Those with a masochistic penchant for Flannery’s white-knuckle narratives of destruction will be surprised by the comparatively sanguine Here on Earth. This meditative book is structured around the philosophical opposition between the co-discoverers of evolution, Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace. Though it was Darwin who became indelibly associated with the theory, Flannery encourages readers to ‘ponder what our world would be like if Wallace, rather than Darwin, had become the great scientific hero of the age’. In doing so, he carefully prises Wallace’s intellectual reputation from its usual position in Darwin’s gigantic shadow.

Flannery describes Wallace’s holistic spiritual vision as the polar opposite of Darwin’s methodical positivism. It was Wallace, not Darwin, who ‘realised that while evolution by natural selection is a fearsome mechanism, it has nevertheless created a living, working planet, which includes us, with our love for each other, and our society’. Flannery views Wallace’s ideas about the interdependent relationship between humanity and nature as the key to transcending the idea of Earth as a mere collection of discrete hunks of matter. James Lovelock, whose influential Gaiatheory describes ‘the sum of unconscious cooperation of all life that has given form to our living Earth’, is nominated as Wallace’s modern heir. We are reminded that both men were initially scorned by the scientific establishment, with their insights only recently gaining mainstream acceptance.

Here on Earth provides a list of intriguing examples in support of these two thinkers’ ideas about Earth’s role as a single organism. For example, Flannery draws on Lovelock’s insight about the complex interactions between land and sea: due to the significant temperature difference between these two Gaian organs, ‘our Earth has a two-state thermostat, which results from a colossal tug of war between life on land and in the sea, each pulling Earth’s temperature towards its preferred state’. Gaian thought also implies that evolutionary competition can just as easily be mutually beneficial as mutually destructive, because ‘coevolution can produce complex ecosystems that seem to have reached an equilibrium’, thus converting nature’s finite bounty into ‘a kind of magic pudding that can be made to expand if cooperation between species is fostered’. Evolution, then, is not always red in tooth and claw.

Enter humans, though, and everything changes. We alone have the capacity to throw Earth’s systems permanently out of whack. Fully aware of this, Flannery agonises over whether our overall impact on Earth will ultimately be ‘Medean or Gaian’ – disastrous or benign. Will humanity decide to work against nature, or with it? We have a choice, because ‘it’s our beliefs about our relationship to each other and to the world, rather than to our technology, that determine whether we show a Medean or a Gaian face’.

Flannery is the first to acknowledge the dominance of the Medean face, and the chapter entitled ‘Man the Disrupter’ duly presents a depressing roll-call of the catastrophes that tend to occur whenever humans unwittingly cripple the delicate ecosystems on which they depend. It is vintage Flannery. In the past, ‘our Medean tendencies have repeatedly been unleashed, leaving in their wake a world of ecological wounds’. Human history is littered with Medean extinction events, which trigger unintended and catastrophic effects.

Yet while Flannery would be the last person to deny humanity’s destructive capacity, he also believes in its ability to overcome the self-defeating Medean imperative in favour of a reciprocal sense of ‘Biophilia’. To achieve this, humanity must drop its isolationist hubris and begin to see itself as part of the ‘global superorganism’. Adopting this empathetic perspective is our only hope of forestalling environmental collapse.

Here on Earth integrates present-day Homo sapiens with Gaia itself by dividing humanity into ‘five human superorganisms’, corresponding to the five regions of the world in which agriculture was independently developed. These so-called ‘superorganisms’ apparently coalesced into a ‘global human culture’ during the twentieth century, just as an overarching political system – democracy – definitively (and conveniently) separated itself from the alternatives that now lay rusting on the ideological junk-heap. The rise of democratic global culture, Flannery argues, has given humanity its first opportunity to comprehend and act on its new-found status as a global superorganism.

Those of a pessimistic bent will notice some difficulties. For starters, the mass of humanity, still stubbornly cleft into nation-states, doesn’t often seem to conduct itself like a cooperative organism. Also, Flannery’s uncompromisingly teleological historical vision, which draws on Francis Fukayama’s appealing idea that ‘humanity has settled upon one political system’, places our own beliefs at the apex of progress – like virtually every other civilisation in history. Further, while democratic systems construct social order from an aggregate of individual choices, there is no guarantee that these choices will produce beneficial environmental outcomes. Reading Flannery’s assessment of democratic political progress, it is easy to forget that the world’s sole superpower’s political system is chronically gridlocked, or that the sole superpower-in-waiting is a dictatorship, or that the vast majority of elected Republicans currently deny the reality of climate change. Political interests don’t always follow Flannery’s neo-Wilsonian script.

Flannery also seems to overlook the potentially disturbing aspects of the ‘global superorganism’ idea. You don’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool libertarian to find the idea of humanity as a benighted termite colony potentially dystopian, yet the book is frustratingly vague about the extent to which individuality would have to be sacrificed if this biological conglomerate actually materialised. While the Gaian view of humanity is far preferable to the bloodstained Medeanalternative, the possibility of a benevolent world order spontaneously arising from humanity’s self-preservation instinct doesn’t seem assured, and the vision of seemingly intractable national rivalries dissolving after a liberal application of democracy sounds uncomfortably familiar.

It is also difficult to see how the ‘Biophilia’ instinct gels with the unavoidably central role of ultra-complex technologies in solving our massive swathe of environmental problems, as controlling carbon emissions by developing renewable energy will require incredibly elaborate husbandry of the natural environment. Even if our current efforts at emissions containment are successful, a completely renewable-energy powered Earth seems no more inherently nature-centred than a fossil-fuel powered version. Both place the environment in the service of humanity, albeit in contingently different ways.

Flannery’s example-based defence of the Gaia hypothesis is excellent, as are his characteristically vivid descriptions of humanity’s tendency blithely to sever the slender threads that bind vital ecosystems together. His vision of human cooperation, however, is less convincing. Here on Earth is a brave attempt to move beyond fatalistic attitudes toward the future, but Flannery’s utopian political analysis dilutes its potency.