Gaia Wakes
Earth’s Emergent Consciousness in an Age of Environmental Devastation
by Topher McDougal
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Pub Date May 22 2025 | Archive Date May 31 2025
Columbia University Press | Agenda Publishing
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Description
Gaia Wakes presents a compelling new framework for understanding the past, present, and future of our planet. Starting from a strong foundation in economics and drawing on a vast range of multidisciplinary scholarship, Topher McDougal explores the possibility of a fifth transition towards an upgraded Earth: the development of a technologically enabled planetary brain capable of coordinating ecological functions and peering far into the future and universe.
Gaia Wakes endows the emergence of a planetary brain with both a plausible economic mechanism and a historical context in which that mechanism has operated over the course of 3.8 billion years of life on Earth. It argues that the global environmental devastation we are beginning to experience and rapid recent advancements in artificial intelligence may jointly be part of a naturally recurring cycle of “upgrades” that has driven the increasing complexity of life on Earth.
Ambitious and provocative, the author combines economics with a breathtaking range of subjects including futurism, technology, philosophy, ecology and planetary and environmental sciences to offer new insights into questions that have long challenged us about the relationship between humankind and the world in which we live. Gaia Wakes stands out as a bold and original perspective on the future of our planet.
Gaia Wakes endows the emergence of a planetary brain with both a plausible economic mechanism and a historical context in which that mechanism has operated over the course of 3.8 billion years of life on Earth. It argues that the global environmental devastation we are beginning to experience and rapid recent advancements in artificial intelligence may jointly be part of a naturally recurring cycle of “upgrades” that has driven the increasing complexity of life on Earth.
Ambitious and provocative, the author combines economics with a breathtaking range of subjects including futurism, technology, philosophy, ecology and planetary and environmental sciences to offer new insights into questions that have long challenged us about the relationship between humankind and the world in which we live. Gaia Wakes stands out as a bold and original perspective on the future of our planet.
Advance Praise
“A much-needed optimistic vision for our planet’s evolutionary trajectory, one that defies the bleakness that pervades so much of the conversation about our environmental future. Gaia Wakes is an important and timely book.”– Richard Florida, author of The Rise of the Creative Class
“Gaia Wakes traverses and synthesizes vast ranges of knowledge to present a new intellectual framework for understanding the past, present, and future of planet Earth. and the place of our species in it.” – Jonathan Blake, Associate Director, Planetary Program, Berggruen Institute, co-author of Children of a Modest Star: Planetary Thinking for an Age of Crises
Available Editions
| EDITION | Hardcover |
| ISBN | 9781788218283 |
| PRICE | $30.00 (USD) |
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