Geology Reference
In-Depth Information
ure within her. Unlike human-made agreements such as business deals and internation-
al treaties such as the Kyoto protocol, our embeddedness in Gaia is non-negotiable. As
Paul Hawken and his co-authors have noted, “Nature bats last, and owns the stadium.”
The dawning realisation of the overarching importance of Gaia has spawned a range
of new ways of relating to the Earth within Western culture. Many organisations cov-
ering a wide remit of green issues have adopted her name, including Gaia House, the
world-famous English meditation centre, and a host of foundations and charities around
the world. I see all of this as a good sign—it shows that Gaia as an archetypal idea is
capturing the imagination of people from many walks of life and from a variety of psy-
chological dispositions who feel disillusioned with the now clearly outdated determinist-
ic world-view which they see as needing to be superseded by a more holistic approach.
As David Abram has said, there is no time to waste: the Gaian perspective must spread
from sensing body to sensing body like a contagion before it is too late to save what is
left of our endangered climate and beleaguered biodiversity.
Philosopher Mary Midgley has pointed out that in our own time, the idea of Gaia is
well placed to provide a powerful catalyst for the widespread adoption of holistic think-
ing in all spheres of life. The upshot of her argument is that Gaia serves very well as a
synonym for a mode of thought capable of connecting seemingly disparate spheres such
as science, religion, politics, education, health care and crime prevention. In fact, holist-
ic thinking has been present in the science of ecology since its inception at the beginning
of the last century. Ecologists have always realised that the living beings they studied are
interconnected in complex ways, that the networks of relationships in ecological com-
munities affect all the players, that what happens to one species reverberates throughout
the web of life, affecting all.
Sadly, holistic thinking in the science of ecology has never really had much of an im-
pact on wider society. The appearance of Gaia theory has the potential to change all that,
perhaps because of the shocking discovery that something as seemingly insignificant as
the thin smear of life clinging 'passively' to our planet's surface is in fact no mere insub-
stantial passenger, but is instead a major contributor to processes of titanic proportions,
such as the composition of the atmosphere, the global circulation of the oceans and the
very weather patterns which we experience every day as our most immediate connection
with Gaia.
Perhaps this is because Gaia is not so small as to seem way beyond the everyday
world, and yet not large enough to boggle the imagination with vast distances and far-
flung cosmic events. A Gaian approach allows us to develop a sense of how the local
connects and contributes in multifarious, surprising and significant ways to life at the
global level. As we explore some of her stories in this topic, as we move through her
various manifestations in our imagination, we will try to catch glimpses of the rich in-
