Medea's Choice

Nothing lasts forever. That's the truth, and there's nothing anyone can do about it--and our planet is no exception. Fortunately, Earth still has a billion or more years left as a life-supporting world, at least according to conventional wisdom. According to unconventional wisdom, however, our planet may already be in its old age.
The Medea Hypothesis (named after the Greek mythological woman who killed her own children after Jason left her) was proposed by geologist Peter Ward as an alternative to the better-known Gaia hypothesis. While the Gaia hypothesis suggests that life continuously maintains an ideal environment for itself, the Medea hypothesis states that life periodically destroys its own environment. And indeed, many of the mass extinctions in the fossil record seem to have been caused, at least indirectly, by biological activity. In other words we--humanity--are simply the most recent Medea event.
The Gaia hypothesis, of course, was one of the ideas that fed into the "environmentalism fad" of the 1960s and 70s, and even today much of what we know about environmentalism and ecology is based on it. But what if the Medea hypothesis is actually true? Is there any way to reconcile an environmental conscience with an understanding of the Medea hypothesis?
The answer is yes. The microbes that were responsible for the mass extinctions in the Permian and the Ordovician periods had no way of understanding what they were doing. Humans, fortunately, do. And that is why environmental efforts still matter, even if the Gaia hypothesis may not be true. We, unlike any life form that came before us, have the mental capacity to choose not to destroy our environment--and in doing so allow life on Earth to last at least a little while longer.
Perhaps this time, Medea can choose not to kill her children.

Eco-Tainment #5: Hoot (Carl Hiassen novel)

Florida is known primarily for two things. One is the fact that DisneyWorld is located there. The other is that old retirees move there. Those who pay attention to novels aimed at teenagers (now excitingly rebranded as "young adults") might notice a third--Florida is where Carl Hiassen sets the majority of his environmental fiction.
Hiassen began his career writing for adults, but in 2002 published his first novel for children, Hoot. The novel concerns a boy named Roy Eberhart, who moves to Florida from Montana and becomes involved in another boy's crusade to save a colony of Florida burrowing owls (an endangered subspecies) from having their habitat destroyed to make way for a restaurant. The boys resort to a number of unscrupulous and possibly illegal means to accomplish this, including putting snakes inside the construction workers' latrines and vandalizing their equipment.
Eventually, the construction foreman, who at first denied the existence of the owls, is forced to acknowledge that he is building on their nesting grounds, and the would-be construction site is repurposed as an owl sanctuary.
Hoot lies somewhere in the middle on the environmental spectrum of nuance that, one could say, has WALL-E on one end and Captain Planet on the other. The antagonists are very stereotypical evil money-loving CEOs of the sort that tend to populate these stories. This is in contrast with, for instance, Michael Bird-boy, in which the people causing the problems willingly confess to their faults and accept the protagonist's help in fixing the damage they have caused.
Hoot, however, is still an excellent introduction to environmentalism in fiction, and one that its target demographic of teenagers--especially teenage boys--will almost certainly enjoy.

While it may not be the most subtle environmental work in the world, Hoot still manages to be enjoyable and engaging.