Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
all you can to make some time to get out there, hop on a bus or train, or drive if you
have no other alternative. Spend as long as you can there. Sit quietly in the woods, or
near a river or under the great wide sky. Let them awaken your innate capacity for direct
connection with our fabulous animate Earth.
But isn't what we are doing completely natural and inevitable? Isn't it part of the
tragedy of our species that we can recognise the intrinsic value of the more-than-human
world whilst destroying it at the same time? Everything we humans produce is natural,
including atomic bombs, GM crops, plastics, pesticides and deforestation. What makes
all the difference is our level of consciousness when devising and using technology. If
we are driven by greed, naked ambition, hatred and selfishness, then the outcomes are
bound to be negative; but if we act from a sense of solidarity with all beings, from a
desire to be of service to the great wide world, and from the deep realisation that there
is only one self, which is the great Self of the universe, then we are more likely to act
with wisdom and restraint. Humans are different from a flood basalt or a meteorite im-
pact because, unlike them, we have the ability to
choose
how to be present to the world.
A meteorite on a collision course with the Earth cannot suddenly change its mind and
swerve harmlessly away; it has to collide with us, if the forces acting on it have con-
figured it to do so—the meteorite has only one degree of freedom. We humans, on the
other hand, are blessed with many degrees of freedom. Now that our best science has in-
formed us of the huge ecological and social crises we are unleashing upon the world, we
can choose whether to remain in the narrow, objectivist mode of consciousness that has
contributed to the crises, or to act from a deeper, wider mode of consciousness in which
we experience our unity with the whole of Gaia and hence understand the importance of
radically changing our way of being in the world.
In this mode of awareness, we come to realise that Gaia is beyond our control—that
it is impossible for us to ever be the masters or stewards of the Earth. We also come
to understand that for Gaia, every living being represents a uniquely valuable mode of
sentience—that it is hubris to think that we are the only sentient creatures inhabiting
Gaia's ancient crumpled surface. Slowly, as we develop sensitivity to many other styles
of nonhuman sentience every bit as important as our own, we realise that we owe our
very existence to the complex planetary intelligence that has run our world without our
input for the last 3,500 million years.
Another question that is often asked is this: Why does it matter about the extinction
crisis and climate change? If Gaia is a great self-regulating being, won't she take care of
herself in the long run? Given enough time, perhaps five million years, Gaia will recover
from our onslaughts, and will once again produce a great flourishing of biodiversity as
she has done after previous mass extinctions. So why worry? All of this may be true, but
of course the fact that biodiversity has recovered after previous mass extinctions is no
