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THE AGES OF GAIA: A BIOGRAPHY OF OUR LIVING EARTH |
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9: God and Gaia
Photographs, like biographies, often reveal more of the artist than of the subject. Maybe this is why passport photographs, taken in mechanically operated booths, look so lifeless. How could a mere machine capture the soul of its subject, stiffly sitting and gazing into the blind eye of the camera? Trying to write about God and Gaia, I share some of the limitations of a mechanical camera, and I know that this chapter will show more about myself than about my subjects. So why try? When I wrote the first book on Gaia I had no inkling that it would be taken as a religious book. Although I thought the subject was mainly science, there was no doubt that many of its readers found otherwise. Two-thirds of the letters received, and still coming in, are about the meaning of Gaia in the context of religious faith. This interest has not been limited to the laity; a most interesting letter came from Hugh Montefiore, then Bishop of Birmingham. He asked which I thought came first, life or Gaia. My attempts to answer this question led to a correspondence, reported in a chapter of his book The Probability of God. I suspect that some cosmologists are similarly visited by enquiries from those who imagine them to be at least on nodding terms with God. I was naive to think that a book about Gaia would be taken as science only. So where do I stand about religion? While still a student I was asked seriously, by a member of the Society of Friends, if I had ever had a religious experience. Not understanding what he meant, imagining that he referred to a manifestation or a miracle, I answered no. Looking back from 45 years on, I now tend to think that I should have said yes. Living itself is a religious experience. At the time, however, the question was almost meaningless because it implied a separation of life into sacred and secular parts. I now think that there can be no such division. In any relationship there are high points of delight, as well as pitfalls in the great plain of contentment. For me one high point came when I was asked by Jim Morton, the Dean of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine in New York, to serve as a participant in a religious celebration. I still recall with wonder being part of that colorful procession, with him and other clerics, dressed in medieval costume. The music of the choir singing "Morning Is Broken" seemed to take on a new significance in the ambience of that sacred place. It was a sensual experience, but to me that does not make it less religious.
My thoughts about religion when a child grew from those of my father and the country folk I knew. It was an odd mixture, composed of witches, May trees, and the views expressed by Quakers, in and outside the Sunday school at a Friends' meeting house. Christmas was more of a solstice feast than a Christian one. We were, as a family, well into the present century, yet still amazingly superstitious. So ingrained was my childhood conditioning about the power of the occult that in later life it took a positive act of will to stop touching wood or crossing fingers whenever some hazard was to be faced. Christianity was there not so much as a faith, rather as a set of sensible directions on how to be good. When I first saw Gaia in my mind I felt as an astronaut must have done as he stood on the Moon, gazing back at our home, the Earth. The feeling strengthens as theory and evidence come in to confirm the thought that the Earth may be a living organism. Thinking of the Earth as alive makes it seem, on happy days, in the right places, as if the whole planet were celebrating a sacred ceremony. Being on the Earth brings that same special feeling of comfort that attaches to the celebration of any religion when it is seemly and when one is fit to receive. It need not suspend the critical faculty, nor can it prevent one from singing the wrong hymn or the right one out of tune. That is only what I feel about Gaia. What about God? I am too committed to the scientific way of thinking to feel comfortable when enunciating the Creed or the Lord's Prayer in a Christian Church. The insistence of the definition "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth" seems to anesthetize the sense of wonder, as if one were committed to a single line of thought by a cosmic legal contract. It seems wrong also to take it merely as a metaphor. But I respect the intuition of those who do believe, and I am moved by the ceremony, the music, and most of all by the glory of the words of the prayer book that to me are the nearest to perfect expression of our language. I have kept my doubts in a separate place for too long. Now that I write this chapter, I have to try somehow to explain, to myself as well as to you, what is my religious belief. I am happy with the thought that the Universe has properties that make the emergence of life and Gaia inevitable. But I react to the assertion that it was created with this purpose. It might have been; but how the Universe and life began are ineffable questions. When a scientist colleague uses evidence about the Earth eons ago to explain his theory of the origins of life it stirs a similar sense of doubt. How can the events so long ago that led to the emergence of anything so intricate as life be treated as a fact of science? It is human to be curious about antecedents, but expeditions into the remote past in search of origins is as supremely unimportant as was the hunting of the snark. The greater part of the information about our origins is with us here and now; so let us rejoice in it and be glad to be alive. At a meeting in London recently, a wise man, Dr. Donald Braben, asked me: "Why do you stop with the Earth? Why not consider if the Solar System, the Galaxy, or even the Universe is alive?" My instant answer was that the concept of a living Earth, Gaia, is manageable. We know that there is no other life in this Solar System, and the nearest star is utterly remote. There must be other Gaias circling other docile long-lived stars but, curious though I may be about them and about the Universe, these are intangible-concepts for the intellect, not the senses. Until, if ever, we are visited from other parts of the Universe we are obliged to remain detached. Many, I suspect, have trodden this same path through the mind. Those millions of Christians who make a special place in their hearts for the Virgin Mary possibly respond as I do. The concept of Jahweh as remote, all-powerful, all-seeing is either frightening or unapproachable. Even the sense of presence of a more contemporary God, a still, small voice within, may not be enough for those who need to communicate with someone outside. Mary is close and can be talked to. She is believable and manageable. It could be that the importance of the Virgin Mary in faith is something of this kind, but there may be more to it. What if Mary is another name for Gaia? Then her capacity for virgin birth is no miracle or parthenogenetic aberration, it is a role of Gaia since life began. Immortals do not need to reproduce an image of themselves; it is enough to renew continuously the life that constitutes them. Any living organism a quarter as old as the Universe itself and still full of vigor is as near immortal as we ever need to know. She is of this Universe and, conceivably, a part of God. On Earth she is the source of life everlasting and is alive now; she gave birth to humankind and we are a part of her.
This is why, for me, Gaia is a religious as well as a scientific concept, and in both spheres it is manageable. Theology is also a science, but if it is to operate by the same rules as the rest of science, there is no place for creeds or dogma. By this I mean theology should not state that God exists and then proceed to investigate his nature and his interactions with the Universe and living organisms. Such an approach is prescriptive, presupposes his existence, and closes the mind to such questions as: What would the Universe be like without God? How can we use the concept of God as a way to look at the Universe and ourselves? How can we use the concept of Gaia as a way to understanding God? Belief in God is an act of faith and will remain so. In the same way, it is otiose to try to prove that Gaia is alive. Instead, Gaia should be a way to view the Earth, ourselves, and our relationships with living things. The life of a scientist who is a natural philosopher can be deeply religious. Curiosity is an intimate part of the process of loving. Being curious and getting to know the natural world leads to a loving relationship with it. It can be so deep that it cannot be articulated, but it is nonetheless good science. Creative scientists, when asked how they came upon some great discovery, frequently state, "I knew it intuitively, but it took several years work to prove it to my colleagues." Compare that statement with this one by William James, the nineteenth-century philosopher and psychologist, in The Varieties of Religious Experience:
This was the way of the natural philosophers in James Hutton's time in the eighteenth century and is still the way of many scientists today. Science can embrace the notion of the Earth as a superorganism and can still wonder about the meaning of the Universe. How did we reach our present secular humanist world? In times that are ancient by human measure, as far back as the earliest artifacts can be found, it seems that the Earth was worshipped as a goddess and believed to be alive. The myth of the great Mother is part of most early religions. The Mother is a compassionate, feminine figure; spring of all life, of fecundity, of gentleness. She is also the stern and unforgiving bringer of death. As Aldous Huxley reminds in The Human Experience:
At some time not more than a few thousand years ago the concept of a remote master God, an overseer of Gaia, took root. At first it may have been the Sun, but later it took on the form we have with us now of an utterly remote yet personally immanent ruler of the Universe. Charlene Spretnak, in her moving and readable book, The Spiritual Dimensions of Green Politics, attributes the first denial of Gaia, the Earth goddess, to the conquest of an earlier Earth-centered civilization by the Sun-worshipping warriors of the invading Indo-European tribes.
The evolution of these horsemen to the modern men who ride their infinitely more powerful machines of destruction over the habitats of our partners in Gaia seems only a small step. The rest of us, in the cozy, comfortable hell of urban life, care little what they do so long as they continue to supply us with food, energy, and raw materials and we can continue to play the game of human interaction. In ancient times, belief in a living Earth and in a living cosmos was the same thing. Heaven and Earth were close and part of the same body. As time passed and awareness grew of the vast distances of space and time through such inventions as the telescope, the Universe was comprehended and the place of God receded until now it hides behind the Big Bang, claimed to have started it all. At the same time, as population increased so did the proportion forced to lead urban lives out of touch with Nature. In the past two centuries we have nearly all become city dwellers, and seem to have lost interest in the meaning of both God and Gaia. As the theologian Keith Ward wrote in the Times in December 1984:
I wonder if this is the result of sensory deprivation. How can we revere the living world if we can no longer hear the bird song through the noise of traffic, or smell the sweetness of fresh air? How can we wonder about God and the Universe if we never see the stars because of the city lights? If you think this to be exaggeration, think back to when you last lay in a meadow in the sunshine and smelt the fragrant thyme and heard and saw the larks soaring and singing. Think back to the last night you looked up into the deep blue black of a sky clear enough to see the Milky Way, the congregation of stars, our Galaxy. The attraction of the city is seductive. Socrates said that nothing of interest happened outside its walls and, much later, Dr. Johnson expressed his view of country living as "One green field is like another." Most of us are trapped in this world of the city, an everlasting soap opera, and all too often as spectators, not players. It is something to have sensitive commentators like Sir David Attenborough bring the natural world with its visions of forests and wilderness to the television screens of our suburban rooms. But the television screen is only a window and only rarely clear enough to see the world outside; it can never bring us back into the real world of Gaia. City life reinforces and strengthens the heresy of humanism, that narcissistic devotion to human interests alone. The Irish missionary Sean McDonagh wrote in his book, To Care for the Earth: "The 20 billion years of God's creative love is either seen simply as the stage on which the drama of human salvation is worked out, or as something radically sinful in itself and needing transformation." The heartlands of the great religions are now in the last bastions of rural existence, in the Third World of the tropics. Elsewhere God and Gaia that once were joined and respected are now divorced and of no account. We have, as a species, almost resigned from membership in Gaia and given to our cities and our nations the rights and responsibilities of environmental regulation. We struggle to enjoy the human interactions of city life yet still yearn to possess the natural world as well. We want to be free to drive into the country or the wilderness without polluting it in so doing; to have our cake and eat it. Human and understandable such striving may be, but it is illogical. Our humanist concerns about the poor of the inner cities or the Third World, and our near-obscene obsession with death, suffering, and pain as if these were evil in themselves -- these thoughts divert the mind from our gross and excessive domination of the natural world. Poverty and suffering are not sent; they are the consequences of what we do. Pain and death are normal and natural; we could not long survive without them. Science, it is true, assisted at the birth of technology. But when we drive our cars and listen to the radio bringing news of acid rain, we need to remind ourselves that we, personally, are the polluters. We, not some white-coated devil figure, buy the cars, drive them, and foul the air. We are therefore accountable, personally, for the destruction of the trees by photochemical smog and acid rain. We are responsible for the silent spring that Rachel Carson predicted. There are many ways to keep in touch with Gaia. Individual humans are densely populated cellular and endosymbiont collectives, but clearly also identities. Individuals interact with Gaia in the cycling of the elements and in the control of the climate, just like a cell does in the body. You also interact individually in a spiritual manner through a sense of wonder about the natural world and from feeling a part of it. In some ways this interaction is not unlike the tight coupling between the state of the mind and the body. Another connection is through the powerful infrastructures of human communication and mass transfer. We as a species now move a greater mass of some materials around the Earth than did all the biota of Gaia before we appeared. Our chattering is so loud that it can be heard to the depths of the Universe. Always, as with other and earlier species within Gaia, the entire development arises from the activity of a few individuals. The urban nests, the agricultural ecosystems, good and bad, are all the consequences of rapid positive feedback starting from the action of an inspired individual. A frequent misunderstanding of my vision of Gaia is that I champion complacence, that I claim feedback will always protect the environment from any serious harm that humans might do. It is sometimes more crudely put as "Lovelock's Gaia gives industry the green light to pollute at will." The truth is almost diametrically opposite. Gaia, as I see her, is no doting mother tolerant of misdemeanors, nor is she some fragile and delicate damsel in danger from brutal mankind. She is stern and tough, always keeping the world warm and comfortable for those who obey the rules, but ruthless in her destruction of those who transgress. Her unconscious goal is a planet fit for life. If humans stand in the way of this, we shall be eliminated with as little pity as would be shown by the micro-brain of an intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile in full flight to its target. What I have written so far has been a testament built around the idea of Gaia. I have tried to show that God and Gaia, theology and science, even physics and biology are not separate but a single way of thought. Although a scientist, I write as an individual, and my views are likely to be less common than I like to think. So now let me tell you something of what the scientific community has to say on this subject. In science, the more discovered, the more new paths open for exploration. It is usual in science, when things are vague and unclear, for the path to be like that of a drunkard wandering in a zigzag. As we stagger back from what lastly dawns upon our befuddled wits is the wrong way, we cross over the true path and move nearly as far to the equally wrong, opposite side. If all goes well, our deviations lessen and the path converges towards, but never completely follows, the true one. It gives a new insight to the old tag in vino veritas. So natural is this way to find the truth that we usually program our computers to solve problems too tedious to do ourselves by setting them to follow the same trial-and-error, staggering, stumbling walk. The process is dignified and mystified by calling it "iteration," but the method is the same. The only difference is that, so quickly is it done, the eye never sees the fumbling. We have lost the instinctive understanding of what life is and of our place within Gaia. Our attempts to define life are much in the stage of the drunkard's walk. The two opposing verges representing the extremes of iteration are illustrated by a splendid philosophical debate that has gone on for the past twenty years between the molecular biologists on the one side and the new school of thermodynamics on the other. Jacques Monod's Chance and Necessity, although first published in 1970, most clearly and beautifully conveys the clear, strong, and rigorous approach of solid science based firmly in a belief in a materialistic and deterministic Universe. The other verge is represented by those, like Erich Jantsch, who believe in a self-organizing Universe. It is concerned with the thermodynamics of the unsteady state of which dissipative structures such as flames, whirlpools, and life itself are examples. Although the participants are all well known and respected in the English-speaking world, most of this entertaining debate has gone on in French, so many of us have missed the fun. The essence of this contest is a rerun of the ancient battle between the holists and the reductionists. As Monod reminds us:
These strong words were in the 1970 edition of Chance and Necessity. Maybe they are by now less extremely held, but they serve well to express what was and still is an important scientific constituency. No one now doubts that it was plain, honest reductionist science that allowed us to unlock so many of the secrets of the Universe, not least those of the living macromolecules that carry the genetic information of our cells. But clear, strong, and powerful though it may be, it is not enough by itself to explain the facts of life. Consider Jacques Monod's Martian engineer. Would it have been sensible to have dashed in with a kit of tools and disassembled analytically the computer he found? Or would it have been better, as a first step, to have switched it on and questioned it as a whole system? If you have any doubts about the answer to this question then consider the thought that the hypothetical Martian engineer was an intelligent computer and the object he examined, you. By contrast, in 1972 Ilya Prigogine wrote:
I wholly agree with Monod that the cornerstone of the scientific method is the postulate that Nature is objective. True knowledge can never be gained by attributing "purpose" to phenomena. But, equally strongly, I deny the notion that systems are never more than the sum of their parts. The value of Gaia in this debate is that it is the largest of living systems. It can be analyzed both as a whole system and, in the reductionist manner, as a collection of parts. This analysis need disturb neither the privacy nor the function of Gaia any more than would the movement of a single commensal bacterium on the surface of your nose. Prigogine was not the first to recognize the inadequacies of equilibrium thermodynamics. He had many illustrious predecessors, among them the physical chemists J. W. Gibbs, L. Onsager, and K. G. Denbigh, who explored the thermodynamics of the steady state. But it was that truly great physicist, Ludwig Boltzmann, who pointed the way towards the understanding of life in thermodynamic terms. And it was by reading Schrodinger's book What Is Life? in the early 1960s that I first realized that planetary life was revealed by the contrast between the near-equilibrium state of the atmosphere of a dead planet and the exuberant disequilibrium of the Earth. When we cross from the sharp clarity of the real world into that nightmare land of dissipating structures, what do we learn that makes the next staggering lurch less erroneous than the last? I have gained from Prigogine's world view a confirmation of a suspicion that time is a variable much too often ignored. In particular, many of the apparent contradictions between these two schools of thought seem to resolve if viewed along the time dimension instead of in space. We have evolved from the world of simple molecules through dissipative structures to the more permanent entities that are living organisms. The further we go from the present, either into the past or the future, the greater the uncertainty. Darwin was right to dismiss thoughts about the origins of life; as Jerome Rothstein has said, the restrictions of the second law of thermodynamics prevent us from ever knowing about the beginning or the end of the Universe. In our guts and in those of other animals, the ancient world of the Archean lives on. In Gaia, also, the ancient chaotic world of dissipating structures that preceded life still lives on. A recent and relatively unknown discovery of science is that the fluctuations at every scale from viscosity to weather can be chaotic. There is no complete determinism in the Universe; many things are as unpredictable as a perfect roulette wheel. An ecologist colleague of mine, C. S. Holling, has observed that the stability of large-scale ecosystems depends upon the existence of internal chaotic instabilities. These pockets of chaos in the larger, stable Gaian system serve to probe the boundaries set by the physical constraints to life. By this means the opportunism of life is insured, and no new niche remains undiscovered. For example, I live in a rural region surrounded by farmers who keep sheep. It is impressive how adventurous young lambs, through their continuous probing of my boundary hedges, can find their way through onto the richer, ungrazed land on my side. The behavior of young men is not so different. My reason for wandering onto the battlefield of the war between holists and reductionists was to illustrate how polarized is science itself. Let me conclude this digressionary visit and return to the theme of this chapter, God and Gaia. And let me start by reminding you of Daisyworld -- a model which is reductionist and holistic at the same time. It was made to answer a criticism of Gaia, that it was teleology. The need for reduction arose because the relationships between all the living things on Earth in their countless trillions and the rocks, the air, and the oceans could never be described in full detail by a set of mathematical equations. A drastic simplification was needed. But the model with its closed loop cybernetic structure was also holistic. This also applies to ourselves. It would be pointless to attempt to disentangle all the relationships between the atoms within the cells that go to make up our bodies. But this does not prevent us from being real and identifiable, and having a life span of at least 70 years. We are also in an adversary contest between our allegiance to Gaia and to humanism. In this battle, politically minded humanists have made the word "reductionist" pejorative, to discredit science and to bring contumely to the scientific method. But all scientists are reductionists to some extent; there is no way to do science without reduction at some stage. Even the analyzers of holistic systems, confronted with an unknown system, do tests, such as perturbing the system and observing the response, or making a model of it and then reducing that model. In biology it is impossible to avoid reduction, even if we wished. The material and relationships of living things are so phenomenally complex that a holistic view is seen only when it suits the biota to exist as an identifiable entity such as a cell, a plant, a nest, or Gaia. Certainly, the entities themselves can be observed and classified with a minimum of invasion, but sooner or later curiosity will drive an urge to discover what the entities are made of and how they work. In any case, the idea that mere observation is neutral is itself an illusion. Someone once said that the reason the Universe is running down is that God is always observing it and hence reducing it. Be this as it may, there is little doubt that a nature reserve, a wildlife park, or an ecosystem is reduced in proportion to the amount of time that we and our children perturb the wildlife by watching them. In The Self Organizing Universe, Erich Jantsch made a strong argument for the omnipresence of a self-organizing tendency; so that life, instead of being a chance event, was an inevitable consequence. Jantsch based his thoughts on the theories of those pioneers of what might be called the "thermodynamics of the unsteady state" -- Max Eigen, Ilya Prigogine, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, and their successors. As scientific evidence accumulates and theories are developed in this recondite topic, it may become possible to encompass the metaphor of a living Universe. The intuition of God could be rationalized; something of God could become as familiar as Gaia. For the present, my belief in God rests at the stage of a positive agnosticism. I am too deeply committed to science for undiluted faith; equally unacceptable to me spiritually is the materialist world of undiluted fact. Art and science seem interconnected with each other and with religion, and to be mutually enlarging. That Gaia can be both spiritual and scientific is, for me, deeply satisfying. From letters and conversations I have learnt that a feeling for the organism, the Earth, has survived and that many feel a need to include those old faiths in their system of belief, both for themselves and because they feel that Earth of which they are a part is under threat. In no way do I see Gaia as a sentient being, a surrogate God. To me Gaia is alive and part of the ineffable Universe and I am a part of her. The philosopher Gregory Bateson expressed this agnosticism in his own special way:
As a scientist I believe that Nature is objective but also recognize that Nature is not predetermined. The famous uncertainty principle that the physicist Werner Heisenberg discovered was the first crack in the crystalline structure of determinism. Now chaos is revealed to have an orderly mathematical prescription. This new theoretical understanding enlightens the practice of weather forecasting. Previously it was believed, as the French physicist Laplace had stated, that given enough knowledge (and, in this age, computer power) anything could be predicted. It was a thrill to discover that there was real, honest chaos decently spread around the Universe and to begin to understand why it is impossible in this world ever to predict if it will be raining at some specific place or time. True chaos is there as the counterpart of order. Determinism is reduced to a collection of fragments, like jewels that have fallen on the surface of a bowl of pitch. Science has its fashions, and one thing guaranteed to stir interest and start a new fashion is the exploration of a pathology. Health is far less interesting than disease. I well recall as a schoolboy visiting the Museum of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine where there were on display life-sized models of subjects stricken by tropical illnesses. Although less well crafted, they were so strange and horrible as to make tame the professional horrors of Madame Tussaud's waxworks. The sight of full-sized models of the victims of elephantiasis or leprosy and the imagination of their suffering made bearable the adolescent agonies of a schoolboy. Contemporary science is similarly fascinated by pathologies of a mathematical kind. Theoretical ecology, as we have already discussed, is more concerned with sick than with healthy ecosystems. The vagaries of weather are more interesting than the long-term stability of climate. Continuous creation never had a chance in face of the ultimate pathology of the Big Bang. Interest in the pathologies of science has a curious link with religion. Mathematicians and physicists are, without seeming aware of it, into demonology. They are found investigating "catastrophe theory" or "strange attractors." They then seek from their colleagues in other sciences examples of pathologies that match their curious models. Perhaps I should explain that in mathematics, an attractor is a stable equilibrium state, such as a point at the bottom of a smooth bowl where a ball will always come to rest. Attractors can be lines, planes, or solids as well as points, and are the places where systems tend to settle down to rest. Strange attractors are chaotic regions of fractional dimensions that act like black holes, drawing the solutions of equations to their unknown and singular domains. Phenomena of the natural world -- such as weather, disease, and ecosystem failures -- are characterized by the presence of these strange attractors in the clockwork of their mathematics, lurking like time bombs as harbingers of instability, cyclical fluctuations, and just plain chaos. The remarkable thing about real and healthy living organisms is their apparent ability to control or limit these destabilizing influences. It seems that the world of dissipating structures, threatened by catastrophe and parasitized by strange attractors, is the foreworld of life and of Gaia and the underworld that still exists. The tightly coupled evolution of the physical environment and the autopoietic entities of pre-life led to a new order of stability; the state associated with Gaia and with all forms of healthy life. Life and Gaia are to all intents immortal, even though composed of entities that at least include dissipative structures. I find a curious resemblance between the strange attractors and other denizens of the imaginary world of mathematical constructs and the demons of older religious belief. A parallel that goes deep and includes an association with sickness not health, famine not plenty, storm not calm. A saint of this fascinating branch of mathematics is the Frenchman, Benoit Mandelbrot. From his expressions in fractional dimensions it is possible to produce graphic illustrations of all manner of natural scenes: coastlines, mountain ranges, trees, and clouds, all startlingly realistic. But when Mandelbrot's scientific art is applied to strange attractors we see, in graphic form, the vividly colored image of a demon or a dragon. Gaia theory may seem to be dull in comparison with these exotica. A thing, like health, to be taken for granted except when it fails. This may be why so few scientists and theologians are interested in it; they prefer the exploration of the Universe, or of the origins of life, to the exploration of the natural world that surrounds them. I find it difficult to explain to my colleagues why I prefer to live and work alone in the depths of the country. They think that I must be missing all the excitement of exploration. I prefer a life with Gaia here and now, and to look back only to that part of her history which is knowable, not to what might have been before she came into being. A friend has asked why, if this is so, I chose to spend so much of this book on the history of the Earth. I find it easiest to explain my reasons for this apparent inconsistency in a fable. Imagine an island set in a warm blue sea with sandy beaches. The lush forest in the foreground gives way to small rocky mountain peaks as sharp and clear as a line drawing on the distant horizon. There is no sign of habitation, human or other. What at first sight looks like a village of white stone houses turns out, on closer inspection, to be a chalk outcrop, laser bright in the sunlight. Something looks odd, though; you blink, for the light is very bright, and look again. It is not an illusion, the trees are not green, they are a dark shade of blue. The island in view is somewhere on Earth 500 million years from now. The exact details are unpredictable and unimportant to this travel tale, but we can say it is hotter than any seaside place on Earth today, with a sea temperature near 30°C; it often reaches 60°C in the desert inland. There is little or no carbon dioxide in the air, but otherwise it is much the same as now, with just the right amount of oxygen for breathing but not so much as to make fires uncontrollable. There has been a major punctuation, and the dominant life forms on the land surface are of a structure no botanist or zoologist of our time would recognize. In a small meadow near the shore, a group of philosophers is gathered for one of those civilized meetings hosted by a scientific society. A symposium that leaves ample time for swimming and walking and just talking idly. A participant has a theory that their form of life, so unlike that of many of the organisms in the sea and of the microorganisms, did not just evolve but was made artificially by a sentient life form living in the remote geological past. She bases her argument on the nature of the nervous system of the philosophers and of land animals generally. It operates by direct electrical conduction along organic polymer strands, whereas that of the ocean life operates by ionic conduction within elongated cells (which we, of course, would recognize as nerves). The brains of the philosophers operate by semi-conduction, in contrast to the chemically polarized systems of the sea organisms. In this new form of life, males do not exist as mobile sentient organisms, merely as a vegetative form that supplies the necessary separate pathway for genetic information so that recombination can reduce the expression of error. Marriage is still a lifelong relationship, but with males rooted in the soil like plants, it is more one of that between a loving gardener and the flowers. Our philosopher argues that such a system could never have originated by chance but must have been manufactured at some time in the past. Not surprisingly, her theory is not well received. Not only is it outside the paradigm of the science of those times, but the theologians and mythopoets find the notion repugnant to their view of a single, spontaneous origin of a living planet. To bring back the Creationist heresy is unacceptable. These occupants of a future Atlantis have no need for speech or writing. The possession of an electronic nervous system makes speech redundant; they are able to use radio frequencies to communicate directly a wide range of images and ideas. In spite of these advantages and their superior wisdom, they are, like the whales of today, neither mechanically adept nor interested in mechanisms. This being so, the very idea of making anything as intricate as a brain or nervous system as an artifact is beyond their understanding, and therefore, in their minds, beyond the capabilities of a past life form. The point of the fable is to argue that it is not necessary to know the intricate details of the origin of life itself to understand the evolution of Gaia and of ourselves. In a similar way, the contemplation of those other remote places before and after life, Heaven and Hell, may be irrelevant to the discovery of a seemly way of life. We may well have been assisted by the nature of the Universe to cheat chaos and evolve spontaneously, on some Hadean shore, into our ancestral form of life. It seems unlikely that we come from a life form planted here by visitors from elsewhere; or even arrived clinging to some piece of cometary debris from outer space. I like to think that Darwin dismissed enquiries about the origins of life not merely because the information available in his time was so sparse that the search for life's origin would have had to remain speculative, but, more cogently, because he recognized that it was not necessary to know the details of the origin of life to formulate the evolution of the species by natural selection. This is what I mean by the concept of Gaia being manageable. The belief that the Earth is alive and to be revered is still held in such remote places as the west of Ireland and the rural parts of some Latin countries. In these places, the shrines to the Virgin Mary seem to mean more, and to attract more loving care and attention, than does the church itself. The shrines are almost always in the open, exposed to the rain and to the sun, and surrounded by carefully tended flowers and shrubs. I cannot help but think that these country folk are worshipping something more than the Christian maiden. There is little time left to prevent the destruction of the forests of the humid tropics with consequences far-reaching both for Gaia and for humans. The country folk, who are destroying their own forests, are often Christians and venerate the Holy Virgin Mary. If their hearts and minds could be moved to see in her the embodiment of Gaia, then they might become aware that the victim of their destruction was indeed the Mother of humankind and the source of everlasting life. When that great and good man Pope John Paul travels around the world, he, in an act of great humility and respect for the Mother or Father Land, bends down and kisses the airport tarmac. I sometimes imagine him walking those few steps beyond the dead concrete to kiss the living grass; part of our true Mother and of ourselves.
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