Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
and spiky, wet and windswept, lush and gloomy? What is it saying to you? If the
qualities form themselves into words, write them down, letting them spill onto the
page. Sketch or paint any images that might arise, hum any tunes.
Now get up and walk around again, and repeat the process two or three times,
going from sensing the individual beings in the ecological community to intuiting
its emergent quality, its participatory intelligence, its gesture.
Finally, lie or sit on the ground with your eyes closed. Now, starting from
your immediate ecological community, slowly expand your awareness to take in
Gaia's great ecological communities: rainforests, tundra, boreal forests, tem-
perate forests, heathlands, deserts and high mountain regions, the oceans. Even
though you have never met most of the more-than-human beings that live in these
wondrous domains, you are able to connect with a sense of the stunning biod-
iversity they contain.
Feel all Gaia's living beings crawling, swimming, flying, walking, growing and
running over her Earthly surface, bringing the rocks to life, shaping the very taste
of the air itself, its temperature, pressure and humidity. Feel the rocks, the air and
the water giving themselves freely to the exciting adventures that Gaia's diverse
living beings invite them to participate in.
Biodiversity and Climate
So far we've looked at the effects of biodiversity on ecological health at the local level,
but could there be a relationship between biodiversity and the health of the planet as a
whole? This question, considered absurd by the scientific community as recently as ten
years ago, is now beginning to loom large in the minds of scientists trying to understand
how humans are changing the Earth, which they now recognise is a fully integrated sys-
tem in which life is a key player.
It is now generally agreed that life affects climate in at least two major ways: by al-
tering the composition of the atmosphere, and by changing how solar energy heats up
the Earth's surface and how this heat is distributed around the planet. But how could
biodiversity be involved in making these globally important processes work more effect-
ively? The Ecotron and BIODEPTH experiments have taught us that diverse ecological
communities on the land can change the composition of our atmosphere by increasing
