Geology Reference
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joy and energy—a truly spiritual or religious experience. His narrow, manipulative wild-
life manager's mind fell away for good. The attitude that saw nature as a dead machine,
as there solely for human use, vanished. Leopold had been Gaia'ed . He had recognised
the existence of an active agency far greater than himself in the great wild world around
him; in the rocks, the air, the birds, the sun, the microbes in the soil and in every speck
of matter. He understood them all now as powers that had witnessed what he had done
with profound disapproval.
Notice that the experience was not looked for, expected or contrived— it happened
spontaneously. Something in the dying eyes of the wolf reached beyond Leopold's train-
ing and triggered a recognition of where he truly was. From that moment on Leopold
saw the world differently, and as he strove—over the course of years—to find a voice
appropriate to this way of seeing, he eventually wrote a key essay about his Land Ethic,
in which he stated that humans are not a superior species with the right to manage and
control the rest of nature, but rather that we are just “plain members of the biotic com-
munity”. In this justifiably famous essay, he also penned his famous dictum: “A thing is
right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic commu-
nity. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
The experience imprinted itself so powerfully in Leopold's psyche that he wrote the
following passage combining rational insights about the Earth as a living being with pro-
found intuitions and ethical guidelines about how we should live within such a world:
It is at least not impossible to regard the earth's parts—soil, mountains, rivers, atmosphere etc,—as or-
gans or parts of organs of a coordinated whole, each part with its definite function. And if we could see
this whole, as a whole, through a great period of time, we might perceive not only organs with coordin-
ated functions, but possibly also that process of consumption as replacement which in biology we call
metabolism, or growth. In such a case we would have all the visible attributes of a living thing, which
we do not realise to be such because it is too big, and its life processes too slow. And there would also
follow that invisible attribute—a soul or consciousness—which many philosophers of all ages ascribe
to living things and aggregates thereof, including the 'dead' earth. Possibly in our intuitive perceptions,
which may be truer than our science and less impeded by words than our philosophies, we realize the
indivisibility of the earth—its soils, mountains, rivers, forests, climate, plants and animals—and respect
it collectively not only as useful servant but as a living being, vastly less alive than ourselves, but vastly
greater than ourselves in time and space. Philosophy, then, suggests one reason why we cannot destroy
the earth with moral impunity; namely that the 'dead' earth is an organism possessing a certain kind and
degree of life, which we intuitively respect as such.
Anima mundi had moved Leopold to the core of his being, and had triggered in him a
holistic mode of perception in which his intuition, sensing, thinking and feeling func-
tioned as a unified whole. Leopold had come home.
Finding Your Gaia Place
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