Perhaps some good is coming of the ever-increasing jellyfish implosion being reported worldwide.

It turns out, jellyfish may be working to save us from our excesses. The massive new blooms of jellyfish might be burying more carbon dioxide deep under the ocean by pumping cold water to the surface with every meal. When they return, ferrying CO2-laden warm water down into the depths of the sea.

In the process, they may be changing the overall carbon balance in the atmosphere.

The finding is the latest in a decades-old debate over whether swimming animals have much effect on ocean mixing, the process by which warm water on the surface combines with the cold water far below.

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Back in the early 90’s, Ted Turner created the world’s first animated eco-superhero Captain Planet to entertain viewers and increase younger kids’ awareness of environmental hazards. After a decade of hibernation, he is back to save the Earth from pollution, global warming and eco-villains.

Captain Planet and the Planeteers, an animated environmentalist television program, was considered to be “edutainment.” The series advocated the United Nations as an organization, and the concepts of globalism, multiculturalism and environmentalism.

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In fact, Lovelock is anything but an “environmentalist” in the traditional sense. Nor is he a staunch advocate for rigorous conservation and “dehumanization” of the planet, at least in his first book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979). He quite often criticizes as fatuous and downright silly many environmentalists’ claims, using evidence gathered from his work in the sciences.

One passage in Gaia struck me as extremely provocative despite being written nearly thirty years ago. Discussing the atmospheric gases, specifically those produced by human industry, Lovelock writes,

In our persistent self-imposed alienation from nature, we tend to think that our industrial products are not ‘natural’. In fact, they are just as natural as all the other chemicals of the Earth, for they have been made by us, who surely are living creatures. They may of course be aggressive and dangerous, like nerve gases, but no more so than the toxin manufactured by the botulinus bacillus.1

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What would you do if you could hear the Earth asking for help? In the Gaia Girls book series, that is what happens to four girls, each from a different region of the world. They are approached by Gaia, the living organism of the Earth. Each is endowed with powers over one of the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water. They must learn to use their powers to help Gaia survive the effects of modern humanity.

The first book centers around a girl named Elizabeth Angier and one very eventful summer at her family farm in New York state. She and the family’s undeniably lovable dog Maizey take on a big business factory farming operation that is trying to buy up all the farms in her town. On top of that, her best friend is moving not only out of town but out of state to Florida. Just as her troubles start to reach their boiling point, Elizabeth is greeted by an eager otter named Gaia who will change her world forever.

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In “Global Change and the Ecology of Cities,” published in the Feb. 8 issue of Science, a team of researchers from Arizona, New Zealand and Australia argue we need to focus more on cities — and not just the “natural” world — to ensure a sustainable future.

“Cities, and the people in them, will ultimately determine the global biodiversity and ecosystem functioning,” says Jianguo (Jingle) Wu, one of the paper’s co-authors and an ecologist at Arizona State University’s (ASU) School of Life Sciences. “Sustainable urbanization is an unavoidable path to regional and global sustainability.”

The paper’s authors advocate a global approach to urban development that recognizes cities both cause and respond to environmental change. That strategy echoes an emerging school of thought that views cities as organic entities — a sort-of Urban Gaia, if you will — things that consume resources, produce waste and interact with their surroundings.
 
While the concept might sound bizarre, it might ultimately prove to be as effective a philosophy as James Lovelock’s Gaia view of Earth. After all, cities around the world are doing nothing but metastasizing, absorbing an ever-flowing influx of rural people either displaced from their traditional lifestyles and/or looking for a better future in a modernizing world.

As of today, according to TaskForce MegaCities, the world has anywhere from 16 to 39 megacities (population thresholds for meeting “megacity” status vary). In just seven more years, that number could approach 60. The trend is especially strong in Asia, which could be home to as many as 10 hypercities by 2025, according to one estimate.

Sustainably managing such urban growth could be key not only to better living in cities themselves, but a better Earth overall.

“The relatively young and highly interdisciplinary field of urban ecology has demonstrated how well-designed cities can actually have less overall impact on the environment than equivalent dispersed rural populations,” said Jonathan Fink, director of ASU’s Global Institute of Sustainability. “The kind of counter-intuitive research results described in (the Science) paper show how an ecological perspective can help urban planners and engineers find ways for society to live more harmoniously with nature.”