any volition or purpose, the important thing is that however eerie or idiosyncratic they appear to be, such behaviors do contribute to the stability of an ecological system.

If "good citizenship" can apply at all, it could be used for every other species except industrialized man, for all the other species live carefully within their assigned niche.

The Gaian insight should allow us to have an intimate view of the homo sapiens, rather than any other species.

Obviously, increasing human knowledge about the environs in no way turns humans into good citizens.

Chuang Tzu once said that "your life has a limit but knowledge has none. If you use what is limited to pursue what has no limit, you will be in danger."

The danger today lies chiefly in our inability to prevent our limited knowledge from being abused at the expense of our environment, or ourselves.

Destructive intelligence

Armed with that knowledge, we are laying waste to a sizable portion of tropical forests everyday, and with the depletion of cheap oil, we are marching to the polar regions.

When knowledge is not tempered by faith, or awareness of our obligation as stewards of the earth, it can be worse than useless.

Our geologists and mechanical engineers have conspired to usher in the age of private car ownership, fueling growth and the release of carbons that had been locked by plants and then buried underground for millions of years in the form of fossil fuels.

Apparently we do not need any encouragement in our excesses.

"Is there any worry that we will so damage the planet as to imperil our own survival through oxygen depletion? A frequently raised concern is that by cutting down rain forests such as the Amazon ("the lungs of the planet") will we asphyxiate ourselves? Fortunately the reality is much less alarming," reassures Tyrrell.

His logic goes like this: Even if all plant life dies off, simple calculation shows that it would still take at least 4,400 years to remove all the oxygen, or at least 440 years to remove even one-tenth of the current amount of oxygen in the atmosphere.

GDP fanatics can easily conclude that human beings can continue their fun without causing much harm to nature.

This view is in clear contrast to Lovelock’s view that our earth is becoming sicker due to global warming ("The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth Is Fighting Back — and How We Can Still Save Humanity").

"If we fail to take care of the Earth, it surely will take care of itself by making us no longer welcome," Lovelock warns.

In an interview with the Guardian in 2010, Lovelock concluded that humans are too stupid to prevent climate change from radically impacting our lives over the coming decades.

The beauty of Gaian view is that it allows us a view that nature moves in a mysterious way, and this can inspire awe and humility, rather than excite hubris about our intelligence.