dragon dreaming - fact sheet 2

_______________________________________________________________________________________________Dragon Dreaming Factsheet Number #2 of 23

FACT SHEET NUMBER #2

WHO OR WHAT IS GAIA?

By John Croft 15th

July 2006

Gregory Bateson1, the systems thinker has argued

"The myth of power, is of course, a very powerful myth; and probably most people in this

world more or less believe in it... But it is still epistemological lunacy and leads inevitably

to all sorts of disaster... If we continue to operate in terms of a Cartesian dualism of mind

versus matter, we shall probably also come to see the world in terms of God versus man;

élite versus people; chosen race versus others; nation versus nation and man versus

environment. It is doubtful whether a species having both an advanced technology and this

strange way of looking at the world can endure...

The whole of our thinking about what we are and what other people are has got to be

restructured. This is not funny, and I do not know how long we have to do it in. If we

continue to operate on the premises that were fashionable during the Pre-Cybernetic era,

and which were especially underlined during the Industrial Revolution, which seemed to

validate the Darwinian unit of survival, we may have twenty or thirty years before the

logical reductio ad absurdum of our old positions destroys us. Nobody knows how long we

have, under the present system, before some disaster strikes us, more serious than the

destruction of any group of nations. The most important task today is, perhaps, to learn to

think in the new way."

If Bateson was correct, as given the reality of the last section suggests he was, then our culture thus needs to undergo a major shift in worldview, the shift from seeing everything as mere mechanism, a lifeless machine, to seeing it as a complex organism – full of life, mind, intelligence and soul. This realisation is an extremely important and challenging one for the conventional reductionist mechanical scientist. It is also important for Dragon Dreaming if we are to ultimately build a truly life sustaining culture as a part of the Great Turning2, shifting us away from the cancerous Industrial Growth Civilisation. GAIA AS A MODEL

Bateson has suggested that our conventional models of thinking about ourselves is fundamentally wrong, but what is this model, and how can it be changed? The conventional social, economic and political view of consumer society sees humans as the measure of all value and the earth as an inanimate background to our activity, to be used by us for our purposes. As well as a larder for our resources, “Nature” has become the sewer for our wastes. Since 1950, more than 70,000 new chemicals, never before seen in Nature, have been released into the environment. Rachel Carson, in “The Silent Spring”3 was the first to draw attention to this problem of this load of toxic chemicals in the biosphere, by finding traces of insecticides in egg-shells of bird species. She was using the new method of Gas Chromatography invented by James Lovelock, a British research chemist, who later adapted and used his technique to discover the presence of Chloro-Fluoro-Carbon (CFC’s) refrigeration gases in the atmosphere, that are known to puncture the hole in the Southern Hemisphere Ozone Shield, the shield that protects all terrestrial life from harmful Solar ultraviolet rays. However, in the 1970s under pressure from the Chemical Industry, these findings were ignored until irrefutable evidence of an Ozone Hole was seen at Antarctica by space and ground observations. By then the leading chemical companies had developed a replacement


chemical to the CFC’s and so an international protocol, signed in Montreal, agreed to phase out these chemicals from production. Nevertheless, CFCs that had been produced earlier continue to leak into the atmosphere and the Ozone Hole still gets bigger each year. Carson, as an oceanographer and ecologist, drew upon a different scientific source than conventional reductionist classical science. Since the beginning of the 20th century, as a result of the Quantum and Relativistic scientific revolution, and wrestling to understand the complexity of the new sciences of ecology and cybernetics, scientists had come to recognise that “reductionism” only gave part of the picture and in fact Nature was organised as a much more complex system. Carson was aware of the work of the Russian ecologist, Vladimir Verdansky4 who stated that a biosphere was a stable, adapting self-organising life support system with the potential to be a major geological force on a planet's surface and ecosphere. She also drew on the General Systems approach of Ludwig Von Bertalanffy5 and the cybernetics of John Von Neumann6. Her deep concern for the disappearance of the song-birds after the spraying of areas with pesticides and insecticides was the crucial stimulus that helped launch the modern environmental or ecological activist movement into the policy and political arenas of all nations of the world. In the early 1960s, James Lovelock was then working for the US Space Program to see if his Gas Chromatography could be used to test for life on Mars. This work was inadvertently to extend Verndasky’s work on the biosphere in a completely new direction. Lovelock as an independent scientist had an approach that had no difficulty thinking “outside the box” as he began visualising how a Martian could examine if the Earth had life. He began by confronting paradoxes in the chemical composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, her oceans and rocks, factors rarely previously considered by conventional science. For example, French scientists had demonstrated the presence of measurable amounts of Methane in the atmosphere, is a chemical impossibility in our oxygen rich environment. Oxygen is the second most reactive gas after fluorine, and conventional chemistry paradoxically argued it could not coexist with methane, and yet it did. The formula of the reaction is easy to understand

CH4 + 2O2 → CO2 + 2H20 + energy Methane, when it exists in the presence of oxygen gets converted into carbon dioxide and water with a release of considerable amounts of energy. This was only the first of a number of paradoxes Lovelock was to examine. Carl Sagan7, the famed astrophysicist, suggested another. That the fact

that the Earth was a water world for instance, constituted a second paradox. As shown in the following diagram it is known that the sun is nearly half as hot again, after the end of the T Tauri stage at the time the Earth solidified; any water present at that stage should have boiled away by now as steam vapour, leaving a dry Venusian world. Alternatively, if the Earth is covered by water now, in earlier times it should have been a world that was frozen solid, like Jupiter’s moon Europa, at the beginning of the Phanerozoic


Era. In fact, recent paleoclimatological studies suggest that this very nearly happened, but rather than being the result of the cooler sun, it was a result more of the rapid reduction of the Greenhouse effects of carbon dioxide, which had been reduced to a little more than one thousandth of its earlier effects. A similar “Snowball Earth”8 period was found in the Huronian Ice Age, some 2,300 million years ago when methane was largely eliminated from the atmosphere by the presence of oxygen. But studies of the Earth’s past temperature, have shown that since the end of the formative Hadean period and the end of the Late Heavy Bombardment, temperatures on the planet have largely oscillated between just under +30 and +5 degrees Celsius. Despite the frozen conditions of the Earth at these periods, the freeze can never have been total, as life on Earth continued, a fact which required the continued presence of liquid water on the planet. Furthermore, the fact that the Earth has not irretrievably frozen or boiled has been shown by the fact that fossil Zircons from the Narilyer Jack Hills region of Western Australia formed beneath the sea, showed that liquid water was already present 4.15 billion years ago, depite the much cooler sun. Lovelock showed that this continual presence of water was another unexplained paradox. A third paradox is that the seas have stayed at 3.6% salt for geological periods, suggest that at the same time rivers are dissolving and washing salt into the sea, some “sink” is removing it to maintain the saline stability we observe. To Lovelock, these three paradoxes could only be explained by one hypothesis. The Earth itself has the character of a “living system”. Lovelock suggested that just as we breathe in oxygen and breath out carbon dioxide, so blue green cyanobacteria and other bacterial methanogens breathe in carbon dioxide and breathe out oxygen and methane, so keeping small amounts of methane present in an oxygenated atmosphere. These processes are involved in a giant balancing homeostasis that also preserves a fair degree of temperature stability. Just as we regulate the exchange of gases in our own body, regulating our temperature and salinity of our blood, so the Earth as a whole appears to be doing the same with its temperatures and the salinity of seawater. Lovelock showed that the chemical composition of the Earth’s atmosphere, oceans and much of the rocks were not just a “non-living” rocky lithosphere, liquid hydrosphere or gaseous atmosphere, but were in fact biological products similar to tree bark, fur or feathers of a living animal or plant. They were part of a gigantic metabolic system of circulation of material nutrients, energy, entropy, information and other materials necessary to keep Earth stable, similar to being a living entity in its own right. Lovelock was joined by the renowned Professor of Biology at Boston University, Lynn Margulis, former wife of Carl Sagan, who demonstrated how these metabolic cycles were assembled through the cooperating symbiotic activities of trillions of bacteria, which collectively weave the web of life through an organic chemical “language” of exchanges driven ultimately by sunlight that keeps us all alive. This can even be expressed as a chemical formula (1) 106 CO2 + 90H2O + 16NO3

+ + PO43+ + minerals + 5.4MJ light = 3,258gm of living protoplasm + 154O2 + 5.35MJ

heat

The chemical composition of 3,258 grams of protoplasm is as follows 106 atoms 1272grams carbon 180 atoms 180grams hydrogen 46 atoms 736grams oxygen 16 atoms 224 grams nitrogen 1 atom 31 grams phosphorus various 815g minerals (including suphur and iron)9


It was Lovelock’s neighbour in Berkshire, the Nobel Laureate for Literature, William Golding, who first suggested the name “Gaia” for Lovelock and Margulis’s hypothesis. This was to be an act of inspiration. After having been banished through an absence of nearly seventeen hundred years, the animate Earth, ancient Delphic Gaia, was now resurrected as a modern scientific explanation, a verifiable scientific model of how the Earth functions. This is the context that makes Gaia Theory so revolutionary, as the new Science of the Earth is recovering for us a reconnection with the ancient “Anima Mundi”, soul of the Earth as it was known to the ancients. Ecologist Stephan Harding10 has suggested, despite Lovelock’s disagreement, that it was in fact the “Anima Mundi”, the soul of the living planet itself, which as a result of his work in searching for life elsewhere, forced itself into the consciousness of the two men, Lovelock and Golding, at the time. Once again, as happened with Rachel Carson, and other the leading scientific theorists of the day, Lovelock, Sagan and Margulis were discovering ways in which our individual life, as separate bodies was really part of something much larger, a huge, ancient, evolving “being” whose collective interactions creates the conditions necessary for the continuation of all life. Ancient Gaia had been reborn, not as the “Goddess” it once had been, but now as the latest scientific model of how the biosphere of the planet functions. Through “Earth Systems Science”, the latest satellite tests and scientific evidence on Earth, scientists were at last confirming the inherent wisdom of shamanic wisdom ancient cultures who proclaimed that it is by living in harmony with the natural rhythms and cycles of the Earth that all life is maintained. After an absence of centuries the “Anima Mundi”, the living Earth, was suddenly present again, within the very bastions of conventional science itself. Conventional scientists did not take kindly to Lovelock using the name of Gaia, even as a metaphor. For them a “self-regulating semi-homeostatic autopoetic system” would have been far more satisfactory. To increase the acceptability of his theory, Lovelock himself was forced to call “Gaia Science” as “Geophysiology”, by analogy to how Physiology was the biological science of the regulation of the living body, so geophysiology was the science of the regulation of the planet as a whole. Part of the problem with this inacceptability of the new Gaian paradigm lay with the motivations of classical, conventional reductionist scientists themselves, who had a long history of rejection of organic metaphors for explaining living processes, relying on mechanical metaphors instead. The Gaia hypothesis also raised an important question of “why should we do science?” The conventional reason, given by scientists ever since the days of Francis Bacon and Rene Descartes has been to gain knowledge for control of life and power over the world. This reason, however, has been upset by the Gaia theory of Lovelock and Margulis, as control over a living entity as large as the living world is simply impossible. Lovelock has called it the “ultimate act of hubris”. Paraphrasing the earlier British biologist J.B.S.Haldane 11we can remark, “the world is not only stranger than we imagine, it is stranger than we can imagine”. The complexity of Gaian feedback loops beggars our imagination. This leads us to a new reason and different reason for the scientific enterprise, a holistic reason for us to engage in science. This holistic reason suggests that we should “do” science, not to gain control (which as we have seen is arrogant human hubris in the extreme within the new paradigm), but to achieve a greater sense of participation, partnership and belonging to the living world of which we are a small, but now important part. In the Gaian paradigm, we are not the separate Newtonian or Cartesian observers outside the systems we observe, but like has been shown with early Quantum theories of physics, we are intimately involved as active participants, and our behaviours can and do have potentially huge effects. This new sensibility and curiosity, closer to the original meaning of “scientia” as true “knowledge” is within those working within the Gaian paradigm becoming once again a real reason why we are doing science. But unfortunately, at the same time, we find that neo-conservative governments are demanding that the goals of science be still further reduced to that which is considered


economically relevant or profitable to our corporate consumer culture. Given the ignorance of Gaian wisdom, and the fact that the corporate consumerism equates progress with turning the life of the planet into money, ignoring both the finite sources of its wealth and the limited capacity to detoxify wastes, this is a culture which Lovelock has recently reckoned on the basis of its current trends, has not long to survive. Gaia Theory, or rather, Gaia Science is now recognised as an important part of what has been called “Deep Ecology”. It was Arne Naess12, the Norwegian philosopher and environmental activist, who was the first to speak of Deep Ecology in 1973. He also spoke of the transpersonal “wide identification with the more than human world”. Aldo Leopold13, the forester and wild-life expert, who began to speak of an “ethics of the land” in the 1940s also spoke of the need to start “Thinking like a Mountain” when he saw the great living spark that linked the light in the eyes of a dying wolf with the world in which it lived. Humans too, they suggested, need to respect the larger systems of which Lovelock and Margulis had shown we are all a part. As we are not separate from the metabolistic processes which keep our air breathable, our waters drinkable and our soils fertile, what we do to the Earth, we ultimately do to ourselves. Doing science in the absence of such identification and participation within the Anima Mundi it would seem makes science into a dry and lifeless mechanism, and possibly results ultimately is us becoming the ecologically suicidal subject which extinguishes and sucks the soul out of that living body which is being studied. Like vivisection, dissection of living tissue first kills that which it is trying to study. But looking at the true nature of scientific creativity shows this has never been the way the best science has ever been done. Truly great science has always been in touch with the ultimate mysteries of existence, the awareness that we are “on an infinite seashore exploring a few small shells of interest, while all around us the mighty unknown ocean rolls”. To reclaim a living and not a suicidal science, we need to reanimate science with its ancient soul, with poetry, animation, and the joy of our full participation in and with life. All the work that the world does to maintain life is not done on the basis of the sterile economic motives that seem to have become dominant for us humans. Each life we share in this way is the ultimate “free lunch”. Nevertheless, this has not stopped humans from trying to calculate the economic value of the environmental services that are freely provided for us by the living Earth. For example, Robert Constanza, President of the International Society for Ecological Economics has calculated that the environment provides the following ecological services, that would cost the following amounts if humans had to provide them Environment Value Biosphere Net Primary Production Biomass (trillion $ US) Area (Mkm2) Dry Carbon by weight total Gigatonne Gm/m2 total (Gigatonne)

Coastal 14.568 2 1,800 3.60 Open Sea 6.381 359 147 53.08 Total Marine 20.949 361 1,947 56.68 Wetlands 4.899 2 2,000 4.0 Forests 4.706 57 1,405 80.09 Lakes/Rivers 1.700 2 250 0.5 Grasslands 0.906 42 515 21.64 Crops (all kinds) 0.128 14 650 9.10 Total Terrestrial 12.319 149 775 115.40 Grand Total 33.268 510 926 170.28


This figure is equivalent to the “interest” of the Net Primary Production of 170.28 billion tonnes of Dry Carbon by weight, produced by the photosynthesis of a biosphere of 1877.29 billion tonnes, giving a “return on investment” of living tissue of about 9.07%. But this economistic type of calculation is a little like trying to fit an elephant of the living planet into a VW beetle automobile of human economics. The world of course does not “own” such things nor sell them, it is the generous fecundity of life that maintains such a living biosphere and us. Nevertheless as Costanza showed, the economic value of the environment is much larger than the total Gross Domestic Product of all the nations of the world, and its destruction is at our own peril. And even then it is arguable that Constanza has left much out of his calculation. For example, what is the cost of the natural pollination of all of our flowering plants on earth by insects? The disappearance of the bees is demonstrating this in a graphic way. And how does one place a value on life itself? Once Lovelock announced the Gaia theory, some scientists denied that it said anything that was new. Reductionist science had long showed that life did have an influence on the atmosphere. They were aware that an oxygen atmosphere was part of the by-product of photosynthesis. Other scientists argued that an oxygen atmosphere was the result of non-living processes, such as the photodissociation of water into hydrogen and oxygen by ultra-violet light, as follows.

(2) 2H2O + uV � 2H2 + 02

Studies in detail showed that such reactions while possibly explaining some of the oxygen on the Earth was not sufficient to explain why our atmosphere now remained at about 20% oxygen. Dissociation could explain at best an oxygen atmosphere of only about 2-5% of the oxygen present. It seemed, when the studies were done, that life had taken over and amplified these processes. Both Gaia Theory and conventional science now show just how the self-organising fashion of life works. The tectonic plates on which the continents exist are constantly moving, recycling themselves in subduction zones where one plate moves beneath another. Because of these plate movements, life has to keep colonising new habitats if it is to survive. It also recycles the needed phosphates from the deep oceans pushing them high into mountain ranges, making them once again available and recycling them in a way necessary for life on Earth to continue. It is a little like Life as a whole having to keep walking backward so that it can stay still on an upward moving escalator. James Lovelock states “Life has a radical impact and the tight coupling between life, oceans, rocks and atmosphere in which something new emerges such that it starts being able to regulate key aspects of life”. A number of these cycles can be discerned. For instance, there are an infinite range of possible states between the ultimate acidic state (pH1), and the ultimate basic state (pH14). There are also a vast number of bacterially regulatory cycles that shows how the pH of soils is regulated by humic acids that are designed exactly to provide for simultaneously the release of needed minerals from rocks, and at the same time, to prevent their too rapid leeching into the water table and transport to the oceans. In fact it was the creation of this ability that allowed the accumulation of calcium and phosphate ions in the soils and muds of the early Cambrian period and may have led to the explosion of complex life on the planet at that time. There also appears to have been a similar long term regulation of planetary temperature so as to permit the survival of all three states of water (soil ice, liquid water, and gaseous vapour) on the


planet simultaneously. As K.C. Condle and R.E. Sloan show, the long term temperature and humidity of the atmosphere have oscillated backwards and forwards across both recent and long term geological time, but never exceeded the values under which liquid water survives. This pattern of temperature maintenance has occurred despite the known heating of the atmosphere by the sun by a value of between one third and half of its current value. Despite the sun getting hotter, the temperature of the Earth has remained remarkably constant. As Lovelock continues “Gaia Theory is about the evolution of tightly coupled systems whose constituents are the biota and their material environment which comprise the atmosphere, the oceans and the surface rocks. Self regulation of important properties such as climate and chemical composition is the result.” One chief problem for Gaia has been the fact that volcanoes continue to belch out Carbon Dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere. Carbon Dioxide, as we know, is a greenhouse gas, and as the sun gets hotter with increasing CO2 the earth should also get hotter, with the result that the Earth should fry. Conventional geochemists argue that Carbon Dioxide dissolved into water, creating a dilute acid, through the weathering of Silicate rocks should be sufficient. They argue that the following process would occur.

(3) CaSiO3 + 2CO2 + H2O � Ca2+ + 2HCO3- +SiO2

(4) Ca2+ + 2HCO3 � CaCO3 + 2CO2 + H2O

In this way the calcium ion (Ca2+), washed down to the sea to form super saturated solutions which should precipitate as chalk. This, so some conventional geophysicists claim is enough to provide a thermostatic regulation of the Earth’s temperature. Thus This gives us a negative feedback loop in which temperature regulation occurs and it seems that life is not required. But when the calculations for this process are done, it turns out to be far too little for what is observationally required, it is less than 1/8th as powerful as that needed to account for what has in fact happened. And there is the further difficulty that super-saturated oceans of calcium would be extremely difficult to generate life, and such oceans don’t appear to have ever existed on Earth, as such a situation would wipe out all life on the planet. Life is clearly required as a regulator in the process.

Volcanoes

Level of Carbon dioxide

Temperature rises

Increased evaporation

More rainfall

Increased bicarbonate weathering

Removal of Carbon dioxide from atmosphere

+ve +ve

+ve

+ve +ve

-ve

+ve


In fact it is the smallest components of life that play the major role in the removal of both calcium and Carbon Dioxide. In fact the small bacteria, Aemiliana huxleyi, which is about 1/4000th of a millimetre seems to be central. Its tiny skeleton is made of chalk, CaCO3. Although tiny it produces huge “blooms” in the ocean, causing the surface layers to go white and milky over areas nearly as large as the whole of Scotland. Accumulation of such coccolithophorids over the time of the Cretaceous, the era of the Dinosaurs, has been enough to build the huge chalk cliffs of the White Cliffs of Dover, cooling temperatures. The famous “white cliffs” are solid atmosphere, created by a process to keep the Earth habitable. Thus one of the main ways in which Gaia has achieved such climatic regulation is by taking carbon out of the atmosphere through the burial of carbon. Gaia thus is a huge planetary entity, and yet it is not us humans that are its most important constituents. It is the bacteria that have kept life going for 4 billion years, and these bacteria regulate all of the important planetary cycles. How efficient this has been can be shown in the following table. Source of Carbon Amounts of Carbon Present (gigtonnes) Methane (in atmosphere) 10 Gt Life 610 Gt Atmospheric CO2 760 Gt Oceans CO2 740 Gt Oceans CO3

2- 1300 Gt Carbon in soils and sediments 1600 Gt Carbon in fossil fuels 4200 Gt Oceanic HCO3

- 37,000 Gt Sedimentary rocks (eg shales) 10,000,000 Gt Limestone rocks 40,000,000 Gt Without such action, the earth would have an atmospheric pressure of over 60 times that now found in the atmosphere, and would be a run-away greenhouse world like Venus, with temperatures over 600 degrees. A closer picture of Hell on Earth would be hard to imagine. The coccolithophorids have thus been able to precipitate the Calcium ion at concentrations much less than that required by conventional geochemistry, and has in this way maintained the world as a fit environment for life (and for itself). These coccolithophorids, like Aemiliana huxleyi, as we shall see, also seem to play a more direct major role in temperature regulation too. Coocolithophorids also take up calcium from the water and precipitate it as chalk at concentrations far below that which natural processes would require. This is important because if the calcium build up were allowed to proceed to the levels required for spontaneous precipitation to occur it would make the oceans poisonous to life. The white cliffs of Dover in this way can be seen to be “solid atmosphere”, the atmosphere made solid. The soluble silicon ions (from SiO2) washed down into the oceans are in a similar way also used by diatoms in their exquisite cases and shells. In such ways life has become incredibly sensitive in (one could say divinely) retuning the processes. Plate tectonics recycles these elements, as without the volcanic recycling there would be no feedback loop and the world would have frozen solid behind frozen oceans and possibly even a frozen atmosphere.


Water is essential in this process as it is water of crystallisation built into the rocks at the subduction zones (where one plate slips beneath another), that lowers the melting point of the rocks sufficiently so that one plate slides over the other. Water is here functioning as a lubricant. We only have water on the earth because the oxygen atmosphere traps any escaping hydrogen, turning it back into water and preventing it escaping into space, as it would do otherwise (as has happened for Mars and Venus which are now almost entirely waterless). Water is prevented from this happening by the Ozone screen, which prevents ultraviolet light penetrating the troposphere, the lowest layer of our atmosphere, and splitting the water molecule into Hydrogen and Oxygen, with the hydrogen, unable to be held by the Earth’s atmosphere, ultimately escaping (it is for this reason Mars and Venus are waterless – they have never had an atmosphere of Oxygen – again a biological product, this time of blue-green cyyanobacteria). Above the troposphere the Stratospheric atmosphere is kept dry and almost completely waterless. where water is confined through the water cycle of evaporation, crystallisation and precipitation to the lower atmosphere. Thus Coccolithophorids thus seem involved in a second feedback loop necessary for this rain and thus necessary for life. From the effects of oceanic and atmospheric turbulence it has recently been confirmed that coccolithophorids are producing turbulence in order to get themselves more widely dispersed. Thus when we look at clouds we may really be seeing the dispersal buses necessary to spread themselves around the Earth. This use of clouds as agents for dispersal may explain why these bacteria seem to have a genetic antifreeze that prevents crystallisation of their internal water. Forests too, through the action of the roots, and the humic acids of the mycorrhizal fungi on their root hairs, have been a great deal more efficient at dissolving rocks through weathering than dilute acidic rainfall could ever do. This has increased the action of weathering of rock and the production of fertile soil between 40 to 1,000 times. Rainforest ecosystems also similarly seed clouds and so modify climate. Bromeliads in forests are epiphytes that trap water, which contains cloud seeding algae. Bob Charleston has calculated that this makes a 10oC difference in climate by cooling the local environment. When we consider that the Ice Age average global temperature was only five degrees cooler than the world temperatures of the present, this shows that a ten degree difference can have a huge effect. Clearing rainforests

Coccolithophorids Dimethyl Suphate

Oceanic clouds

Localised cooling of

the earth

Increased atmospheric &

oceanic turbulence

Spread of

coccolithophorids

Reduced local numbers of

coccolithophorids

+ve

+ve

+ve

+ve

+ve +ve

+ve -ve


results in huge temperature rises, with much higher evaporation rates, lower humidity and less rainfall – and can convert rainforests into arid deserts very quickly. Overall, it appears that the rock-weathering cycle, involving humic acids, tree roots, coccolithophorids and diatoms may be responsible for lowering average global temperatures from an average of 45oC to the 15oC it is today. In this way it has also kept global temperatures as a whole hovering around the triple-point where liquid, solid and gaseous water may coexist. For at least as long as the last 800 million years, the earth seems never to have been much hotter than about 30 oC and never much cooler than about 7 or 8 oC. Any colder and the planet risked a run-away ice-box effect, where temperatures would fall, larger glaciers would form, more heat would be reflected, more carbon dioxide (CO2) would be dissolved in the oceans, and temperatures would fall still further. Alternatively above 45 oC, less CO2 would be absorbed in the oceans, and they would become a source rather than a sink of the gas. Temperatures would rise higher. Rainforests would burn, and permafrost would melt pushing huge amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. A runaway greenhouse of this kind risks converting the Earth to a Venus situation. What we see is a tight coupling of atmospheric composition, temperature and wetness of our climates. As follows


These are kept in place through the close couplings between the land and ocean systems. Similarly the sulphate ion carried through the atmosphere from the oceans to land is matched by a reverse flow of dissolved sulphates in the rivers of the earth back to the oceans. This modulates the flow of iron from the land through the rivers to the ocean is matched by continental upthrust as a part of the tectonic movements, so closing that loop too.

Neogene Paleogene Cretaceous Jurassic Triassic Permian Carboniferous Devonian Silurian Ordovician Cambrian Protozoic Archaean

Colder Hotter Drier Wetter

Land Ocean

SO42-

Fe2+


These cycles, with their negative and positive feedback loops resemble, and indeed support the continued existence of the living metabolism that cycles through our own bodies. Without their subtle modulations human life could itself not exist. As I will show later, the chemical languages upon which these cycles work interpenetrate not only the geology and biology of the planet, but permeates our own bodies too. We are thus not separate as our conventional model claims, we are part of the Earth and what we do to the Earth we do, ultimately to ourselves. Of course this realisation that the Earth was animate was present in pre-Western world views too. For such pre-Modern people there was a clear “Anima Mundi” a “soul of the world” that infused the entire Earth with, people, trees, water and rocks, with responsiveness and knowingness. Talking with Australian Aboriginal elders that Gaia Theory had demonstrated that the Earth seemed to be alive was a humbling experience. “What”, they exclaimed, “have the white Europeans only just now discovered that the Earth is alive? That would explain a lot!” In its way Gaua theory has confirmed and demonstrated how the “Anima Mundi”, of “dreaming” that animates their whole world view, the way the whole of the world for them is alive. This was true of all earlier pre-Western cultures. This view was also present in our own past. At the dawn of classical European culture, about 800 BCE, the ancient Greek poet Hesiod sang

“I will sing of well founded Gaia

Mother of all,

Eldest of all beings, She feeds all the creatures that go in the world,

all that go upon the godly land,

all that are in the paths of the sea

and all that fly.

All these are fed of her stone.”

Notice that the whole flavour of this poem is that of a living entity. Only in modern times have we “disenchanted” the world, and only in modern times has the damage being done to the planetary environment become truly global in extent. It is only a very recent and a very brief forgetting. Understanding the nature and history of Gaia is essential to healing this damage. GAIA AS A MYTH

Thus Gaia was one of the oldest of the Greek Goddesses. She seems to have been worshipped for thousands of years, as her name comes from two much older words, *Ge or “Earth” found in words like Geography or Geology, and *aia, which seems to have meant “Mother” or “Grandmother”. In early times she was called “Gaia Urania” or “Earth, the All Mother”. This second name she had is the origin of the classical Greek god (later considered Gaia’s “husband”) Uranus. Hesiod continued

“Gaia, the beautiful, rose up,

Broad bossomed, she that is the steadfast base

Of all things. And fair Gaia first bore

The starry Heaven (Uranus), equal to herself,

To cover her on all sides and to be

A home forever for the blessed Gods.”


Uranus was only later the name given to the 7th planet of our Solar System by the English Astronomer Royal William Herschell on 13 March 1781. In the ancient world Gaia was first worshipped at her major temple in Delphi, at the foot of Mount Parnassos, the home of an oracle that was consulted on the likely consequences of political, economic, social and personal decisions for thousands of years (1800 BCE – 386 CE). This temple was remarkable, as it instructed the visitors who came to consult it with the messages “Know Thyself” and “Nothing in Excess”, messages that lie at the heart of Dragon Dreaming. Just prior to the beginning of the classical period (approximately 8-900 BCE) Gaia’s temple at Delphi was taken over by priests of the male sun-God Apollo Smitheus (Apollo the Mouse). Known as God of Music and Medicine amongst the Greeks and Romans, Apollo was said to have killed the Drako (Dragon), or serpent, Python, who guarded the Delphi complex, and he wrapped the body of the Python and his spouse around his sacred staff, creating the caduceus, the symbol of healing used by pharmacists to the present day. Apollo came from the earlier Hittite God originally known as Aplu, (from the Akkadian Babylonian) meaning “son”, a title given to Nergal, Son of Enlil, the King of the Gods. Nergal was also a mouse God of the plague. This patriarchal myth must surely be the only known example of a mouse killing a snake known to history! Despite the seizure of the oracle at Delphi by the male priests of a male God, the oracle continued to be called the Pythoness or Pythia, however, and she remained a woman. In fact the oracle at Delphi was undoubtably the most powerful woman of ancient Greece, which was otherwise a period of extreme patriarchy, in which women were denied any public role whatsoever. Our modern word “Dragon” comes from the Greek, through Latin, where Drako meant Snake. In Greek myth there are many snake or dragon legends, usually in which a serpent or dragon guards some treasure. A serpent dwelt, coiled up in the shield of Pallas Athene, guardian of Athens, and the first Pelasgian kings of Athens were half human, half snake. The dragon Ladon, guarded the Golden Apples of the Sun of the Hesperides, daughters of Atlas, who held the sky upon his shoulders. Another Serpentine Dragon guarded the Golden Fleece of Aetes, king of Colchis, protecting it from theft by Jason and the Argonauts. Similar to how Pythia and Python, the pair of serpents who guarded the temple of Gaia, and the Oracular priestess by the same name, before the Delphic Oracle was seized by Apollo, so too Zeus, in becoming king of the Gods on Mount Olympus, first had to conquer the Titans and their last defense, the serpent Typhon. The Greek stories of Zeus and Typhon, and Hercules and Ladon seem derived from Canaanite myth where Baal overcame Lawtan, and Israelite Yahweh overcame Leviathan (the snake (=tan) of the Levi tribe). These stories too go back still further in history 1,500 BCE, to the Hittite or Hurrian hero Kumarbi who had to overcome the dragon Ilyukanas of the Sea. In Babylonian myth Marduk, of the same period, conquers Tiamat, the “mother of all life” (Ti = life, Ama = Mother, t is a Akkadian (Babylonian language) feminine marker) portrayed as a serpentine dragon of the sea. But Marduk was only the last of a line of dragon-slaying kings of the Gods. Earlier, before Babylon was more than a tiny village, Enlil, Lord Air, of the temple of E-kur (The House of the Mountain) of the ancient Sumerian city of Nippur, became king of the Gods by slaying Tiamat by shooting the arrows of his winds down her throat, cutting up her body and making from her ribs the vault of the heavens. The weeping eyes of this salt-water goddess became the source of the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers, two of the four springs of the Biblical Garden of Eden. Her tail was the Milky Way. Why this compulsive masculine obsession, like George and the Dragon, Saint Patrick or Saint Michael, Apollo and Zeus, to kill the dragon or eliminate the snake. In Jewish and Christian stories was a snake that betrayed Eve and hence all of humankind in the Garden of Eden. He was later identified even with Satan, the devil. But even here we find the hint of an even older layer to the snake story. Gilamesh, the Hero King of the city of Uruk, one of the first in the world, had to expel


the demoness Lilith, the snake and the Anzu bird, from the sacred huluppu tree of Inanna. Later, it was a snake who stole the secret of immortality that Gilgamesh was bringing back to Uruk from his journey to Dilmun, modern Bahrein, and the land of Utanapishtim, the man who never dies, who was rewarded by the Gods for saving humanity from the world-covering flood. The ancient Sumerian word for priest, Shanga, also meant “snake charmer”. Here too the snake is a symbol, a guardian of a divine secret. We learn too, in the Bible of the Bronze Serpent of Moses, part of the family of Nehushtim, one of whom was found in the Ark of the Covenant by King Hezekiah of Jerusalem. The origin of this custom seems to have been the brass staff of Moses, which became a snake when cast upon the ground. During the Babylonian captivity, the prophets Ezra and Ezekiel bemoaned the fact that snakes were painted on the interior walls of the temple of Solomon, on Mount Zion, in the heart of Jerusalem. Legged serpents, and lions also guarded the great Ishtar gate of Babylon, and even the Snake in the Garden of Eden seemed to at first have legs, for only after seducing Eve was he cursed by Yahweh to forever crawl upon the ground, and be the enemy of all humankind. To understand the earlier stories of serpents we need to turn eastwards and southwards from Iraq. In Egypt snakes played a big part in ancient Egyptian religion. One, the cobra goddess, Wadjet, was portrayed on the royal uraeus or headband of the Pharaoh, as the protector of the king. The snake goddess was also the guardian of the city of Buto, in the Delta. Nagas, cobra serpents protected both Siva and Buddha, and in South East Asia, led to the fusion of these two divinities into the Siva-Buddha figures of Ankhor Wat in Cambodia and Borobudur in Java. Here, as in India, sacred dragon kings, Chakravartins or “Lords of the Mountain” were called the snake guardians of their people. Snake charming is still a part of certain Hindu cults today. The serpentine dragons of China too are auspicious guardians of wealth, good fortune and the imperial family. In China, like Japan and Vietnam, the dragon was symbolic of the forces of nature and the universe. Recently, when Nike had an advertisement showing a dragon being slain, it was banned in China, and even today it is a crime to disfigure a dragon. Already by the Han dynasty the Chinese dragon was a composite creature with the body of a snake, claws of an eagle, feet of a tiger, scales of a fish, ears of a bull, antlers of a deer, eyes of a demon and sometimes rarely, the wings of a bat. In the Chinese zodiac, people born in the year of the dragon are naturally charismatic, powerful, talented, gifted and lucky. They have an active mind and a great interest in their world. Dragon people are rarely unnoticed and are highly competitive, and thus are capable of great achievement, if they can harness their great energies. Dragons are loyal and helpful to friends in difficulty but may fail to see other people's weaknesses. It is said that carp able to overcome the difficulties and obstacles of leaping over a Dragon Gate get turned into dragons. Even in Central America, in pre-Columbian Mexico, we find numerous references to the “Fathered Serpent” the God-man Quetzalcoatl, bringer of civilization. When he was expelled he promised to return, creating the myth of the returning God, which was exploited by Cortes and the Conquistadores. In the Maya lands, the feathered serpent, Kukulkan, seems to have been a Toltec invader who, establishing himself in Chichen Itza, instigated a vicious cult of human sacrifice. But then the serpent Goddess of Mexico, Coatlicue, Goddess of Compassion, seems to have led to the later worship of the Virgin of Guadalupe, in the 19th and 20th centuries. In Australian Aboriginal mythology, the Rainbow Serpent was a culture hero to the indigenous people in many parts of the country. Known by different names in different places, from the Waugal of the South Western Nyungar, to the Ganba of the North Central Deserts or the Wanambee of South Australia, the rainbow serpent, associated with the creation of waterholes and river courses, was to be feared and respected. Modern biologists have in fact shown that amongst the extinct giant Megafauna of Australia was a 45ft (15metre) python, which appears to have been


a water-dwelling ambush predator, and may have been in part an explanation for these Australian stories. But we do not find such gigantic serpents outside the tropical areas inhabited by the boa constrictor or the South American Anaconda. Extinct megafauna cannot explain the Chinese, Indian, Egyptian, Middle Eastern or European stories. Why do our cultures then have such an ambivalent love-hate relationship with snakes? Freud found snake motifs in our dreams and suggested that the snake was symbolic for the male phallus. But while the snake certainly has certain phallic symbology in modern times, in ancient myths snakes seem to have had different meanings. The presence of female serpent too, would seem to suggest that the phallic association of Freud is of limited truth. There are two pieces of evidence which are interesting and probably inter-related. Grain farming was a precarious occupation, for not only did one need to store sufficient grains to plant as seed next year, but also the harvest, which occurred in only one season, needed to be stored in such a fashion, as to give people access to sufficient carbohydrates to keep them alive for 12 months. This was overcome in traditional villages through a communal granary, but in the absence of cats, such grain storage was at risk of being attacked by plague bearing rodents. A mouse or rat plague would have been the worst outcome for pre-modern people, and in the absence of cats, such infestations were deterred by putting a pair of snakes into the granary, with the Drako guarding the “golden horde” of the grain, the wealth of the whole community, from rodents and other pilferers. Early farming people, no less than earlier hunter-gatherers are dependent upon nature, the seasons and harvests for their livelihood. Serpents came to be seen as symbolic for this natural connection, powerful non-human beings, symbolic of the natural world as a whole, a world on which the whole human community came to depend. Women, having a superior metabolism than men, and thus more resistant to snake venom, were those who went into the granary to catch the serpents, and statues of women holding snakes are found throughout the ancient Middle East. Halucinating with snake venom seems to have led to the first oracular utterances by these sacred women, snake charmers and priestesses of the Earth. The belief in the Earth (Gaia) as creator and supporter of all life was thus found not just amongst the Greeks. Hannahanna (Mother’s mother, or Grandmother the Great) was worshipped by Hittites and Hurrians (1700 – 850 BCE) earlier people in what is today Turkey, who seem to have preserved the name of the Earth Goddess used by the world’s first grain farmers (from 7,500 BCE). The fat and pregnant goddess, flanked by lions or leopards was found in what was originally a granary at Catal Huyuk, a pre-pottery town in Central Anatolia, and her worship continued to Christian times. The holy marriage, conception, death and resurrection of her son and consort, god of grain, was central to these people’s religion. It was the mythic explanation for the seasonal cycle of spring, summer, autumn and winter, and the cyclic planting, growing, harvest and storing of the grain and vegetable foods upon which the whole community depended. Failure to live in harmony with these ecological cycles was catastrophic, so balance needed to be maintained. Over the centuries, as farming spread, neighbouring people all adopted varieties of her name, and of the sacred marriage rituals between the seasonal god of grain and the living Earth. Still later with the rise of temples, cities, monarchies and empires, the sacred marriage rite continued. The sacred role of Inanna (Sumeria 3,150 – 1,900 BCE), Ana-hita (2,500 BCE – 640 CE, in Elam and Persia), Ana-t (Anath, in Syria and amongst the Phoenicians, 1600 BCE – 380 CE), and also with Mycenaean At-hanai (Athene of the Greeks, 1,600 – 650 BCE) saw the role of Goddess being at many times taken and enacted by a priestess. For thousands of years the enactment of this holy drama of the sacred marriage rite was the way in which sovereignty was conferred on the local kings of the region and was central to the spiritual life of the people,


inaugurating at Easter, the new year. It was found even with the Hebrews, where in the Bible this Goddess became Hannah, mother of the prophet Samuel (whose name means the gift of God), who also conferred the kingship on both Saul and David, and even with Christians she appears as Saint Anna, the mother of Mary, the mother of Jesus. The death of Jesus as divine king and his resurrection in glory at Easter is thus part of a pattern of religious belief that was already many thousands of years old. Also in the Bible, the “Song of Solomon”, or the Song of Songs preserves the poems of the ancient sacred marriage rite between god-king-spouse and goddess-beloved. Amongst the Sumerian people of Southern Iraq (3,125-2,000 BCE), who created the world’s first cities, Ge, or Gaia was called Ki, again meaning Earth. She was given a great number of other names and titles, including Ninhursag (Lady of the Mountain), Nintu (Lady womb), Dumkina, Damgulana (Great Spouse), and Ninti (Mother of all living, a name also meaning “Lady Rib”). Her lover and husband, Enki (“Lord Earth”) was the “Lord of Fresh Water”, (he was also called Ea, meaning the House of Water (E=house, A=water) and was guardian of the tablets of knowledge, the god of wisdom and the special creator and protector of humankind. Amonst the Eblaites he was called Yah, and was associated later by the pre-Judaic Canaanites of Ugarit with the Yawu, Judge of the Rivers (Nahar) and the Sea (Yam). Amongst the later people of Syria and Palestine Sumerian Ninti, “Lady Rib” and the “mother of all living” translates as “Hawwah”, or Heva, our “Eve”, the mortal woman supposedly made from Adam’s rib, according to our Judeo-Christian Bible. In sacred marriage the creation came to be seen as Yah and this asherah, Hawwah together, in a single divinity, neither male nor female, perhaps explaining the origin of the Jewish sacred name Yahweh (YHWH). A Semitic people who took over from the Sumerians to build the World’s first Empire, and ruled from their still undiscovered capital city of Akkad (the Akkadians 2,350 BCE), called Inanna, the Sumerian Goddess, by the name of Ishtar, after their name for the planet Venus. Ishtar worship too travelled far and wide, influencing the Syrians’ (1,206-734 BCE) and Phoenicians’ (1,000-342 BCE) worship of their Goddess Ashtar-t, or Astarte, the Bible’s Ashtoreth or Asherah, and possibly the Egyptian (3,000 BCE – 395 CE) God Ausar (known to the Greeks as Osiris) and his wife Auset (known as Isis). Cyprian Astarte was adopted later by the Greeks as Aphrodite, “foam borne”, the goddess of love. Amongst the Persians (800 –342 BCE) Ishtar was known as Esther, and she is in the Bible known by that name. These ancient divinities were an anathema to the new monotheists at the end of the Roman period. The old oracle at Delphi was shut by orders of Theodosius, the Christian Roman Emperor of Constantinople, just before the Dark Ages began. Gaia, however, had been taken into the Roman Empire (133 BCE – 476 CE) earlier under a variety of names, such as Tellus, or Terra (Latin, for Earth), as Ceres (Goddess of Grain), or as Cybele (called “The Great Mother of the Gods”) whose temple was established after the Sybelline oracle said it was the only way that Rome would beat Carthaginian Hannibal, with her adherents coming from Turkey. In Ephesus, in Western Turkey, during early Christian times, attempts to abolish the worship of the Great Goddess, here known as Diana, were strongly resisted. An anti-Christian riot only ended with Mary being declared to be Theotokos or “Mother of God”, with Diana’s temple being converted into a church for Mary. Temples to Cybele, such as the Roman temple of the Gallic tribe known as the Parisi, in the Seine, were often later turned into Christian Churches sacred to Mary. At “Notre Dame” (Our Lady) Cathedral, one could argue that the ‘goddess’ continues to be worshipped there to the present day. Thus, it is not by accident that the Biblical “nativity” is celebrated in a cave, surrounded by animals, indicated by a star at mid-winter, all part of the worship of the divine child, conceived with the new year festivals (Babylonian = Akitu) with the first full moon after the spring equinox, for thousands of years. These mythic elements in fact come from much older traditions extending back beyond the beginning of civilisation itself. Despite the historically continuing fall in the status


of women, the nativity has been one of the most popular Christian images. Even today, images of Mary as “the Queen of Heaven” often show a snake at her feet. This helped make Christianity an extremely popular religion for women who otherwise had very low status in the Greco-Roman world. Removing the divine Goddess from the central position of the ancient anthropomorphic pantheon seems to have occurred at a particular moment in this long history. With the collapse of the last widespread and largely peaceful pre-literate Middle Eastern culture, the Uruk culture, possibly as a result of the increasing aridity of a period of climate change known as the Priora oscillation, a rise in institutional violence clearly occurred. Un-walled villages were abandoned and people retreated within the walls of the cities of the region, defended for the first time by a caste of professional soldiers. With this rise in institutional violence, a generalised fall in the status of women was associated with the creation of a new myth. Tiamat, (from the Sumerian ti=life, and ama=mother) the Goddess creatrix of the cosmos, was supposed to have sought to take back the creation as a result of the enslavement of her spouse, Abzu (from ab=water, zu=far or deep) as a result of the digging and irrigating of the dry lands of southern Iraq. The younger Igigi gods gathered in terror, and the God of the wind, Enlil (en=lord, lil=air) patron of the city of Nippur, promised to restore order if he was made king of the Gods and obeyed unquestioningly in all matters. In this way an act of violent male destruction replaced the sacred marriage of male and female divinities as the earlier sacred metaphor by which the cosmos was created. With the killing of the dragon, and the violent imposition of order over chaos, in which those not with the forces of Enlil were demonised as the enemy had begun the long institutionalisation and internalisation of war and patriarchal rule, from which we are still trying to escape. Dragon killing myths spread and permeated Middle Eastern and European mythologies down to the end of the Middle Ages. Male centred pantheons reduced the divine role of Gaia as women too were marginalised by these new hierarchical and patriarchal cultures. GAIA AS A METAPHOR

Thus Gaia as Mother Earth, or Mother Nature, by Christian times had ceased being a Goddess and was reduced to become a metaphor for the Earth itself and all the animals that “she” supported. With the building of the first great Romanesque Cathedrals of the Middle Ages, she was often shown as naked woman, suckling wild animals. In this way the Earth, in various guises continued as a metaphor for life itself. Medieval thinkers Like Julian of Norwich and Hildegarde of Bingen, however, continued to use such organic metaphors describing the Earth as a living body of which we are all a part. However, with the rise of a monetarised market economy, the literate and civilised town and city dwellers increasingly insulated themselves from the need to live in harmony with the Earth and its seasons. Merchants and the rising middle class, in particular, had few connections with “wild nature”, which was seen as demonic, the doorway to hell. Village people, often condemned as pagans (from the Latin pagani = people of the countryside), whose lives depended upon the bounty of her harvests, however, never forgot the earlier cycles of the seasons, which through harvest and other folk festivals were increasingly honoured by the Christian church and Islamic Mosque alike to the present day. Many of these festivals still survive, becoming nowadays major tourist attractions. There is some evidence that the numbers of these festivals increased throughout the Middle Ages with the returning prosperity of the 12th century Renaissance, and the Medieval Warm Period. But then disaster struck. A worsening of climate in the Little Ice Age, across Eurasia led to a series of famines, and in 1322 people were reduced to hunting rodents for food. Then in 1348-9 the Black Death in two years wiped out between a third and half of the population across the continent. In some areas whole villages disappeared. Reduced to eating ergot infected barley, people had strange


hallucinatory visions before dying, the pagans were blamed. In the economic, social and political uncertainty that followed, Satan was the cause, and his agents, as heretics or witches were believed to be active in the world. Ecclesiastical and secular authorities came together to persecute those seen as deviant, and their power of determining life or death fell hardest upon the peasantry. Drawing upon the Exodus verses that stated a witch should not be allowed to live, in 1486, the Dominican misogynists Kramer and Sprenger wrote a treatise called “The Hammer of the Witches” which told how witchcraft was to be rooted out. Used by both Catholics and Protestants, it would seem that possibly up to half a million people, over ninety per cent of them women, were subsequently tried, tortured, burned or hung as heretics or witches. Given the smaller pre-modern population, this is a collective trauma of a huge proportion. Millions more were killed in the following wars of religion, in which 30-50% of all people alive in Germany perished. In this period the this trial and hanging of witches continuing until 1715, and it spread to the new world with one of the most infamous cases being the execution of more than a dozen people for witchcraft in Salem in the now USA. The Spanish Inquisition in South America was responsible for eliminating Earth-centred religions there too, as Christian missionaries spread in the wake of explorers. The persecution of witches had a huge effect too on European’s view of the natural world. The English Prime Minister, Francis Bacon, who had participated in the torture and trial of witches, advocated that Nature too had to be put on the rack and tortured to reveal her secrets to a new class of secular male scientists. This desacralisation of nature was widely apparent. This spirit of the enchantment of Anima Mundi, the living Earth, that was with us at the beginning of human culture was gradually repressed, pushed into the subconscious of our mind and of our culture, over these latter centuries by a shift from an organic to a mechanistic world view, out of touch with their senses and their own bodies, which has come to dominate as a result of the scientific revolution. This can be simply illustrated by reference to a few quotations of these founding fathers of modern science. Francis Bacon, who called for this scientific revolution, stated “We should endeavour to establish the power and dominion of the human race over the universe….” And also “I am leading you to nature to bring her to your service and make her your slave”. Galileo Galilei wrote “The book of the universe is written in the language of mathematics and its characters are triangles, circles and geometric features…hence I think that tastes, colours and so on are mere names”. The sensory experience of the world was clearly not to be trusted. The French philosopher Rene Descartes wrote “I have described the Earth and the whole visible universe in the manner of a machine”. Speaking of the human role and their destiny he stated it was “therefore to become like the lords and possessors of nature”. Just as Europeans were enslaving the Africans to install their colonial empires in the Americas, so nature itself was rendered a possession to be used at will. Descartes thus spoke of the fact that the world was totally soulless and without sensation. He claimed that the cries of fear and pain witnessed when an animal was slaughtered or cut up alive and vivisected was nothing more than the creaking noises of a machine. Isaac Newton stated “For the rays of light, to speak properly, are not coloured. In them there is nothing else than a certain power and disposition to stir up sensation of this or that colour”. These quotes should not be taken too much out of context. They were made at a time when the witches were still being persecuted, but the world of these times around them was still full of life, when towns and cities by modern standards were small. Science seemed to offer an intellectual adventure, free from the superstitions and false beliefs of the past. Also even for many of these early scientists the “Anima Mundi” was still present. Isaac Newton considered his greatest work not to be his mechanics and calculus, by which he is remembered today, but his alchemy, a work


which he kept secret and which only was rediscovered in the 1950s. However, with the growth of rationalism the same authorities that persecuted witches eventually turned against the practice of such magical arts as pointless superstition. Modern science, developing as a reaction against the superstitious persecution of people in the name of religious beliefs, however, for a while struggled between whether an organic or a mechanical metaphor was the best way to describe the Universe. With the victory of Newtonian Mechanics, however, science also came to reject and later forget the belief that the world was previously thought of as alive, a living being in its own right. Reductionist vivisection, the cutting of living objects into their parts in order to understand how it worked, became the new method of classical laboratory science. Copernicus showed that the Earth was not the centre of the Universe, so too eventually two centuries later so Charles Darwin’s Theory of Evolution showed that humans were not the centre of all life. Parts of the Christian religion had (and continues in some places of the USA to have) great difficulties in accepting these theories. A compromise in the developing struggle between Science and Religion, nevertheless, led to the European Enlightenment, which coped by clearly separating between the realms of Science and Religion, splitting the human soul still further between what we believe we know rationally and objectively – seen as the realm of science, and what we know subjectively, morally or ethically, as a result of our emotions, feelings and experiences – seen as the realm of religion. In such circumstances, “Nature” as a metaphor for life itself has become “red in tooth and claw” and so has become merely a metaphor for the rising Capitalist competition, almost devoid of any real meaning. Today, rather than having a life of and in itself, “Nature” has become the name of that inferior part of the universe that is not considered a civilising part of human “Culture”. And so we arrive at the Industrial Revolution, based upon the unceasing “exploitation of Nature’s resources” for human purposes, and as dumping ground for our wastes, saw the elimination of the last vestiges of these earlier peasant sensibilities. The first act of this drama came with the enclosure of the villager’s common land, and the driving of the landless poor to the cities to work in the new industrial factories. With the disappearance of the reciprocal gift subsistence economy, land was totally reduced to being a resource, owned and exploited like any other, as industrial, economic and technological “progress” sought to extend this exploitation to “virgin wilderness”, taken from native peoples in the “New World”. The growth of private corporations, increased markets and new technologies were all part of “progress” or “development”, which was seen as desirable and inevitable. Despite the shadow cast by two world wars when technology had been used mainly to find new ways of killing each other in ever-larger numbers, it was hoped that soon the whole world could achieve such a market-led prosperity. Today it is believed by many that the process of “globalisation” is equally inevitable, despite the evidence of a widespread economic collapse that it is increasing the gaps between rich and poor, destroying biodiversity and causing climate change and global warming at an alarming rate. THE MODERN PREDICAMENT

What does this mean? It means that we have come full circle, by treating the earth as the lifeless environment of our activities is dangerous to life itself. It means that life not only has the living Earth capital value as estimated above by Robert Constanza, but that in its scientific mystery, in its complexity, life is worthy of intrinsic value, irrespective of its “usefulness” or instrumental value to humans. It is in this way that the new science of Gaia has, after a long absence of centuries, brought the Anima Mundi, the soul of the Earth, back into the core of modern science. For us humans at this time it is of central and increasing value. Lovelock has suggested that at present the Earth has a cancer-like disease of “disseminated primateaemia” a form of “homosapientitis”. It


was Aldo Leopold in his Land Ethic who first drew attention to what this requires in terms of an ethical sequence of rights and responsibilities of the modern age. Thus he stated

“The first rights and responsibilities were from individual to individual

The second rights and responsibilities were from the individual to society

The third rights and responsibilities are from society to the land itself.”

As Leopold showed, the land will look after us if we look after it. But we have used the land as a slave and the revolt of the Earth from this slavery could see, as Bateson warns, the end of humanity. We need to liberate the Earth from our slavery, if our human life is to survive. Seen within this new planetary perspective it was clear that all is not well with Gaia. Rapidly rising Carbon Dioxide levels and the consequent rise in global temperatures suggested a planetary fever which could end our stable agricultural systems and drown our cities. Acidification and algal blooms caused by fertiliser produced eutrophication of waterways and overfishing accelerated the death of marine corals, previously thought to be the largest living structures on Earth. Spreading desertification and clear-felled ancient forests were causing massive “skin lesions” on the face of the Earth, as once fertile and diverse ecosystems have collapsed, dragging many tens of thousands of species into extinction, most of them never even named and recorded by science. The cause of this planet-wide “illness” was the selfish, cancer-like behaviour of just one species; our own. Our life as human beings is maintained through each cell being part of a massive and complex system of communication, linking the DNA of our cells, the neuro-transmitters of the brain, the endocrine hormone system and the chemical transmitters involved in the immune system. Disease is caused when this communication system is in some way disrupted. Cancer cells develop when living tissue loses its connection with the whole body, reproducing wildly, re-routing circulation systems and treating the body as mere resources to support the growth of new cancerous tissue. In the worst cases, eventually the toxic by-products and disruptions to vital organs produced by the cancerous tissue grows to the extent that it becomes harder and harder for the body to maintain itself in balance. In this way too, humans, out of touch with the living body of Gaia, are equally behaving selfishly, undermining the pillars upon which life depends. Continued life on Earth is based upon 5 great pillars. For example. Pillar 1. By burying as calcium carbonate and fossil fuels most of the carbon dioxide of the

primitive atmosphere, it has prevented the Earth from heating as the sun grows warmer, liberating

oxygen and maintaining the temperatures which make complex life possible. But human activity, in digging up these “fossil fuels” as quickly as possible and turning them back into carbon dioxide into the air, is making the stable climates upon which our food and agricultural systems depend, increasingly unpredictable, whilst simultaneously threatening the continued existence of much of the complex life of the planet. Pillar 2. The oxygen has created an ozone shield, which by preventing the photochemical

breakdown of water, stopped the Earth from drying out like Mars and Venus. By protecting the

land from harmful ultraviolet light, life was able to leave the protective oceans and spread to every

habitat on the planet. Human activity, through the release of ozone destroying chemicals has created huge ozone holes over the poles, and has reduced global ozone worldwide, seriously threatening all life in these regions by increasing cancer rates, and reducing the effectiveness of the immune systems for all. In


its effects upon the phyto-plankton, it is effecting all living things around Antarctica, an important part of the “lungs” of the planet. Pillar 3. Interlocking nutrient cycles amongst soil microflora, fungi, bacteria and non vertebrates

have created thick fertile soils which retain moisture, hold nutrients, limit erosion, stimulate plant

growth and recycle all plant and animal wastes. Human activity, through over-use of our soils and excessive dependence upon agro-chemicals for fertiliser and pest control, increases erosion, and reduces soil viability. Through the resulting acidification, compaction, desertification, increase in soil salinity and reduced soil structure, all life is threatening by removing this pillar. Destruction of such soils as been shown by Jarred Diamond, in his book, “Collapse: why societies succeed or fail”, to be the major cause of the collapse of civilisations. Pillar 4. Forest ecosystems, hundreds of millions of years old, have evolved to maximize

biodiversity of life, providing many millions of ecological niches which help generate biological

resilience which dampens the destructive effects of climatic and other environmental fluctuations

and changes. Human activity through deforestation, clearfelling old growth forests around the world, is contributing to habitat destruction at hundreds of thousands of square kilometres per year. It also contributes significantly to global warming. This is producing a huge reduction in biodiversity, pushing nearly sixty three thousand plant and animal species per annum, most of them unknown to science, into extinction, so undermining this major pillar of all life. We are burning the pages of the encyclopaedia of life without ever having read the book. Pillar 5. Waterways and wetlands, created by the interaction of the previous pillars of life, have

created sources of fresh, unpolluted waters that recharge aquifers and ground water systems, and

through interaction with plants maintain a hydrological cycle that sustains and nurtures all life.

As already mentioned, human activity now discharges over 70,000 new chemicals previously unknown to life. These are pumped, through sewerage and through the use of excessive amounts of agro and other chemicals in the soils. Huge amounts of fresh water have become polluted, creating algal blooms and eutrophication at the same time as releasing exo-oestrogen and other hormone disruptors which undermine the living pillar of our waterways and wetlands. Through our over use of water, we are increasingly threatened by “Water Wars” in the 21st century. Gaia as a living system, however, has suffered huge planetary assault before. She has survived Ice Ages that came close to freezing all the Earth’s oceans, and other catastrophes that have at times wiped out 98% of all species. Even the extinction of the dinosaurs from a massive Meteoric impact was not enough to sterilise the Earth and wipe out all life. Over 99% of all species who have ever existed are already extinct today, and Gaia can and will survive for some time, albeit in a less complex form. The simple extinction of industrialised humanity, after an initial trauma, would suffice to return the Earth to good health. This is the ultimate lesson in humility that biological Gaia science has been showing us. Not only are we totally dispensable, but unless we mend our cancerous ways, the continued future health and survival of our planet may ultimately lead to and require human extinction. But it doesn’t have to be this way. There is an alternative


GAIA AS A MOVEMENT

This is the challenge we face, a challenge to engage in what has been called the Great Work, the Great Turning, the Great Re-linking, or the Work that Reconnects. We humans need to curb our consumption, to find ways of living once again in fully harmony within the living body of which we are an indivisible part, for our own survival. It is no longer enough to save a local Amazon forest from logging, or a single species from extinction, or to prevent the poisoning of the water and air of some Third World city. These piecemeal actions, while important, only buy a little time. A time for the work of building us a cultural bridge to enter what has been called the Solar or Ecozoic age. How can this occur? Paradoxically the answer is quite simple. If for example, as a result of Dargon Dreaming, if you are inspired and empowered to change your lifestyle to live in harmony with the Earth, that is a huge start. If you can, with a friend, work colleague or relative, over the course of one week, get them too to make the change, that is the next step. If, over the course of that week, that person too, develops the skill to share what they have learned with one other, working with one person a day, we have the third and final step in place. That is all we require to build a socially just, peaceful, sustainable and democratic world for all of us, and for our no-legged, four-legged, six-legged, winged swimming cousins, the more than human beings with whom we share this world. Because, if we manage to achieve this spread of a sustainable lifestyle today there could be two of you, tomorrow, when your co-conspirator works with one other person and you repeat what you have learned with one other, there will be four of you. The next week there can be eight. Then sixteen, thirty two, sixty four. The power of doubling continues, so that within just 33 weeks you will have changed the lives of every single man, woman and child on the planet. By the first person just working with 33 people, in a little over eight months could change and heal the world forever. This is the power and the promise of the international deep-long range Gaia ecological movement on which Dragon Dreaming is based. It is a movement that is already leaping international boundaries, halting destructive practices, building new green sustainable technologies, economic systems and social structures, and re-programming the Human consciousness to resume its responsibilities to live in harmony with all that is alive. It would seem that not only does the healing of the planetary predicament of our present cancerous-like existence require such a personal and collective mobilisation, but paradoxically, new technologies, new movements and the proliferation of community organisations and projects is making such a mobilisation increasingly possible. Unlike other earlier revolutionary changes in human history, this Gaian movement requires all of us, working together to make the shift. It cannot occur only in one part of the world, as the disruptions it could produce would be almost as catastrophic as the extinction of human life itself. We are all part of this single living being. This has to become the source of our true globalisation, not the shallow parody occurring in the name of planetary corporatism or free market economics. Not only is this shift going to take all of us, it is also going to require us using all of our potential skills and abilities, including those skills and abilities which we have not yet adequately developed. Confronting the inspiring and empowering challenge of the Great Work is thus going to take all of us, and all of each one of us. CONCLUSION

Gaia was a myth of ancient and indigenous people in which the Earth was alive, and this non-human and human existence were profoundly interconnected. Gaia then became a metaphor, replacing that of a “chain of being” with humans in “the web of life”, with us humans being just one strand. . Many people are also increasingly aware of Gaia, the scientific model of James


Lovelock and Lynn Margulis of the Earth as a self-organising, sun energised system. But today Gaia is also an international movement of people working to eliminate the cancerous characteristics of Industrial Growth society, and to facilitate a Great Turning towards a Sustainable Life Sustaining civilisation on Earth. It is important for us, those people engaged in this great work, to become familiar with the intricacies of the myth, metaphor, model and movement. We can then draw strength from the fact that we are not powerless, separate individuals, but part of the world’s own attempt to heal the damaged relationship with its human part. So why is Gaia so important to the “Deep Long Range Ecological Movement”? Gaia seeks, quite simply, to save us from ourselves by expanding our identification -- our sense of "egotistical separated self", beyond community and nation-state, beyond even humanity -- to the whole biosphere -- to a sense of "interconnected eco-self" of Gaia. This healing is urgently required. Peter Vitousek in 1986 showed how nearly 40% of the present net primary organic material produced each year is being co-opted by human beings. After only a single doubling of the world's population (say, in 40 years) we will use 80%, and 100% shortly thereafter, leading to massive planetary extinctions thereafter. The Ecological Footprint analysis by Drs. W. Rees and M.Wackernagel shows that it takes 1.8 hectares of land to maintain the current average world levels of consumption (8-9 hectares in Australia), which, when multiplied by current world population comes to a land surface equal to 1.3 planets! As a result about 104 species become extinct per day, 37,500 per year, a loss that will take 10 million years to repair. These studies indicate that today's 6.6 billion humans at present levels of consumption are double that needed to maintain Gaia as a fit environment for complex lifeforms. The Living Planet Index, of the International Union of the Conservation of Nature has today fallen to 70% of the values it had in the 1960s. How are we to proceed? The work we do needs to be threefold. Firstly is the work of our Hands. We must limit the destruction: This requires continuous action aimed at preventing certain actions. eg. Government and industry promoted destruction of forests, ditto in the nuclear industries, opposition to ridiculous privatisations of the planetary genetic heritage, resisting the damage done by the World Trade Organisation, the Structural Adjustment Policies (SAPs) from IMF and world bank (IBRD), the ongoing wars and ethnic “cleansing” in various parts of the world (Tibet, Kosovo, Kurds, East Timor, Ruanda, Iraq and Afghanistan etc.) This action is demanding, exhausting, but it slows down the rate of the cancerous Industrial growth society's destruction, and saves (human and non-human) lives. It involves boycotts, letter writing, lobbying, legal and court injunctions, participation in shareholder meetings, attendance in submission writing, civil disobedience and non-violent direct action. It can rapidly produce burnout and cannot for most people be sustained indefinitely for long periods. It is necessary, but is not in itself sufficient. By itself this is not enough for the Great Turning. It needs to be complimented at a second level with a new direction. It needs to be complemented by the work of our Heads. We urgently need to build new social, political, economic and technological structures for the Life Sustaining Culture (LSC) we need to replace the Industrial Growth Civilisation (IGC). Here we need rapid reduction in overall levels of consumption, transferring savings achieved in the so-called First World to Third World Nations, so lessening the 90:1 gap in incomes (a gap which was 45:1 in the 1950s and 24:1 at the turn of the 20th century). A community campaign of “simplicity circles” is urgently needed where groups of people support each other to trade income and levels of consumption for improved quality of life and directing savings to Third World development NGOs. Such “Transition Towns” creating “Energy Descent Action Plans” need to be coupled with improved living conditions in the


“majority world”. Flexible part-time work hours could easily reduce everyone’s paid employment time to 70% of the current figure, reducing stress and improving the quality of our lives at the same time. But this trade off needs Guaranteed Minimum Income Legislation to be balanced by legislated maximum permissible wage differentials for both income, share equity and assets (linking CEO salaries to minimal salaries paid within enterprises). Given the obscene levels of bonuses paid to managers of companies, that helped fuel the recent economic collapse, this urgently needs addressing. Changes in youth education, employment transitions and the abolition of “retirement”, with full accounting of domestic duties and community work as employment (rewarded accordingly) are also required. Arms spending, for example, needs to be taxed internationally, and the funds need to be directed towards UN peacekeeping arrangements. These changes will limit the outflow in debt from 3rd world to first world. If Third World Nations were able to keep the results of their economic growth, they would not be required to “mine their environment” for every last bit of export income as the IBRD/IMF SAP agreements force them to do. Nor would countries like Bolivia, Burma, Afghanistan, Columbia, Laos and others need to trade drugs for a good quality of life of their peasants. We need to strongly support the Jubilee 2000, with debt/environment trade offs. These policies if widely implemented would enable rising mean living standards in the Third World, would thereby reduce population growth. Transfer of wealth should be conditional upon reduced arms spending in Third World nations, increased spending upon education of women and universal application of family planning programs. Genuine Progress Indicators need to replace GNP/GDP indicators everywhere, complimenting regular updates on ecological footprints, with individual communities creating their own Local Agenda 21indicators for sustainability, like those of Sustainable Seatle and the Oregon Option. In enterprises audits need to use triple bottom line measures (accounting for financial, social and environmental capital, stocks and flows), with Natural Step programs in all countries. Our “mixed economy” urgently needs the “missing” or “Third Sector” of LETSystems, Community Credit Unions, 2nd generation Worker, Producer, Housing, Consumer, Market and Credit Cooperatives of all kinds, Ethical Investment Fora, ESOPs, and Land-Sharing Intentional Communities. Urban Policies need to promote telecommuting need to replace physical commuting. Urban infill needs ecological corridors and bio-design making cities self reliant as regards their own food supply. Re-empowerment of local government by direct democracy using new technologies (Internet Polling etc) linked to authentic debate and community public education programs would strengthen local decision making structures based upon Bioregionalism. Community Economic Auditing, tracing the connections between financial, social and environmental capital stocks and flows into and out of communities, with annual “community shareholders meetings” could become the most popular (and dramatic) event on everyone's local calendar. By themselves even these strategies are not sufficient, because they address the social, economic, political and environmental symptoms of our interlocking problematique, not its cause. The cause as we have seen above is a cancerous and obsolete individual egotistical consciousness that promotes treats the earth as an inanimate object of our desires, raising rising consumption levels, through its hierarchical decision making, adversarial political and legal systems, and rigid forms of social stratification within and between nations and unceasing capital accumulation. Unless this toxic morality, dangerous ethical system and limited consciousness is directly addressed, all structural reform effects will be co-opted to keeping the present destructive chain of events in place. We also need the work of our Hearts. The question we need to face is how can we build a rapid shift in consciousness on a truly massive scale. How can we do this in the Gaia Movement?


Regular Experiential Deep Ecology workshops promote and train facilitators in Joanna Macy's Despair and Empowerment Work is part of the answer. Intentional Community Building Weekends bring large numbers of people together to give them an experience of “authentic high quality low consumption community life” at the same time as training people in the skills of community building could be another part. But much more is needed too. As Deep Ecology shows us, the core principles for a new set of post-industrial values are 1. The flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth has inherent value. The value of non-human life forms is independent of the usefulness of the non-human world for human purposes. 2. The richness and diversity of life forms are also values in themselves and contribute to the flourishing of human and non-human life on Earth. 3. Humans have no right to reduce this richness and diversity except to satisfy vital needs. 4. Present human interference with the non-human world is excessive, and the situation is rapidly worsening. 5. The flourishing of human life and cultures is compatible with a substantial decrease of human population and consumption. The flourishing of non-human life requires such a decrease. 6. Significant change of life conditions for the better requires change in policies. These affect basic economic, technological, and ideological structures. 7. The ideological change is mainly that of appreciating life quality (dwelling in situations of inherent value) rather than adhering to a high standard of living. There will be profound awareness of the difference between big and great. 8. Those who subscribe to the foregoing points have an obligation, directly or indirectly, to participate in the attempt to implement the necessary changes. From our experience we argue in the Australian Gaia Foundation that if we cannot build a truly sustainable 21st century society in Perth, Western Australia, the most isolated city of the planet, where else are we going to be able to succeed. With a single city of 1.7 million people, in a state of 2.4 million, occupying an area 1/3rd the size of continental USA, if we cannot succeed here, we will not be able to succeed anywhere on Earth. To this end we have run and supported more than 611 projects in 23 years. It is in this environment that we have developed the power and the promise of Dragon Dreaming. After the millennial long multigenerational project of civilised cultures to control chaos and kill the dragon in the name of imposing order and control, we need to learn to dance with the fears of our dragons, to liberate our creativity in new ways as only this will be sufficient to ensure the continued thriving of complex life, human and more than human, on the blue green jewel sustained by the planetary feedback systems of Gaia. 1 Bateson, Gregory 2 Macy, Joanna and Brown Molly “Coming Back to Life:” and Korton, David “The Great Turning” 3 Carson, Rachel “Silent Spring” 4 Verdansky, Vladimir 5 Bertalanffy, Ludwig 6 Von Neumann, John 7 Sagan, Carl


8 “Snowball Earth” 9 Smil, Vaclav “Energies:an illustrated guide to the biosphere and civilisation” (MIT Press, Boston) p.42 10 Harding, Stephan “Animate Earth” 11 Haldane, J.B.S. 12 Naess, Arne 13 Leopold, Aldo

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