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THE AGES OF GAIA: A BIOGRAPHY OF OUR LIVING EARTH |
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Epilog
In letters and conversation, people often ask, "How should we live in harmony with Gaia?" I am tempted to reply, "Why ask me? All that I have done is to see the Earth differently; that does not qualify me to prescribe a way of life for you." Indeed, after nearly twenty years of writing and thinking about Gaia, it still seems that there is no prescription for living with Gaia, only consequences. Knowing that the question about how to live with Gaia is serious and that such a reply would be discourteous, as well as unhelpful, I will try to show what living with Gaia means to me. Then, perhaps, the questioner will discover something that we share in common. My life, as a scientist-hermit, would suit very few. Most people are gregarious and enjoy the lively chattering of human company in pubs, churches, and parties. Living alone with Nature, even as a family unit, is not for them. So let me take you on a tour around the place where we live in north Devon, and as you walk with me I will try to explain why we prefer to live as we do. Then maybe you will see your own way to live with Gaia. Soon after Helen and I came to live at Coombe Mill we adopted a peacock and a peahen. It was a delusion of grandeur coming from recollections of stately homes where peafowl strutted sedately and displayed their amazing colored tails. Coombe Mill is, in fact, a small cottage with thick mud-and-straw walls and a slate roof, an English adobe. But we did have 14 acres of land to start with, now grown to 30 acres. With the nearest neighbor about a mile away, it is room enough to keep the noisiest birds there are. Noisy they may be, but to us their triumphant trumpet sound at mating time is fitting and seems to usher in the spring. For the rest of the year, their extensive vocabulary ranges from a gentle clucking or purring sound to cries like a donkey braying. Then there is the sharp bark of their alarm call when, all too often, wild dogs stray onto our land. Helen, the dedicated gardener and keeper of our environment, calls them mobile shrubs, and we both have enjoyed their colorful company over the years. There is only one disadvantage -- their habit, either through friendliness or the expectation of snacks, of gathering on the pavement outside the door. There they leave their smelly dung. I used to curse them when I trod in it unawares or had to clean it up. But then it came to me that I was wrong and they were right. Those ecologically minded birds were doing their best to turn the dead concrete of the path back to living soil again. What better way to digest away the concrete than by the daily application of nutrients and bacteria in the shedding of their shit? Why should we need 30 acres to live on? We are not farmers. I think the purchase of a house with so large a garden was a reaction to the changes that took place in our last village, Bowerchalke, some 130 miles to the east. In the twenty years that we lived there, we saw a living village dispossessed of its country people, and its hinterland of seemly countryside destroyed. It was a quiet rape and pillage, no savage hordes swept upon us from the downs. The destruction was by a thousand small changes over the years, until the match between our model of what the countryside should be and the reality no longer coincided. To a casual visitor the village would have looked as beautiful as ever, but with each year that passed the farms underwent metamorphosis into agribusiness factories. Fields that in the summer were Wiltshire's glory, scarlet with poppies among the grain, became a uniform green sea of weed-free barley. Meadows that once had been gardens of wildflowers were plowed and sown with a single highly productive strain of grass. When we moved, we were determined to find a place where the environment was not likely to change so drastically again. The best way to achieve this seemed to be to find a house with enough land around it to allow us to control what happened to it. I first saw Bowerchalke in 1936 on a journey by bicycle across southern England during a summer holiday from school. Of all the places between Kent and Cornwall that I traveled, none left so lasting a memory of perfection, and I resolved there and then that one day it would be my home. I had planned my journey with the single-mindedness of a general going to war. Like him, I scrutinized ordnance maps, one inch to the mile. So detailed were these maps that they marked almost every house and tree, and finely drawn contour lines conveyed the lay of the land. I spent most winter evenings imagining the places I would visit. In those days there were few cars, and fewer still traveled on the minor roads I intended to use. With the aid of the ordnance maps, I traced a path through the network of winding lanes that joined in vertices at the villages and hamlets. Each county had its own style of architecture and its own accent. My journey was about 500 miles long and lasted for two weeks. The scale of life in England then made such a journey seem as much an expedition as does a trip to Australia now. It was not that we were diminished; it was the slower and more human pace of travel which enlarged the world. As a novice scientist I was interested in things like wild plants, especially the poisonous ones like henbane, aconite, and deadly nightshade. I experimented once by chewing a fraction of a leaf of one of them and learnt the hard way the discomfort of atropine poisoning. Fossils too had a fascination, and the coastline of Dorset and Devon, where they lie as pebbles on the beaches, was part of my itinerary. I was led to Bowerchalke by the strange names of the Wiltshire and Dorset villages. I had to see what Plush, Folly, and Piddletrenthide looked like. I had to discover what Sydling St. Nicholas was, and hear the sonorous sounding Whitchurch Canonicorum. To reach these villages, my map showed that I had to follow the Ebble Valley that led through Bowerchalke in a gentle rising slope to the high downs of Dorset. The only tight-packed contour lines, marking a steep hill, were at the head of the valley just beyond Bowerchalke, an ideal road for a traveling by bicycle. I can still remember passing up the road from Broadchalke, with the watercress beds on my left, and rounding a corner to see before me the small thatched village of Bowerchalke, the stage of an amphitheatre of green and shrubby down land hills. I arrived there at about four on a sunny Sunday afternoon in July. I was thirsty but, unusually, there were no signs outside the cottages offering teas. In those days walkers and cyclists were common enough to make it worth the while of villagers to sell refreshments. So remote was this region, and so few the travelers, that such efforts would have brought a poor return. I asked a man walking if there was anyone who would supply my needs, and he said, "Why, yes, Mrs. Gulliver in the white cottage over there sometimes will make you a tea"; and she did. It was the memory of the quiet tranquility of Bowerchalke then, when the countryside and the people merged in a natural seemliness, free from any taint of the city, that lingered in my mind and brought me back some twenty years later to make it our family home. The recent act of destruction of the English countryside is a vandalism almost without parallel in modern history. Blake saw the threat of those dark satanic mills a century ago, but he never knew that one day they would spread until the whole of England was a factory floor. Humans and Nature had evolved together to form a system that sustained a rich diversity of species; something that stirred poets and even Darwin, who wrote about the mystery of the "tangled bank." It was so familiar, so taken for granted, that we never noticed its going until it was gone. Had anyone proposed building a new road through the close of Salisbury Cathedral the reaction would have been immediate. But farmers were paid by the Ministry of Agriculture to emulate the prairies, those man-made deserts in which nothing grows but grain, and nothing lives but farmers and their livestock. The yearly tromp of vast and heavy machines and the generous spraying of herbicides and pesticides ensured that all but a few resistant plant and insect species were eliminated. The older-style farmers could not stomach it, and left the land to young agricultural college graduates working as managers for city institutions. One old farmer said to me, "I didn't do farming to be a mechanic in a factory." But it was wonderfully efficient, and soon England was producing far more food than could be eaten. The destruction still goes on. Even here in Devon, the hedgerows and small copses still fall to the chain saws and diggers. Rachel Carson was right in her gloomy prediction of a silent spring, but it has come about not simply by pesticide poisoning, as she imagined, but by the attack on all fronts of the farmers enemies, "weeds, pests, and vermin." Birds need a place to nest, and where better than the hedges, those marvelous linear forests that once divided our fields. Government, on the advice of negligent civil servants, paid handsome subsidies to farmers to root out the hedgerows, until the wildlife was destroyed, just as effectively as if the land had been sprayed with pesticide. The environmentalists, who should have seen what was happening and protested before it was too late, were much too busy fighting urban battles, or demonstrating outside the nuclear power stations. Their battle, whatever was claimed otherwise, was more against authority, represented by the monolithic electricity supply board, than for saving the countryside. They sometimes noticed poisonous sprays, for they were the products of the hated multinational chemical industries. But few were the friends of the soil who protested the agribusiness farms, or noticed the mechanized army of diggers and cutters working to make the landscape sterile for next year's planting of grain. There is no excuse for their neglect. Marion Shoard, in her moving and well-publicized book, The Theft of the Countryside, said all that I have said and much more. To those who see the world in terms of a conflict between human societies and groupings for power, my personal view of the changing landscape must seem obsessional and irrelevant. They also are the vast majority everywhere, whether in the cozy comfort of air-conditioned suburban homes of the First World, or in the squalor of a Bidonville. Who was most to blame for the destruction? Without doubt it was the scientists and agronomists who worked to make farming efficient. The experience of near starvation in the Second World War was a powerful stimulant to make Britain self-sustaining in food. Their intentions were good, it was just that they could not foresee the consequences. I know, because I was a small part of it. In my role of inventor, I helped friends and colleagues at the Grassland Research Institute near Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1940s. They were intent on improving the output of food from the small-scale English farms. I recall their sermons to young farmers on the inefficiency of hedgerows that hindered the free movement of machinery around a field; on the waste of meadows left as permanent pasture compared with a good crop of Italian rye grass grown as a monoculture. We never dreamt that the message would be so well heard that the government would be persuaded to pass the legislation that led to the removal of hedges and to the nurturing of agribusiness. Nor did we have the imagination to see that most young farmers share, with young males everywhere, a delight in mechanical toys. We, and through us the government, were giving them the money to buy, and the license to use, some of the most dangerously destructive weapons ever used. Weapons to fight the farmer's enemies, which were all life other than crops, livestock, hired help, and the farmer's family. Should anyone think that I have got it wrong, that this was another example of heartless exploitation done by a government of capitalist nominees for the profit of a few multinationals, I would remind them that it started in the late 1940s during the period of the post-war Labor government, an administration secure in power, confident, and committed to its socialism. The destruction of the countryside was independent of politics; it was carried through by good intentions aided by the tendency of civil servants to apply positive feedback by subsidies, or a negative one through taxes. Farmers work on very small margins. They may own land worth up to a million pounds, but their returns may be very small compared with the returns from simple investment. A minuscule subsidy can turn a slight loss into a comfortable profit. The countryside has vanished from most of England, and what little remains here in the West Country is passing away because the government continues to pay farmers a subsidy which is just enough to make it worth their while to act as destroyers rather than as gardeners. The small subsidy to remove hedgerows has led to the loss of over 100,000 miles of them in the past few decades. An equally small subsidy would put them back again, although it would be generations before they served once more as the linear ecosystems and artistic landscape features of the countryside. So what should we do instead? My vision of a future England would be like Blake's: to build Jerusalem on this green and pleasant land. It would involve the return to small, densely populated cities, never so big that the countryside was further than a walk or a bus ride away. At least one-third of the land should revert to natural woodland and heath, what farmers now call derelict land. Some land would be open to people for recreation; but one-sixth, at least, should be "derelict," private to wildlife only. Farming would be a mixture of intensive production where it was fit so to be, and small unsubsidized farms for those with the vocation of living in harmony with the land. In recent years, the overproduction of food by immoderate farming in the European Economic Community, including England, has been so vast that events have made my vision the basis of a practical plan for countryside management. In their humorless despair, I have sometimes heard Greens parody Sir John Betjeman's verse, written near the beginning of the Second World War:
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Even for the desperate, such an evil catharsis is not needed. Left to herself, Gaia will relax again into another long ice age. We forget that the temperate Northern Hemisphere, the home of the rich First World, now enjoys a brief summer between long, long periods of winter that last for a hundred thousand years. Even the nukes would not so devastate the land; nor would a "nuclear winter," if it could happen at all, last long enough to return the land to its normal frozen state. The natural state here in Devon has been, for most of the past million years, a permanent arctic winter. Even though close to the ocean, it was still as bitterly cold and barren as is Bear Island in the Arctic Ocean now. A mere 50 miles to the north or east of Coombe Mill were the great permanent glaciers of the "ice ages." These bulldozer blades of ice scraped off every vestige of surface life that had flowered in the brief interglacials like now. So why should I fret over the destruction of a countryside that is, at most, only a few thousand years old and soon to vanish again? I do so because the English countryside was a great work of art; as much a sacrament as the cathedrals, music, and poetry. It has not all gone yet, and I ask, is there no one prepared to let it survive long enough to illustrate a gentle relationship between humans and the land, a living example of how one small group of humans, for a brief spell, did it right? The little that is left of old England is still under threat. The donnish guardians of the landscape seem unaware of its existence. They see the countryside through romantic notions of scenic beauty. In my part of Devon they look only at the tundra of Dartmoor, and see it as something of inestimable value to be preserved at all costs. Tundra -- the waterlogged bog, too wet and too cold for trees to grow -- is a common place where the polar and temperate zones merge, a memory of what this region was in the last glaciation. In great contrast, the same guardians regard the land to the north of Dartmoor, with its small low-efficiency farms, rich wildlife, and village communities that have changed little since the Domesday Book, as of no account and expendable, a fit place for new schemes, such as a reservoir, a new road, or an industrial site. I often think that those city planners who act so destructively have been misled by that great novelist Thomas Hardy. His writing deeply influenced my city-born and city-bred mother, a woman who easily saw the countryside through Hardy's distorting spectacles. My father, though, was born in Hardy's Wessex, and he showed me how very different was the reality. Hardy, for all the brilliance of his characterization, did not understand the countryside and used it merely as a background to act out his own tragic view of the human condition. The England I knew as a child and a young man was breathtakingly beautiful, hedgerows and small copses were abundant, and small streams and rivers teemed with fish and fed the otters. It inspired generations of poets to make coherent the feelings we could not ourselves express. Yet that landscape of England was no natural ecosystem; it was a nation-sized garden, wonderfully and carefully tended. The degraded agricultural monocultures of today -- with their filthy batteries for cattle and poultry, their ugly sheet-metal buildings, and roaring, stinking machinery -- have made the countryside seem to be a part of Blake's dark satanic mills. I know it seems that way because I knew it as it was. Visitors come to Coombe Mill from the cities and abroad, and eulogize over the few glories that remain. They, and the planners of the countryside, do not understand that, unless we stop the ecocide soon, Rachel Carson's gloomy prediction of a silent spring will come true, not because we have poisoned the birds with pesticides, but because we have destroyed their habitats, and they no longer have anywhere to live. Being a typical Englishman, I did not expect "them," the establishment, to change their ways. There was nothing for it but for my family to try to do our best with the land we owned at Coombe Mill; make it a habitat and a refuge for some of the plants and animals that agribusiness is destroying. This is how we, personally, choose to live with Gaia. There are only three of us here, but 30 acres is not much more difficult to manage than a suburban garden. A garden lawn forever needs mowing, feeding, watering, and weeding; a ceaseless labor or a cost if someone else is to do it. Ten acres of our land is grass. It is no nightmare lawn requiring the ceaseless attention of an army of gardeners; it grows as meadows rich with wildflowers and small animals. The meadows divide and form a setting for the 20 acres of planted trees. It needs only to be enjoyed and cut once a year when the grass has grown long. Local farmers are glad to come and cut it; they use the grass for fodder and pay for it. The cost of keeping 10 acres of meadow is comparable with that of a well-kept suburban garden. The trees need more attention, but not so much as to be in any way a burden for the three of us. The River Carey divides our land into two equal parts, which posed a problem. The river runs by the house, which was once a water mill, and is about 60 feet wide. It cannot easily be crossed by wading, and we soon discovered that to reach our new land involved a five-mile walk. Bridges across the Carey are widely spaced apart. Two years ago, we decided to build a bridge so that we could more easily tend the 10,000 trees that were newly planted on the west bank of the Carey. As metaphors go, building a bridge has almost become a cliche. But just try building a bridge in real life; it is amazing to experience, personally, the power of reducing a metaphor to practice. As you will have gathered, we are solitary people and don't much mix with our neighbors. Yet in this part of west Devon we were welcomed as soon as we came and have experienced more spontaneous kindness than in any other place that we have lived. Helen and I and our son John are in various ways physically handicapped so that we add up to make one able-bodied person, not enough to run a place as large as this. It would not have flourished had it not been for the unstinting care and generous help of our friends from the village, Keith and Margaret Sargent. Our home and the buildings that go to make up the rest of this place are of mud and straw, with slate roofs. They would never have survived the winter storms but for the skillful repairs of our other village friends, and former occupants of Coombe Mill, Ernie and Bill Orchard. But it was not until we started to plan our bridge that we experienced the full vigor of the community in which we are immersed. When these friends knew what was in our minds, the bridge began to form -- first in the imagination as an exciting project, and then more solidly as the plans were drawn and the materials gathered. They had the skills needed to do with elan and enjoyment a challenging task, one that arose from no more than a passing personal thought. The project showed, in a Gaian way, how a thought became an act that brought personal and then local benefit. Our bridge is made of steel; it was built by a blacksmith, Gilbert Rendall, and is in every way a mechanical construction. I am never quite comfortable with things mechanical. I well recall a conversation with my friends Stewart Brand, editor of CoEvolution Quarterly, and Gary Snyder, the poet. They were shocked and indignant when I said, "Chain saws are an invention more evil than the hydrogen bomb." To me a chain saw was something that cut down in minutes a tree that had taken a hundred years to grow. It was the means of destroying the tropical forests. To Gary Snyder it was a benign gardening tool with which he could carefully, like a surgeon, remove the scars of years of bad husbandry in his forests. It is not what you do but the way it is done; the more powerful the tool, the harder it is to use it right. How, you may ask, do these rambling thoughts tell us about how to live with Gaia? I would reply that as a metaphor, Gaia emphasizes most the significance of the individual organism. It is always from the action of individuals that powerful local, regional, and global systems evolve. When the activity of an organism favors the environment as well as the organism itself, then its spread will be assisted; eventually the organism and the environmental change associated with it will become global in extent. The reverse is also true, and any species that adversely affects the environment is doomed; but life goes on. Does this apply to humans now? Are we doomed by our destruction of the natural world? Gaia is not purposefully antihuman, but so long as we continue to change the global environment against her preferences, we encourage our replacement with a more environmentally seemly species. It all depends on you and me. If we see the world as a living organism of which we are a part -- not the owner, nor the tenant; not even a passenger -- we could have a long time ahead of us and our species might survive for its "allotted span." It is up to us to act personally in a way that is constructive. The present frenzy of agriculture and forestry is a global ecocide as foolish as it would be to act on the notion that our brains are supreme and the cells of other organs expendable. Would we drill wells through our skins to take the blood for its nutrients? If living with Gaia is a personal responsibility, how should we do it? Each of us will have a personal solution to the problem. There must be many simpler ways of living with Gaia than the one we have chosen at Coombe Mill. I find it useful to think of things that are harmless in moderation but malign in excess. For me these are the three deadly Cs: cars, cattle, and chain saws. For example, you could eat less beef. If you do this, and if the clinicians are right, your health might improve and at the same time you would ease the pressures to turn the forests of the humid tropics into absurdly wasteful beef farms. Gaia theory arose from a detached, extraterrestrial view of the Earth, too distant to be much concerned with humans. Strangely, the view is not inconsistent with the human values of kindness and compassion; indeed it helps us to reject sentimentality about pain and death, and accept mortality, for us as well as for our species. With such a view in mind, Helen and I wish our eight grandchildren to inherit a healthy planet. In some ways, the worst fate that we can imagine for them is to become immortal through medical science -- to be condemned to live on a geriatric planet, with the unending and overwhelming task of forever keeping it and themselves alive for our kind of life. Death and decay are certain, but they seem a small price to pay for the possession, even briefly, of life as an individual. The second law of thermodynamics points the only way the Universe can run-down, to a heat death. The pessimists are those who would use a flashlight to see their way in the dark and expect the battery to last forever. Better to live as Edna St. Vincent Millay advised:
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