University of Washington Professor Peter Ward: Get Earth before she gets you.If your image of Mother Earth is a loving, peaceful benevolent who wants to see her human offspring grow and prosper (I’m looking at you, Wiccans) you might not want to invite University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward to your next moon dance.Because not only does Ward think Gaia is more interested in harming, rather than helping, us mere mortals. He also thinks she’d be happiest smothering us in our collective crib.Ward is the author of the book “The Medea Hypothesis.” Named after the Greek mother who slaughtered her own children, it’s a direct response to the Gaia hypothesis, a 1970s theory that the entire planet works as one giant, symbiotic organism. (Plants breathe out oxygen; humans breathe it in; everyone’s in it together.)If the title didn’t already tip you off, Ward’s views on Earth are a tad bit darker.Ward’s specialty is in mass extinctions. And having studied death on a grand scale, he has his own theories on what causes it. Specifically, Ward claims that four of the five great extinctions since the rise of animals weren’t caused by volcanoes or meteors, they were caused by life itself.”Life,” he wrote recently, “seems to be actively pursuing its own demise.”The Medea Hypothesis, then, is basically Ward’s antithesis to every idealistic argument that began in a graduate study hall and ended in the creation of a commune. As highlighted in the New York Times magazine’s annual “Ideas Issue,” Ward writes that we must “overcome nature…not go ‘back to nature.'”I think what this means is that we can all feel a little less guilty for not driving a Prius. Or for taking the car to Safeway even though it’s within walking distance so you don’t have to schlepp grocery bags back to your apartment in sub-zero weather. In which case, I think I speak for all lazy Earth-killers when I say, thank you Professor Ward.