GAIA

GAIA theory was first proposed by the English scientist James Lovelock in 1979 to explain how and why, as life appeared on the planet and grew abundant, its evolution and the earth's evolution merged into a single dynamic system he called Gaia. Lovelock was aware that this was the Greek name for a primordial cosmic goddess who was also a primal earth deity. He used the name and has continued to use it, in spite of criticism from some scientists, because of its metaphoric power. It conveys, he says, the idea of a superorganism composed of all life tightly coupled with the air, the oceans, and the surface rocks. By the end of the 1980s there existed sufficient evidence, models, and mechanisms to develop the theory further through transdisciplinary scientific research in cooperative projects between those working in such apparently disparate fields as practical ecology, ocean science, evolutionary biology, biochemistry, geology, and climatology.

Continuing this research, Lovelock and others have shown that Gaia self-regulates at a global scale through life-environment interactions, and that as a result the earth has remained in a habitable state over billions of years. The theory suggests that its habitability results from three intrinsic properties and one extrinsic property of living organisms. First, all organisms alter their environment by taking in free energy and excreting high-entropy waste products in order to maintain a low internal entropy. Second, organisms grow and multiply, potentially exponentially, thus providing an intrinsic positive feedback to life (the more life there is, the more life it can beget). Third, for each environmental variable there is a level or range at which the growth of a particular organism is maximum. Extrinsically, the fact that organisms both alter and are constrained by their environments in these ways means that feedback between life and its environment is inevitable.

In 2001 more than one thousand scientists signed the Amsterdam Declaration on Global Change, which states: "The Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components." This view sees the earth as a unified whole and humans as organic members of the entire community of life on earth. There is no question of human life being external to or independent of the planetary system's self-regulatory functioning, or of its common environmental resources, climatic variables, or ecosystem constraints. That being so, we need to take account of how we rely on and use those resources and adapt to those constraints. As Lovelock himself says, perhaps the greatest value of Gaia theory lies in its metaphor of a living earth. This reminds us that we are part of it and that human rights are constrained by the needs of our planetary partners.

Some religious implications follow from perceiving the earth and ourselves in this way. First, whatever is deemed sacred or holy in life cannot be separated out in any absolute sense from whatever we understand as the whole of existence. It may instead be seen as the internal transcendence of every living being. But as that cannot be divorced from the environment that supports life or from the interactions in which each being is connected with all others, so we cannot reduce the sacred to any one manifestation of being but must extend the concept to the whole dynamic system of relationships between God and the world. Lovelock says that Gaia, like life, is an emergent phenomenon, one that is comprehensible intuitively but difficult or impossible to analyze by reduction. Similarly, sacredness is an emergent property of life, one that cannot be analyzed reductively by separating it out or cutting it off from the interactions of daily life.

Second, if we accept that our species evolved in the same way as every other species, we cannot assume that we were created at a particular moment in time outside the processes or flow of evolution. Neither can we claim absolute privileges for our species in respect of our use of the earth's material resources. Nor can we assert that we alone know, through some divine revelation extraneous to or cut off from daily life, how our species began or what will happen to us at the end of time. Practically, we cannot assume that the earth and its resources evolved and now exist solely for our use.

Gaia theory therefore raises critical questions about the anthropocentrism of major Christian doctrines where they infer that: (1) the earth was created solely for our sake, so that its creatures and resources exist primarily for our benefit; (2) the revelation of God is fully contained in human words addressed to and historically recorded by humans; (3) death was brought into the world as punishment for one man's sin rather than being an evolutionary necessity; or (4) the life and death of Jesus is solely "for" human salvation from sin and death.

It also puts in question the traditionally vertical nature of hierarchical Christian imagery. This places God above angels, men, and women in descending order of value and importance, so that the earth and its creatures are presumed created in a position of subservience to human beings because they are of less value to God. The metaphoric power of the religious language of dominance based on this valuation system authorizes human domination over the entire household of life and claims it in God's name. The intrinsic value and sacredness of the more-than-human world in the sight of God is implicitly negated or at best reduced.

The practical effects of such claims to human exceptionalism are now evident in the exploitation through industrialization and technologization of the earth's resources. The scale of their extraction and the extent of their use and consequent waste far outstrip that of their natural replacement or disposal. Seen within the context of a relational understanding of human interactions with the environment, and of human rights constrained by those of our planetary partners, the implications of this exploitation for social justice are far-reaching.

The implications are of particular concern to four classes of people singled out in the documents proceeding from the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development as being most at risk from environmental degradation, most vulnerable to its effects, and most powerless to do anything about it: women, children, indigenous peoples, and the poor. Yet the dominant free-market model of development and continuing growth presupposes that the resources needed to sustain it are and will be available, and that thanks to science and technology, together with the spread and improvement of education, we shall be able to hand on a better global situation than the one we inherited. The presupposition behind this expectation is, of course, that the global biophysical environment will sustain this growth. Numerous research projects into the health of that environment, however, show precisely the opposite. Decline in fish stocks and freshwater supplies are well-publicized examples. The fact too that many of the poorest human communities live in battle zones, or are refugees from territories devastated by war, offers them little hope of redress for the loss of their pastures and access to clean water.

Yet human interdependence within Gaia means that we are all in some way implicated in and diminished by the contemporary expansion of militarist regimes and the consequent destruction of biodiversity and loss of material resources. Arms industries today use the chemical, physical, and biological resources of the planet to produce sophisticated weapons through the expenditure of billions of dollars and massive amounts of human energy. In 1994 the amount of weapons available was computed at twenty thousand kilograms of explosive for every person on the planet. By the year 2000 the available weapons-grade plutonium was the equivalent of a million atomic bombs. This waste of planetary resources is compounded by the fact that such weapons exist solely to destroy life and its support systems within Gaia.

Commitment to as nonviolent a lifestyle as possible is, therefore, an obviously appropriate response to a deepening understanding of the single, self-regulating planetary system within which we belong. Religions such as Jainism and Buddhism have made a nonviolent ethic an inherent and coherent part of a religiously inspired worldview. Now, Gaia theory is reminding Christians that Jesus—believed by them to be the authentic revelation of God—taught love of enemies, forgiveness, and nonretaliation for insults. He claimed that God has a direct interest in sparrows and in each flower of the field, was renowned for healing bodies, and died on a cross erected by military power, his own body pierced and broken after death by military weapons.

If, therefore, as Lovelock asserts, we each contribute, according to our kind, to the continuous and consistent relationships between organisms and their environments that constitute the support system of all life on earth, the adoption of as nonviolent a lifestyle as possible is a positive contribution to Gaia from a religious, ethical, and scientific perspective. This nonviolence is more than the negation of violence. It is a rational and spiritually powerful commitment to living in a way that asserts the sacredness of Gaia.

See Also

Ecology and Religion; Evolution; Goddess Worship; Nonviolence.

Bibliography

Bunyard, Peter, ed. Gaia in Action: Science of the Living Earth. Edinburgh, 1996. A collection of papers from leading scientists and authors, based on a series of international conferences on Gaia, that seeks to define what the theory means in terms of their own disciplines.

Lenton, Timothy M. "Gaia and Natural Selection" Nature 394 (1998): 439–447. Addresses the question of how organisms alter their material environments and how their environment constrains and naturally selects organisms.

Lovelock, James E. Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine. London, 1991. Draws attention to the similarity between Gaian and physiological self-regulation.

Lovelock, James E. Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford, 1995. Second revised edition of the 1979 book in which Lovelock proposed the Gaia theory.

Lovelock, James E. The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth. Oxford, 1995. Second revised version of the 1988 edition; gives the background to new fields of research in Gaia theory.

Lovelock, James E. "The Living Earth." Nature 426 (2003): 769–770. Reviews the development of Gaia theory from its beginnings as part of NASA's planetary exploration program.

Potts, Grant H. "Imagining Gaia: Perspectives and Prospects on Gaia, Science, and Religion." Ecotheology: The Journal of Religion, Nature, and the Environment 8, no. 1 (2003): 30–49. Analyzes Gaia in relation to the writings of James Lovelock, Anne Primavesi, and Oberon Zell.

Primavesi, Anne. Sacred Gaia: Holistic Theology and Earth System Science. London, 2000. Develops the scientific and religious implications of the theory and presents a coherent theology rooted in awe at the sacredness of the whole earth system.

Primavesi, Anne. "The Wisdom of Gaia." Irish Journal of Feminist Studies 4, no. 2 (2002): 16–31. Considers Gaia as a project of contemporary wisdom that embodies the body politic and planetary, human, and more-than-human, and therefore open to women's ways of knowing.

Primavesi, Anne. Gaia's Gift: Earth, Ourselves, and God after Copernicus. London, 2003. Continues the exploration of human relationships with the earth in the light of the ideological revolution set in motion by Copernicus, Darwin, and Lovelock.

Ruether, Rosemary. Gaia and God: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing. London, 1993. Reviews from an eco-feminist perspective three classical creation stories that shaped the biblical and Christian tradition: the Babylonian story, the Hebrew Story, and the Greek (Platonic) story.

Volk, Tyler. Gaia's Body: Toward a Physiology of Earth. New York, 1998. An introduction to the field of earth physiology that examines long-term trends in the earth's evolution and humanity's role in Gaia.

Anne Primavesi (2005)