GAIA LIVES:
James E. Lovelock, a British biologist who first developed
the Gaia Hypothesis and wrote about it in his book “A New Look At Life On Earth”
(1979), [ arrived at it (so the story goes) through purely scientific
observation. The idea began to form itself in his mind during the early sixties
while working as a consultant to the jet propulsion laboratory of the National
Aeronautics and Space Administration in Pasadena California. Lovelock apparently
noticed several things about the nature of Earth biology that he claims had been
overlooked by scientists up to that point. One of the things he noticed was that
the quantities of methane and oxygen in the Earth’s atmosphere have remained
constant for hundreds of millions of years, despite the fact that methane and
oxygen interact to destroy each other. He also noticed that the oceans have
contained approximately 3.4% of salt during all of that time and that the planet
has sustained a more or less constant surface temperature despite the fact that
the sun’s radiation temperature has increased by 25% or more over the last 3.5
billion years, when life on the planet is supposed to have originated. He
arrived at the realization that a homeostasis is active, clearly showing that
there is an underlying intelligence or “mind” at work in the total, ecological
sphere. This is the ubiquitous Anthropic Principle with mythic overtones.
In the Gaia Hypothesis humanity is seen as an integral part
of the total, ecological life of the planet and this complex meta ecological
awareness organism is affected by everything living in it. Absolutely everything
is interacting in such a way as to make life itself possible or to destroy
itself.
Lovelock says that Gaia has become fully conscious and aware
of herself through human technology. She has seen herself in a new way through
the eyes of space cameras. It is the collective intelligence of human awareness
that is the functioning Gaian brain mind and neurological system within which
environmental changes and adaptations will be anticipated. It is hardly
surprising, then, if Gaian-conscious people see themselves as integral to the
conscious being that is Gaia, who is the embodiment of Earth life
itself. It would seem that the human part of Gaia is the scene of the critical
part of her pathology, because we are the ones who are out of control and
willfully destroying the living organism that is Earth.
We have always responded to the human experience by
ideologically imposing our immature and usually destructive ideas upon the
actuality of planetary life itself. Many people now believe that virulent
viruses and plagues are here, and will be here in the future, to drastically
reduce our numbers so that the Gaian biosphere can recover its health.
Humanity is being forced by reality to understand that our
self-image is the source of our problems. We see ourselves as being entitled to
do anything we like to the Earth, but this is just one more part of our
pathology and suicidal behavior. By now this statement has all the power of a
trite cliché. We discover ourselves as a species incapable of confronting the
challenge of our Earth crisis, because it is not we who are in control but the
historical content of the Gaia sphere that binds us to patterns of life that we
are, as yet, unable to break.
As we grow more conscious of Earth as a single, sentient
entity, we will become aware of the total eco-psychological content of the Gaia
Image. A living Presence Ecology will lead us to the realization of the dynamics
inherent in how we are actually connected to the Gaia-sphere. In this way we
will learn to see ourselves clearly and come to the end of our retarded
self-image as disconnected autonomous ego-entities. We are about to transcend
and overcome our individual and collective self-image in order to stand upon the
Earth in full consciousness and spiritual reality. To this end there is the
prevailing idea amongst newagers, deep ecologists and archaic revivalists that
the answer to our profane and disastrous relationship with the Earth is to
rediscover its sacred nature, summed up in the phrase “the resacralization of
nature”. The basic insight here is that when European science reached the point
where nature was conceived of as a mechanism and source of raw materials to be
put at the disposal of materialistic exploration and exploitation, that we lost
touch with the true nature of the Earth. Economic, growth-driven,
post-industrial and technological civilization is seen as the culmination of the
trend which really got underway during the seventeenth century.
The Malthusian equation, which states that population growth
will always exceed food supply and result in famine, is upon us with a vengeance
as World food supplies lag farther and farther behind the population explosion.
And this not withstanding the fact that countries like Mexico and India have
become net exporters of grain and other food stuffs. Still, for all the
complexity of this situation, Gaian ecologists remain convinced that the answer
to this overall problem must begin with the resacralization of nature as an
antidote to the historical trend towards the mindless exploitation of the
biosphere.
next page
