Gaia - The Whole Earth as One Wise Being

 It's the time of year when I begin thinking about planting. The winter solstice is behind us now, and the days are getting a bit longer. At our solstice gathering here at Prairie Hill last week, we watched a demonstration of how the earth's tilt on its axis creates the seasons. And though our landscape here is covered in snow and temperatures are still very cold, we've started our path toward spring. Looking out my windows, I see just white around buildings, no green showing. The skies are the only real changing canvas, and they give a welcome show of clouds, sunset color and flocks of birds flying through. Everything else seems pretty dead and bleak, though we know that this is merely a dormant season and life underground and in holes or dens is just waiting for the temperature to trigger a renaissance.  At this time of year, we have to use our memories to remind us that this cold barren world is only a passing thing.

The older I get, the more I get intimations that all life on our planet is connected. It's an intuitive feeling. And now science gives us millions of examples of this: how two species thrive from their connection in an ecosystem, or even a whole ecosystem thrives because of the balance its living forms create together. It is such a beautiful picture of health and cooperation. It's easier to see this happening in natural systems with no human intervention. And harder to figure out exactly how humanity is part of this web. Yet of course we are just as connected as anything else. It's just that we have become so good at manipulating our environment that the natural interconnections are harder to see. I know I have a tendency to bemoan the results of human progress on the rest of the living world. And yet who can blame us for gradually finding ways to survive and thrive, getting our needs met. We are a creative species, and our brains and hands combined mean that we have been able to change our environment to our advantage, at least in the short run. It is relatively recently that we are noticing how our behavior may be threatening the health of the whole planet.

When thinking of this whole interconnected, mutually helpful population of life on earth, I've come to a stumbling block in my mind lately. OK, so species and individuals have a tendency to balance out, to adjust to each other, to find a relationship that is healthy for the whole. That is well documented. But when you look at a single individual of a species, there is no evidence that this being has any intent except to get its own needs filled. There isn't a focus on cooperating with its neighbors in order to form a thriving collective. Even humans have their own needs at the forefront of their minds, though they've learned to cooperate in small and large groups to enhance their living situation. Although many of our far ancestors were in touch with earth's wider natural cycles and inhabitants, these days humans have become mostly centered on their own narrower world. So we don't tend to make decisions informed by how it will affect the rest of life. Looking at the evidence that most individuals, human or not, mostly have their own safety and wellbeing in mind as they live and make decisions, what is the force that holds life on earth together in a pattern of healing and balance? That seemed like a true mystery and I realized that I needed to think beyond any specific species or ecosystem. And then I remembered James Lovelock and the Gaia Hypothesis. 

In 1965, Lovelock shared with the western world his theory of a co-evolving earth, with all life forms being a part of one planetary being. He named this earth-being Gaia after the Greek goddess who in ancient Greece personified the earth. At first there was resistance to this theory. And many scientists began to do their own studies to either disprove or verify it. Later, we found that several Russian scientists had also theorized about the earth as one living whole, an integrated being. And today there is a wide acceptance that the earth is a complex self-regulating system composed of unconscious feedback loops that tend toward balance, toward homeostasis. Lynn Margulis found after long study that microbes affect the atmosphere and different layers of the earth's surface. We now have perspective on how greenhouse gas feedback loops between oceans and ecosystems affect climate.  Here's just one of this earth-being's responses to imbalance: a specific phytoplankton in the ocean responds to temperature changes by producing dimethyl sulfide that helps stabilize the atmosphere and therefore the climate. 

I remember hearing about the Gaia Hypothesis long ago, and I loved the image of the planet as a huge being. One time when driving from Iowa to North Carolina through mountain forests, I came over the top of a hill and suddenly "saw" a living breathing forest in front of me, like the skin of a being. It was one of those aha moments and caught me by surprise. If I think of that vision, it is easy to see our planet as the earth mother, with forests and grasslands and desserts and rivers and oceans, all a part of her body. And just as our own bodies work at balancing us toward health, so does Gaia with her body. It is a friendly theory, our planet as a huge organism caring for the whole of itself. And intuitively, it feels right.

Self-regulation has its limits, of course, at least from our own perspective. With rising temperatures and rising oceans, dramatic weather events, and unstable seasons, we are feeling the effects of an earth in the throes of self-regulation gone a bit extreme. And since Gaia has a large family of life to tend, humans are not her only concern. We can just hold on tight, weather the ride and do our best to help out by curtailing the activities that have negatively affected the planet. And at the same time, be ever more intelligent about our own place in the order of things.