Normalizing Gaian Consciousness for Political Change
This summer I had to leave my home of 35 years in the Santa Cruz Mountains of Northern California. It was a place of huge trees, creeks, mountains; a wild abundance of critters and plants. The last enormous forest fire came within 3 miles of my home. If the wind hadn’t changed, fire would have swept up the canyon and consumed everything in its path.
Living in California, I became a bona fide tree-hugger. When you hug a big tree, you feel a huge, cool weightlessness coming from its heart. I feel great gratitude to Gaia for the enormous joy and peace I am afforded in the natural world. Gaia is the name of the Whole.
In his famous “Gaia Hypothesis,” James Lovelock proposed that “all organisms and their inorganic surroundings on Earth are closely integrated to form a single and self-regulating complex system, maintaining the conditions for life on the planet”. Lovelock’s work was supported by Lyn Margulis’ breakthrough understanding of symbiosis, and their work was presaged by Russian scientists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
“Gaia” still has an aura of woo-woo about it — both because it is named after a Greek Goddess associated with myth, and also because the ideas behind it were so radical at the time. Around the same time that Lovelock wrote his first paper, the notion of “continental drift” was considered fantasy by the scientific community. But then, in the early 1970s, evidence-based science changed everything. Today, “continental drift” is understood as scientific truth. Evidence-based studies have brought Gaian Systems into the scientific mainstream.
There is a bridge near a creek in a canyon near my old home where ladybugs come to mate in the fall. The aggregation is so dense that nearby trees drip with them. After the deed is done, adults head off to hibernate while the larvae develop into adults in about 8 weeks. One warm December day Rob and I were down at Ladybug Bridge when the babies took flight, whirling and whorling into the sky in all directions.
Most gardeners know that ladybugs can break up the relationship between aphids and their tomatoes. Ants keep the aphids around to suck the good stuff out of the plant and feed it to them — a protection racket. When ladybugs swoop in and eat the aphids, the ants find other things to do. An oscillating balance is maintained. This is a simple way to understand the symbiotic relations among entities that is at the heart of the Gaian system. The ant/aphid/ladybug relationship can be seen as an entity itself. It is nested within a larger entity that includes all the entities within a garden, a region, on to the Gaian Whole. Like Russian dolls, it’s nested entities all the way up, and down to mitochondria and transposons.
Gardeners and farmers who use organic or regenerative agricultural practices are in right relationship with the symbiotic balance. Industrial farming disrupts it. Slash and burn agriculture disrupts it. We can point the scientific finger at that now.
But it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that we were even aware of the human causes of global warming. Now we know that our influence dates back at least eight thousand years to the practice of rice farming, but the folks who invented ancient agricultural practices couldn’t have observed it nor imagined the future human footprint on the climate.
I left California in a record-setting year for wildfires. Causes include rising temperatures, drought, increasingly severe lightning storms, and an over-abundance of brush. Human activity — and inactivity — contribute to each of these causes. In the state park that borders my former home, “conservation” was interpreted to mean non-intervention. If a tree falls, let it rot there. If brush grows up, leave it. It’s nature’s way. Well, no — not if we consider ourselves to be part of nature, of Gaia. We are in symbiotic relationship with forests and meadows, and that means that our actions as well as our inactions count. As my indigenous friends remind me, colonial culture thinks of nature in terms of rights, while indigenous culture thinks in terms of responsibilities.
Indigenous people in California and throughout the world have been acting symbiotically with forests for millennia through controlled burns, not only to avoid cataclysmic fires but also to protect damage to habitat for other species, including salmon and redwoods. In California now, wildfire attenuation programs newly include active collaboration with indigenous people. Small burns in the cooler months don’t get out of control, and have a net negative carbon footprint by safeguarding the health of the forest itself and its function as a carbon sink.
Such practices can be understood as “Gaian Gardening” — that is, to act in right relationship to the Whole. Other examples of Gaian Gardening abound — for example, mangrove swamp restoration and vertical hydroponic urban agriculture.
This is my call to action: we must live in right relationship with Gaia if our biosphere is to survive. This requires the active propagation of an understanding of how Gaia works as a new center of gravity for our actions.
Foremost, we must take action in the polis — in cultural, social, and political contexts. A polis, in the Greek sense, is a city or city-state. More broadly defined, a polis is a group of citizens that share common moral and ethical ground. In this sense, we can already see a global collection of poleis that advocate for Gaian causes — from Defenders of Wildlife to Climate 4.0. Each has its focus, from elephants to carbon-neutral low-latency high-performance computing. But the laser-like focus of such poleis makes them siloed from one another.
As a first strategic action, we need to seek horizontal communication and common cause among these poleis. For example, in the early 20th Century the Democratic party was shaped by alliances among interest groups as diverse as unionists, the Grange Movement, and civil rights advocates. They did not all agree with one another on everything. There was no “litmus test.” But the clusters of meaning inherent in their interests — “meaning clouds” –overlapped to the extent that they were able to consolidate power into a greater polis that could exert large-scale influence on political, cultural, and civic life.
I am not proposing a political party. I am proposing a political movement that consolidates and amplifies the power of the many poleis working for the Good. Working together we will normalize a Gaian understanding of our world at a scale that can lead to real political change.
Despite occasional victories for those advocating right relationship, our established American polis has not succeeded in bending the curve toward Gaian health. The ability to take right action rests on a polis that is set on solid moral and ethical ground — a polis that holds up right relations with Gaia. Working together, we can do this.
My husband often suggests that our Legislature needs a Speaker for the Redwoods. Far-fetched though this may sound, it is an example of how the form, power relations, symbols, and ceremonies of a new polis might be shaped by our consolidated efforts to propagate a conscious understanding of Gaian systems and to ground the actions we take in consideration of the Gaian Good.
May the redesign begin.
