How do you feel about the Earth? That is a question few of us get to answer these days. It seems too big, too abstract, perhaps a little hippy. We lack the language, we are too engrossed in more immediate matters of individual survival, and, even if we can find time to think on a global scale, this line of thought can take us in uncomfortable directions. Just look at the state of the world right now: war, political extremism, climate crisis, nature breakdown, inequality. Who wants to dwell on that? Most people today would rather think in smaller, more manageable doses – nations, tribes, families, selves.
But what if that inability to connect with the Earth is the cause of our contemporary problems, a severing of root from trunk that makes leaves wither, branches fall, collapse inevitable?
I have been drawn to this question in recent years for two main reasons: first, a closer acquaintance with indigenous cultures in my Amazon rainforest home, of which more later; and second, more than 80 hours of interviews with the late British scientist, inventor and philosopher of ecology James Lovelock, who is best known as the father of the Gaia Theory of the Earth.
The Gaia hypothesis suggests our planet behaves like a living organism, maintaining a steady temperature, salinity, acidity and chemical composition through the constant interaction of the biosphere and the atmosphere. In this theory, the billion, trillion, quadrillion discharges of everything – from bacteria to Blue Whales – create and self-regulate the air we breathe, the sky above our heads and the climate that we rely on. Looked at on this planetary scale, Life (with a capital L) is much more about interdependence than competition. Nothing can be understood outside of its place in the Earth system, which encourages a holistic, integrated perspective that is sharply at odds with the more popular trend in modern science of creating specialist disciplines and breaking subjects down into smaller and smaller units of study, such as atoms and genes.
Gaia was a popular concept in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which was an era of unusually strong planetary consciousness. Cold War divisions were starting to break down, the institutional racism of apartheid was defeated in South Africa, the governments of the world came together to pass what is still the world’s most successful environmental agreement: the Montreal Protocol, which phased out ozone depleting chemicals. This was a time when there were still high hopes for what was commonly known as “the international community” – a term that nobody would dream of using in today’s age of Trump, Putin and Netanyahu. It’s heartbreaking that our children have never experienced how good it can feel to come together in this way.
