Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
Re-weaving the Covenant
Two sentences spoke out to me as I recently re-read Jacques Monod's famous topic
Chance and Necessity
. “Animism,” he says, “established a covenant between nature and
man, a profound alliance outside which there seems to stretch only terrifying solitude.
Must we break this tie because the postulate of objectivity requires it?” His answer was
of course that we must, for he was a great believer in the truth of a soulless, mechanist-
ic universe. According to Monod, it was the challenge of the West to break the ancient
animistic covenant with the cosmos, and to learn to live with the consequences. But it is
now becoming increasingly clear that the mechanistic view is literally killing the Earth
as it was configured at the time of our birth as a species, and that in these desperate times
our most urgent task is to find a way of re-weaving the ancient covenant with Gaia.
The moment when Lovelock accepted Gaia as the name for his insight might yet
prove to be of huge significance for this enterprise and for the future life of our planet.
For the first time in many thousands of years, the divine name which had once been used
to revere the Earth as alive, sacred, and replete with meaning, character and soul has
once again emerged fullblown and unashamedly into Western culture. Thanks to Love-
lock and Golding, Gaia's long exile as a way of knowing the world is now over. At last
Gaia has come home out of the outer darkness of our collective unconscious and into
the light of modern awareness. Her name is now once again free to linger on the tongues
and in the thoughts of countless numbers of people who seek to heal the blight inflicted
on their lives by the objectivist fallacy of the West.
Gaia has had an increasingly profound impact both within the scientific mainstream
and beyond, influencing a diverse range of fields such as philosophy, economics, health
care and politics. Vaclav Havel, the Czech president, has pointed out that Gaia gives us
all, whether atheist or believer, something much vaster than ourselves to be accountable
to. On the political right, Margaret Thatcher made a speech in 1998 in which she said
that before the century was out the environment would usurp the political agenda, and
took action by establishing the Hadley Centre for Climate Research at the UK's Meteor-
ological Office. She also tried to persuade her cabinet to read Lovelock's first topic on
Gaia, but unfortunately she failed to see how her vigorous promotion of unfettered eco-
nomic growth helped to bring about the very environmental crisis that she claimed to so
vehemently deplore.
As recent climatic disruption is showing us, we can affect Gaia in very serious ways,
and she is indeed holding us to account by setting in train feedbacks that may well cur-
tail and disrupt our activities long into the future. We are learning the painful way that
we are embedded within a larger planetary entity that has personhood, agency and soul,
a being that we must learn to respect if we wish to have any sort of comfortable ten-
