In Act III of Shakespeare's late romance, The Winter's Tale, Antigonus, an elderly agent of the obsessively jealous King Leontes of Sicilia, arrives on the "seacoast of Bohemia," carrying Leontes' newborn child Perdita,who has been condemned to abandonment on (false) suspicion that she is the bastard child of his wife Hermione with his lifelong friend Polixenes, King of Bohemia. As a dangerous storm gathers overhead, Antigonus mourns his fate, as he abandons the child--until he is frightened away by a bear (hence the famous stage direction, "Exit, Pursued by a Bear"), while the highly vulnerable child is left alone onstage, amidst the gathering storm...
Then, in a comic twist, an old shepherd enters, discovers the child, and speculates darkly about her origins, until his clownish son appears, and breathlessly reports and conflates two catastrophes he has just witnessed: a shipwreck offshore, and a bear tearing into the flesh of the doomed "gentleman" Antigonus. (The ship, of course, was the one that carried Antigonus to shore with the child.) When the clown finishes his report, the old shepherd answers as follows:
"Now bless thyself: thou mettest with things dying, I with things newborn."
Somehow, this iconic line has lodged in my head of late, for obvious reasons: the "things dying" are everywhere to be seen these days: our coral reefs, our forests, our polar ice caps and glaciers, our fisheries, our aquifers, our endangered species, even our insects...but also, it seems, our democracy itself and the social consensus necessary to preserve it, amidst the toxic divisiveness of our politics; science and truth itself, amid a welter of lies propagated on social media; our collective decency and compassion in the face of waves of refugees fleeing north from war-torn and drought-ravaged lands--and so on ad nauseam.
So where, amidst all this dying, is the "thing newborn" to be found, who will redeem our broken world?
To begin, let me steal one more line from The Winter's Tale:
Can art (i.e. human artifice) so "mend" nature? Or only change it--for the worse?
In contemporary usage, "nature" is generally set in opposition to "humanity." For economists, engineers, and industrialists, "nature" is nothing but a "resource" with no value whatsoever until it is transformed into commodities for sale or "development;" for environmentalists, poets, and vacationers, "nature" is a refuge--somewhere "out there" (or on TV), well away from the crowded, polluted world they inhabit most of the time.
For Shakespeare and his contemporaries, however, "nature" had a far more spacious and inclusive meaning than it does for us today. In their understanding, "nature" denoted what the Greeks earlier called "physis"--the physical world, inclusive of the sun, moon, and stars, but also of life, humanity, and our innate dispositions. This was also the common understanding of indigenous, pre-agricultural peoples worldwide, who did not even have a word in their vocabulary for "nature" exclusive of humanity.
And this, I would suggest, might be the "thing newborn" amidst the "things dying" all around us, in both our modern industrial civilization and our ailing biosphere: the dawning rediscovery that humanity is a part of, not apart from, "nature," and that "nature" is a complex adaptive system of which we are a part, not a "resource" for us to exploit at will.
This awareness first arose intuitively among the counterculture in the Sixties and Seventies, and was rendered explicit by Stewart Brand in the Whole Earth Catalog, but it is now seeping into the cultural mainstream, especially the younger generation. On one hand, it is the awareness that what we have done to the Earth, we are doing to ourselves--but on the other, it is the awareness that, as Brand put it, "we are as gods, and may as well get good at it"; that nature itself makes the means by which nature can be mended.
This dawning awareness of our oneness with nature, as a cultural phenomenon, does not yet have a generally accepted name, so I, along with many others, propose that we call it "Gaia," and that those, like myself, who wholeheartely embrace this new understanding, call ourselves "Gaians."
Names are powerful. Once a cultural phenomenon has a name, it can catch on and spread quickly, if the time is ripe for it. "Gaia"--the ancient Greek name for the Earth as primordial mother-goddess, has been recycled, by James Lovelock and now by many others, as a kind of shorthand for the systemic view of the Earth as an integrated holobiont, in which the processes of life itself--photosynthesis, microbial interactions in topsoil, the water, carbon, and nitrogen cycles, etc.--create and sustain the conditions that in turn propagate, diversify, and sustain life. It is this complex adaptive system, above all, that has been badly disrupted by the excessive dumping of CO2 back into the atmosphere from the worldwide burning of fossil fuels.
But Gaian theory, so conceived, can be understood only by scientists. And due to their habitual aversion to mythic thinking, most scientists have renamed it "Earth Systems Science"--which is exactly the same thing, stripped of its mythic resonance. Meanwhile, a few avant-garde intellectuals, like Fritjof Capra, William Irwin Thompson, and Ken Wilber, have seized upon "Gaia" as a luminous metaphor, while environmental activists have embraced "Gaia" as an icon of their mass movements against climate disruption and environmental degradation.
At the same time, the resurfacing of the mythic name "Gaia" has been eagerly embraced by the new-age, neopagan, ecofeminist contingent, with little to no understanding of the rigorous science behind it, while born-again Christians excoriate "Gaia" with fear and loathing, and entrepreneurs have trivialized "Gaia" for their own purposes, to sell video games or body lotions.
Thus many meanings of Gaia have arisen--whether as myth, model, metaphor, or movement. But still, the concept thrives mostly on the margins of society; most in the cultural mainstream either don't know the Gaia concept at all, or have already formed simplistic, stereotypic ideas about it, whether as dangerous resurfacing of paganism or a frivolous example of magical thinking. What is generally lacking is a Gaian praxis that, once conjoined with Gaian theory, could give the Gaia movement the traction it needs to become a culturally regenerative force in our dying and despairing world.
Fortunately, such a Gaian praxis already exists, and is already catching on, worldwide, albeit mostly under the radar of mass media: Permaculture. At the start of his magnum opus, Permaculture: A Designer's Manual, its founder, Bill Mollison, explicitly cites Lovelock's Gaia Theory as his inspiration for his Permaculture design system:
"Lovelock (1979) has perhaps best expressed a philosophy, or insight, which links science and tribal beliefs: he sees the earth, and the universe, as a thought process, or as a self-regulating, self-constructed and reactive system, creating and preserving the conditions that make life possible, and actively adjusting to regulate disturbances. Humanity, however, in its present mindlessness, may be the one disturbance the earth cannot tolerate." (p.2)
And like the academic renaming of Gaia Theory as "Earth Systems Scence" to keep the theory intact while stripping it of its "new age" mythic overtones, Mollison's "Permaculture" concept has been stripped of its countercultural overtones, in recent years, by renaming it "regenerative agriculture." But both "Earth Systems Science" and "regenerative agriculture" signify the attempted absorption, into mainstream discourse, of the transformational insights of Gaia Theory and Permaculture. And that could be good news--especially for us Gaians.
So what is a Gaian? I have at few definitions to offer--I'm sure there are others. The first is the broadest:
(1) A Gaian is a resident of Gaia, the (renamed) Third Planet out from the Sun--one who inhabits, and participates in, a living planet powered by the sun, where the processes of life use the influx of solar energy to turn minerals into topsoil, CO2 into free oxygen and stored carbon, and salt water into filtered, fresh water. By this definition, we are all Gaians already; nobody has to "become" a Gaian.
(2) A conscious Gaian is one who is aware of, and acts upon his or her awareness of, his or her interconnectedness with all of life. Unfortunately, conscious Gaians are as of yet, a small subset of all Gaians, but our mission, above all, is to awaken all our fellow Gaians to consciousness of their true nature and responsibilities as Gaians.
(3) A practicing Gaian is one who has translated, or is translating, his or her Gaian consiousness into a life purpose (such as Permaculture design) that enable them to devote their time and energy to learning Gaia, teaching Gaia, healing Gaia, and creating Gaia.
How might this healing occur, on our dying planet? Imagine...
--people forming Garden Guilds, or Gaian Guilds, within their local communities to grow gardens, grow community, and grow awareness;
--schools and colleges developing Gaian curricula, based on a theoretical grounding in Gaia theory and a practical grounding in Permaculture design, from Kindergarten to Graduate School;
--Gaian groups starting within religious organizations (since Gaia is not a religion per se--there is no Gaian theology--and Gaian consciousness is entirely compatible with every authentic religious tradition on the planet). I am a Gaian Buddhist myself, but I have known and corresponded with Gaian Christians, Gaian Jews, Gaian Muslims, and Gaian Hindus.
So it is just possible that this "thing newborn," Gaian consciousness, could, like baby Perdita (whose name means "the one who is lost") could grow up to regenerate, and redeem, the only living planet we will ever know. So be it.
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