As everyone now knows, we are in the midst of a huge global pandemic that has sent us all into isolation, and that could easily bring our house-of-cards global market economy crashing down around us, leading to--who knows what? Chaos, suffering, and madness, to be sure. All bets are off for the future of civilization--this civilization anyway...
(For more information on this, visit the most reliable information I have yet encountered on the progress of this pandemic, its economic ramifications, and the likely effects of various policy decisions: Chris Martenson's daily update on https://www.peakprosperity.com/tag/coronavirus/)
I am 71 years old and male, meaning that I am at high risk of contracting this virus, and in the likely prospect that our medical facilities are overwhelmed, dying from it. Fortunately, my Buddhist practice has freed me from any primordial fear of death; I am at peace with my own impermanence.
My concern is for younger generations, who may suddenly face the prospect that the futures they had planned, prepared for, and dreamt about will simply vanish, and they will be left--even if they are untouched by this virus--with the irredeemable wreckage of the only world they've ever known, and with the unimaginable and unpredictable chaos and madness that will follow in its wake.
It is for them that I am composing this message.
I should start by explaining the word in my title: "Gaianitas" It is the Latin formation of what, in English, we might call "Gaianity." But what the heck is "Gaianity"?
First the short answer. I would define "Gaianity" as a functional awareness that humanity is a part of, and not apart from, nature--its biological support system--coupled with the awareness that this system--our biosphere--is a complex adaptive system that evolves according to its own, incredibly complex, self-regulatory feedback loops.
A simple metaphor for this is a computer. A computer consists of (1) hardware--its physical foundation in metals, plastics, circuit boards, etc. (2) software--the information enabled by, and flowing through, the design of its hardware. And information, as Gregory Bateson succinctly defined it, is "a difference that makes a difference;" that is, a difference transmitted along a circuit that feeds back into itself, resulting in either magnifying that difference (positive feedback), diminishing or eliminating that difference (negative feedback); or some combination of the two (regulatory feedback). A classic example of a regulatory feedback loop is a thermostat, which measures and processes information about temperature changes, in response to which it either turns on or turns off the heat, depending on whether the temperature is lower or higher than its set point. (For a good basic guide to systems and their behavior, see Donella Meadows' wonderful book, Thinking in Systems.)
Software, for a computer, consists of two levels: the operating system, and applications. Without the operating system, of course, no applications will run. But when the energy source is cut by unplugging it, the whole system shuts down, and all you have left is the hardware.
Now consider our planet. Its "hardware" consists of four essential ingredients that were classically labeled as "elements" (though not in the modern, chemical understanding of that word): Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. It turns out, moreover, that our ancestors, while ignorant of modern molecular chemistry as we now understand it, were very wise in discerning that these four "elements" are also the four essential requirements for life: Fire (an energy source, usually the sun); Air (containing stored solar energy in the form of free oxygen--a highly reactive gas, which we breathe to power our metabolism); Water (which needs to be in liquid form to be useful to living organisms, meaning that it is only useful within a specific temperature range); and Earth (the mineral substrate from which living organisms construct their bodies). But unlike computers, living organisms are self-organizing complex adaptive systems--an important concept which we will revisit further on.
When biochemist James Lovelock and his colleague, microbiologist Lynn Margulis developed Gaia theory back in the late 1970s, they applied systems theory to Lovelock's question: Why is our global atmosphere in a far-from-equilibrium state (with free oxygen in abundance) while the atmospheres of all the other planets are in chemical equilibrium (for example, Mars and Venus both have 95% carbon dioxide--the natural "resting state" of oxygen molecules, bound to carbon), and almost zero free oxygen.
And once he had stated this question clearly, Lovelock immediately recognized the answer: life itself was constantly interacting with, and remixing, our atmosphere, resulting in our current far-from equilibrium state (with 21% oxygen and only trace amounts of CO2), while most of the carbon is sequestered in living organisms, oceans, and topsoil. Here, in brief is the way Gaia works:
1. Fire (energy) comes from the sun, of course, where plants harvest it to photosynthesize, thereby creating the simple sugars (effectively storage batteries of solar energy) that drive the metabolic synthesis of carbon and other essential elements into the growing structures of the plants themselves. As they do so, these plants symbiotically create diverse niches for many other organisms, from bacteria to insects to other plants and animals. Life propagates the conditions that sustain more, and more diverse life.
2. Earth (minerals) Without plants, there would be no animals, and without insects, worms, and microbes to process the minerals in the soil, there would be no plants either. Life propagates the conditions that sustain more, and more diverse life.
3. Water in its liquid form is essential to all life, while living organisms and ecosystems in turn store and filter water. Without life, there would be no fresh water on the planet--and there might not be any oceans either. So life likewise drives the water cycle.
4. Air. As plants draw in CO2 from the atmosphere for photosynthesis, they separate the carbon to use in their own bodies, and return the excess oxygen back to the atmosphere as O2. This oxygen has high potential energy--is highly reactive (as you know if you strike a match--for the flame is nothing more than an explosive oxidization reaction), and so this energy, along with plant matter, drives the metabolism of all animal life. (That is why we breathe). And when we breathe, we take in oxygen and return CO2 to the atmosphere, making it available to plants. Without plants, we would not be able to breathe--and without us animals, plants would eventually run short of atmospheric carbon.
Once again, life sustains life.
Without life, he found, the Earth would have an atmosphere much like Mars or Venus (95% CO2) with an average surface temperature of 280 degrees F and no liquid water. In other words, a hot, hostile world like Venus. But with life busy sequestering excess carbon, splitting CO2 into carbon for complex structural molecules like lignin (i.e. wood) and releasing excess O2 into the atmosphere, we have what we have: a shimmering, blue, watery planet hospitable to life.
Although few people recognized it at the time, this insight changed everything. Until that moment, the default assumption among scientists worldwide had been the "Goldilocks theory"--that life arose on our planet because we were lucky; it was just far enough from the sun for water to remain at a liquid state, with a naturally oxygenated atmosphere, and just enough solar radiation for photosynthesis, and so forth. Not too hot, not too cold.
But Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis painted an entirely different picture: life was not a passive passenger on a hospitable planet as everyone thought. Rather, once it got started (and we still have no idea how), life created, and cybernetically regulates, the atmosphere, oceans, and land surface to make them all increasingly hospitable to the propagation of life.
After it was published and developed further, Lovelock's Gaia theory encountered hostility from mainstream scientists, on one hand, and religious (especially Christian) communities on the other. Scientists were appalled by his unapologetic willingness to bridge the cultural divide between science and myth by using a mythic name "Gaia" for a scientific hypothesis. This was heresy in their eyes--an attack on the prevailing reductionist paradigm, and a dangerously mushbrained (in their view) conflation of evolutionary biology and wishful thinking about an all-nurturing mythic "Earth Goddess." The biosphere, they insist, could not have any agenda overall--it could not "regulate" anything. It simply evolves in response to blind forces like everything else.
The religious folk, of course, were equally appalled. The idea that the Earth was alive and somehow sacred was, in their view, a dangerous reversion to paganism, to nature worship, which must be vigorously discredited. At the same time, the Gaia meme was enthusiastically (and uncritically) embraced by new age hippies in California, already predisposed to worship any nature goddess they could find. And environmentalists jumped on board, quite naturally, since it gave them another rhetorical tool in their chest for fighting back against corporate polluters and despoilers.
The mass media, meanwhile, initially seized upon the connotative richness of the concept with no awareness of the science behind it. Even today, mail-order businesses like Gaia (formerly "Gaiam") market upscale cosmetics, health care products, and fashions to green-minded suburbanites... But by and large, the idea of "Gaia" has disappeared from the screen of public consciousness altogether--not because it is invalid, but simply because most people, living in a mindset formed by agro-industrial assumptions about "man" vs "nature" (or "economy" vs "ecology") fail to grasp its significance.
At the same time, serious Earth Systems Scientists and exoplanet-seeking astronomers have completely adopted Lovelock's theory--they just call it "Earth Systems Science" rather than "Gaia." So why do I cling to this concept, which seems to have been only a very brief blip on our cultural radar, a passing fad?
The answer can be summed up in a small book by British philosopher Mary Midgley entitled Gaia: the Next Big Idea. (This book is now out of print--another passing blip on our cultural radar screen!)
Midgley's argument was that really big ideas--culturally transformative ideas--take a long time to germinate, like dormant seeds in inhospitable conditions, because they fundamentally subvert the dominant cultural paradigm--the set of presuppositions that runs so deep in our cultural consciousness that the vast majority are unaware of them. And these presuppositions are encoded, ironically, in the word "nature."
For the vast majority of us, the word "nature" is automatically conceived in antithesis to "humanity." Even Bill McKibben, one of the most astute environmental thinkers and warriors I know, entitled his first book The End of Nature--by which he refers to those parts of the world still unaffected by a human presence. His argument was that every square inch of the biosphere has now been affected, usually for the worse, by human civilization.
On the other hand, most people, if asked, will accept the obvious--that we are a part of nature; that like every other living organism, we breathe, drink water, and eat food made from other living organisms. But we still routinely talk about "nature" as something "out there," away from ourselves and our society. For developers and economists, "nature" is nothing but a "resource" waiting to be transformed into commodities for market; for environmentalists and recreational enthusiasts, "nature" is a refuge from civilization--somewhere "outdoors" where you drive to, pull on you hiking boots, and "get away from it all." And for scientists, "nature" is an object of study at the other end of their microscopes.
And yet no indigenous, tribal, nomadic, or horticultural society that I know of even has a word for "nature" as distinct from "humanity." Despite their vast differences in mythology and customs, these cultures share a surprisingly common set of assumptions. They see the world as "all their relations" and their communities as embedded in this sacred world, which includes not only the plants and animals they depend on for their survival, but also the unseen forces that influence their lives and are personified as deities, and their ancestors watching over them. But "nature" as something outside of themselves is completely alien to their worldview.
But for us, the distinction between "man" (subject) and "nature" (object) is axiomatic, going right back to the dawn of the agricultural revolution, when a sharp distinction arose between cultivated and "wild" landscapes. The Wild--the area beyond the pale of cultivated (monocultural) lands, became the adversary--the zone of danger (from neighboring tribes, or from wild animals and agricultural pests).
But it was also the zone of opportunity, since it could be "subdued" and transformed into cultivated land. Hence the injunction from the Hebrew God in the Genesis creation story: "Fill the earth and subdue it." (It is noteworthy also that these Hebrew texts have now been dated to the dawn of the Agricultural revolution!)
The Gaia concept was quickly squelched from public consciousness, I would suggest, because it is radically transgressive: it subverts this basic "man/nature" dichotomy, which is the theoretical foundation of our agro-industrial civilization. In his original books, Lovelock pretty much ignores humanity altogether, other than dismissing us as a temporary "plague" upon the planet. But some of his disciples--particularly Stewart Brand in California, and thereafter Bill Mollison in Australia--went a lot further. In his 1970 Whole Earth Catalog, Brand coined the slogan of what was then known as the "whole earth" movement, which in turn has evolved into the Gaia movement: "We are as gods, and may as well get good at it."
Mollison, who cited Lovelock's Gaia Theory as his primary inspiration for his Permaculture idea, was also influenced by Brand, whom he took at his word, by developing his system of landscape and human habitat design based on the Gaian consiousness that humanity is a part of nature, but a part which has gained unprecedented power over the whole, and therefore has the responsibility to create a symbiotic, rather than parasitic relationship with our biological support system if we are to survive. He then undertook to show us how--and this was the beginning of the worldwide Permaculture movement.
Gaian theory was eclipsed by the passage of time and the dominance of industrial consumerism (for which I have coined the term "Glomart"), firmly predicated as that is on the (illusory) man/nature dichotomy. But Glomart--the order of money--runs on a set of premises or production rules that is the polar opposite of Gaia:
- Glomart: More is always better/Gaia: Enough is enough.
- Glomart: You are what you own/Gaia: You are what you do.
- Glomart: Nothing has value until it has a price/Gaia: value is a function of interrelatedness.
- Glomart: The bottom line is the bottom line/Gaia: Life itself is what matters, from one generation to the next.
Models and theories are of interest only to scientists and intellectuals; the rest of the world is in desperate need of something practical--a way to survive the coming apocalyptic collapse of global industrial civilization, and to rebuild a new civilization from scratch, based on a more accurate understanding of our relation to Gaia, the complex adaptive system that is our biological support system. To achieve its transformative potential, Gaian theory needed a coherently formulated Gaian praxis to go along with it. And thanks to Bill Mollison, David Holmgren, and all their disciples worldwide, this has happened. Permaculture is the praxis, based on Gaia theory, that may yet spawn a new global culture that is symbiotic with, rather than parasitic upon, Gaia herself. And it is a transformation in which we can all participate, starting in our own backyards. If I die of the current plague, this is the message I hope to leave with any or all future generations who see these words:
Everything that lives is holy, and life itself creates, sustains, and propagates the conditions that further support and propagate life. So get busy today, growing gardens, growing community, and growing awareness. Glomart (our global market economy) is dying; long live Gaia!
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