The concept of Gaia, a living planet, is for me the essential basis of a coherent and practical environmentalism; it counters the persistent belief that the Earth is a property, an estate, there to be exploited for the benefit of humankind. This false belief that we own the Earth, or are its stewards, allows us to pay lip service to environmental policies and programmes but to continue with business as usual. A glance at any financial newspaper confirms that our aim is still growth and development. We cheer at any new discovery of gas or oil deposits and regard the current rise in petroleum prices as a potential disaster, not a welcome curb on pollution. Few, even among climate scientists and ecologists, seem yet to realize fully the potential severity, or the imminence, of catastrophic global disaster; understanding is still in the conscious mind alone and not yet the visceral reaction of fear. We lack an intuitive sense, an instinct, that tells us when Gaia is in danger.
So how do we acquire, or reacquire, an instinct that recognizes not only the presence of the great Earth system but also its state of health? We do not have much to go on because the concepts of intuition and instinct tended to be ignored, or at best regarded as flaky and dubious, during the last two centuries of triumphant reductionism.
In the twenty-first century we are somewhat freer to wonder about ideas like instinct and intuition, and it seems probable that long ago in our evolutionary history, when our ancestors were simple aquatic animals, we had already evolved an ability instantly to distinguish anything alive within the mainly inorganic ocean. This primeval instinct would have been supremely important for survival, since living things can be either edible, lovable or lethal. It is likely to be part of our genetic coding and hard wired into our brains so that we still have it in full strength. We do not need a doctorate in biology to distinguish a beetle from a stone, or a plum from a pebble. But, because of the circumscribed nature of its origins, the instinctive recognition of life is limited by the range of our senses and does not work for things smaller or larger than we can see. We recognize a paramecium as alive, but only when we can see it through a microscope. Even biologists, when they think of the biosphere, too often ignore all things smaller than can be seen with the naked eye. My friend and collaborator Lynn Margulis more than anyone has stressed the primary importance of micro organisms in Gaia, and she summarizes her thoughts in the book she wrote in 1986 with Dorian Sagan, Microcosmos. The Earth was never seen as a whole until astronauts viewed it for us from outside, and then we saw something very different from our expectation of a mere planet-sized ball of rock existing within a thin layer of air and water. Some astronauts, especially those who travelled as far as the moon, were deeply moved and saw the Earth itself as their home. Somehow we have to think like them and expand our instinctive recognition of life to include the Earth.
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The ability instantly to recognize life, and other instincts, like the fear of heights and snakes, are part of our long evolutionary history, but there is another kind of instinct that is not innate but grows from childhood conditioning. The Jesuits discovered that a child’s mind could be moulded to accept their faith, and that once done the child retained faith as an instinct throughout life; similar but different moulds fix lifelong tribal and national loyalty. The mind of a child is even plastic enough to be shaped to follow faithfully something as trivial as a football team or as potentially sinister as a political ideology. Abundant experience of this kind suggests that we could, if we chose, make Gaia an instinctive belief by exposing our children to the natural world, telling them how and why it is Gaia in action, and showing that they belong to it.
The founders of the great religions of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism and Buddhism lived at times when we were far less numerous and lived in a way that was no burden to the Earth. Those holy men would have had no inkling of the troubled state of the planet a thousand or more years later, and their concern, rightly, would have been for human affairs. Rules and guidance were needed for individual, family and tribal good behaviour; we were the human family growing up in the natural world of Gaia and, like children, we took our home for granted and never questioned its existence. The success of these religious backgrounds is measured by their persistence as faiths and guides over more than a thousand years of further population expansion. When I was a child I was marinated in Christian belief, and still it unconsciously guides my thinking and behaviour. Now we face the consequences of fouling our planetary home, and new hazards loom that are much more difficult to understand or cope with than the tribal and personal conflicts of the past. Our religions have not yet given us the rules and guidance for our relationship with Gaia. The humanist concept of sustainable development and the Christian concept of stewardship are flawed by unconscious hubris. We have neither the knowledge nor the capacity to achieve them. We are no more qualified to be the stewards or developers of the Earth than are goats to be gardeners.
Perhaps Christians need a new Sermon on the Mount that sets out the human constraints needed for living decently with the Earth, and which spells out the rules for its achievement. I have long wished that the religions and the secular humanists might turn to the concept of Gaia and recognize that human rights and needs are not enough; those with faith could accept the Earth as part of God’s creation and be troubled by its desecration. There are signs that church leaders are moving towards a theology of creation that could include Gaia. Rupert Shortt, in his book God’s Advocates (2005), reported an interview with the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams:
INTERVIEWER: The next question is that talk of miracles flies in the face of science. There is a lack of evidence for miracles as well as an intrinsic implausibility about them.
ARCHBISHOP: It is a very big issue, the question of divine action. Again, I think it has to be taken in connection with a doctrine of God rather than a very specific examination of any claim to start with.
Let us put it this way. For a theological believer, the relation of God to creation is neither that of the old image of someone who winds up the watch and leaves it, nor is it that of a director in a theatre, or worse a puppet master who’s constantly adjusting what’s going on.
It’s the relation of an external activity which – moment by moment – energizes, makes real, makes active what there is. And I sometimes feel that a lot of our theology has lost that extraordinarily vivid or exhilarating sense of the world penetrated by divine energy in classical theological terms.
As I read on through these thoughtful and impressive responses I was taken back to the 1970s when Richard Dawkins and other strong-minded scientists fiercely contested the concept of Gaia using arguments similar to those they now use as atheists to challenge the concepts of God and creation. That argument with them about Gaia has I think been settled with an acceptance that Gaia is real to the extent that we have a self-regulating Earth but with a growing recognition that many natural phenomena are unknowable and can never be explained in classical reductionist terms – phenomena such as consciousness, life, the emergence of self-regulation and a growing list of happenings in the world of quantum physics. It is time, I think, that theologians shared with scientists their wonderful word, ‘ineffable’; a word that expresses the thought that God is immanent but unknowable.
Important concepts like God or Gaia are not comprehensible in the limited space of our conscious minds, but they do have meaning in that inner part of our minds that is the seat of intuition. Our deep unconscious thoughts are not rationally constructed; they emerge fully formed as our conscience and an instinctive ability to distinguish good from evil. Perhaps this is why the early Quakers knew that the still, small voice within does not come from conscious reckoning. Our conscious rational minds are no more capable of deep thought than is the tiny screen of a contemporary mobile telephone able to present in its full glory a Vermeer painting. The extraordinary power of our unconscious minds is expressed in what we see as mundane things like walking, riding a bicycle or catching a ball. We would fail utterly to do any of these things by conscious thought; their automatic and instinctive achievement requires long and often tedious training. The same is true of inventors who, after long apprenticeship to their craft, become inspired to imagine and then construct devices that reveal emergence when they are switched on; physicists in a similar way exploit the incredible mysteries of quantum phenomena despite having no conscious understanding.
The history of science shows that we need to keep what is good in past interpretation of the world and merge in new knowledge as it appears. Newton’s understanding enlightened physics for three hundred years. Einstein’s relativity did not cast out Newtonian physics, it extended it. In a similar way, Darwin’s great vision of evolution has raised biology from a cataloguing activity into a science, but now we are beginning to see Darwinism is incomplete. Evolution is not just a property of organisms – what evolves is the whole Earth system with its living and non-living parts existing as a tight coupled entity. It is foolish to think that we can explain science as it evolves, rationally and consciously. We have to use the crude tool of metaphor to translate conscious ideas into unconscious understanding. Just as the metaphor, a living Earth, used to explain Gaia, was wrongly rejected by reductionist scientists, so it may be wrong of them also to reject the metaphors and fables of the sacred texts. Crude they may be, but they serve to ignite an intuitive understanding of God and creation that cannot be falsified by rational argument.
As a scientist I know that Gaia Theory is provisional and likely to be displaced by a larger and more complete view of the Earth. But for now I see it as the seed from which an instinctive environmentalism can grow; one that would instantly reveal planetary health or disease and help sustain a healthy world.
Green thoughts and ideas are as diverse and competitive as the plants of a forest ecosystem and, unlike the plants, they do not even share the spectral purity of the colour of chlorophyll. Green thoughts range from shades of red to shades of blue. The totalitarian greens, sometimes called ecofascists, would like to see most other humans eliminated in genocide and so leave a perfect Earth for them alone. At the other end of the spectrum are those who would like to see universal human welfare and rights, and somehow hope that luck, Gaia or sustainable development will allow this dream to come true. Greens could be defined as those who have sensed the deterioration of the natural world and would like to do something about it. They share a common environmentalism but differ greatly in the means for its achievement. Perhaps the most humane green arguments are in Jonathon Porritt’s two books Seeing Green (1984) and Playing Safe: Science and the Environment (2000). He has done more than anyone I know to persuade the power bases of Europe to think and act in what he believes is an environmentally sound way, and he has selflessly devoted much of his life to this cause.
Since I met him at Dartington in 1982 I have thought of Jonathon as a friend, and therefore I deeply regret that in the past two years our paths have diverged; it is important that, deep though our differences are over the merits of nuclear and wind energy, we still share a great deal in common. In Chapters 5 and 6 I presented detailed criticisms of green thoughts and actions, but it was from within the environmental community, not from without, as in the recent book by Dick Taverne, The March of Unreason (2005), which expresses the viewpoint of an enlightenment liberal who rightly criticizes greens for their impractical romanticism. My feelings about modern environmentalism are more parallel with those that might pass through the mind of the headmistress of an inner-city school or the colonel of a newly formed regiment of licentious and naturally disobedient young men: how the hell can these unruly charges be disciplined and made effective?
The root of our problems with the environment comes from a lack of constraint on the growth of population. There is no single right number of people that we can have as a goal: the number varies with our way of life on the planet and the state of its health. It has varied naturally from a few million when we were hunters and gatherers to a fraction of a billion as simple farmers; but now it has grown to over six billion, which is wholly unsustainable in the present state of Gaia, even if we had the will and the ability to cut back.
If we could go back to, for example, 1840 and start again we might be able to reach a stable population of six billion if we were guided from the beginning by a proper understanding of the Earth. We would know that fossil-fuel combustion needed limiting and that cattle and sheep farming use far too much land and cannot be sustained, and that arable farming, with pigs and chickens as food animals consuming mainly vegetable waste, would be a better way to go. It might even be possible to sustain ten billion or more living in well-planned, dense cities and eating synthesized food.
If we can overcome the self-generated threat of deadly climate change, caused by our massive destruction of ecosystems and global pollution, our next task will be to ensure that our numbers are always commensurate with our and Gaia’s capacity to nourish them. Personally I think we would be wise to aim at a stabilized population of about half to one billion, and then we would be free to live in many different ways without harming Gaia. At first this may seem a difficult, unpalatable, even hopeless task, but events during the last century suggest that it might be easier than we think. Thus in prosperous societies, when women are given a fair chance to develop their potential they choose voluntarily to be less fecund. It is only a small step towards a better way of living with Gaia, and it has brought with it problems of a distorted age structure in society and dysfunctional family life, but it is a seed of optimism from which other voluntary controls could grow and surely far better than the cold concept of eugenics that withered in its own amorality. In the end, as always, Gaia will do the culling and eliminate those that break her rules. We have the choice to accept this fate or plan our own destiny within Gaia. Whatever we choose to do we have always to ask, what are the consequences?
The regulation of fecundity is part of population control, but the regulation of the death rate is also important. Here, too, people in affluent societies are choosing voluntarily seemly ways to die. Traditionally, hospitals have for the elderly been places for dying in comparative comfort and painlessness; the hospice movement has served to set standards and make this otherwise unmentionable role of the health systems acceptable. According to Hodkinson, in his book An Outline of Geriatrics, about 25 per cent of the elderly entering hospitals die within two months. Now that the Earth is in imminent danger of a transition to a hot and inhospitable state, it seems amoral to strive ostentatiously to extend our personal lifespan beyond its normal biological limit of about one hundred years. When I was a young post-doctoral fellow at Harvard Medical School in Boston an eminent paediatrician complained of the huge, more than tenfold, disparity between funds given for cancer research and those given for childhood disease; I suspect that it still exists.
We have severed nearly all the natural physical constraints on the growth of our species: we can live anywhere from the Arctic to the tropics and, while they last, our water supplies are piped to us; our only significant predator now is the occasional micro organism that briefly mounts a pandemic. If we are to continue as a civilization that successfully avoids natural catastrophes, we have to make our own constraints on growth and make them strong and make them now.
Over half the Earth’s people live in cities, and they hardly ever see, feel or hear the natural world. Therefore our first duty if we are green should be to convince them that the real world is the living Earth and that they and their city lives are a part of it and wholly dependent on it for their existence. Our role is to teach and to set an example by our lives. In purely human affairs, Gandhi showed how to do it; his modern equivalents might come from the Deep Ecology movement, founded by the Norwegian philosopher Arne Naess. I am moved by the ideas of deep ecology and touch on them again in the next chapter. In certain ways my long-time friend Edward Goldsmith is one of the few who have tried to live and think as a deep ecologist. His erudite and thought-provoking book The Way is essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about green philosophy; he founded The Ecologist, a magazine concerned with green thoughts and politics. It is now managed in much the same way by his nephew, Zac Goldsmith. The difference between us lies in our origins. I, not surprisingly, since my first experience in science was twenty-three years of medical research, think like a physician or even a surgeon. This is why I would like to see us use our technical skills to cure the ills of the Earth as well as those of humans. Teddy Goldsmith and the deep ecologists, from their humanist origins, scorn modern technology and would prefer alternative technology and medicine and would let Nature take its course. I acknowledge that they may be right and that iatrogenic illness, the disease that treatment causes, is all too common, but I cannot stand aside while civilization drinks itself to death on fossil fuels. And this is why I regard nuclear energy, however much it is feared, as a needed remedy.
The green community should have been reluctant to found lobbies and political parties; both are concerned with people and their problems, and, like megaphones, they amplify the demagogic voices of their leaders. Our task as individuals is to think of Gaia first. In no way does this make us inhuman or uncaring; our survival as a species is wholly dependent on Gaia and on our acceptance of her discipline.
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I am often asked, ‘What is our place in Gaia?’ To answer we need to look back a long time ago in human history to when we were an animal, a primate, living within Gaia and different from other species only in unimportant ways. Our role then was like theirs, to recycle carbon and other elements. We lived on an omnivorous diet and returned to the air as carbon dioxide the carbon collected in their lifetimes by our food animals and plants. We had our niche in the evolutionary system, and our numbers were probably not more than a million.
As intelligent predators, we were equipped with useful brains and hands and could alter the boundaries of our niche in ways that were unavailable to other animals. We could throw stones, use simple stone and wood tools, and do it better than other primates.
Many animals, even insects like bees and ants, can communicate. They use alarms and mating calls and pass on detailed information about the size, direction and distance of food sources. We humans were fortunate to acquire through a mutation the ability to modulate our voices sufficiently for a primitive spoken language. This change was as profound for us as primitive people as the invention of the computer or mobile phone has been for modern humans. The members of the tribe could share experiences; they could plan ahead against drought and famine and guard against predators. We were by then the emerging Homo sapiens and may have been the first animals consciously to modify the environment for their own benefit. Most remarkably, we used natural fires started by lightning for cooking, clearing land and hunting.
The innocent among the urban intelligentsia think and talk of early humans as living in harmony with the natural world. Some of them go further and gather funds to preserve what they see as natural communities living in remote regions, such as the tropical forests. They see the modern world as clever but bad and these simple lifestyles as natural and good. They are wrong. We should not think of early humans as better or worse than we are; indeed, they were probably very little different.
Others consider us superior because of our cultured ways and intellectual tendencies; our technology lets us drive cars, use word processors and travel great distances by air. Some of us live in air-conditioned houses and we are entertained by the media. We think that we are more intelligent than stone-agers, yet how many modern humans could live successfully in caves, or would know how to light wood fires for cooking, or make clothes and shoes from animal skins or bows and arrows good enough to keep their families fed? I am indebted to Jerry Glynn and Theodore Gray for making this point in their guidebook for users of the computer program Mathematica, a mathematics processor. Using as an example the fact that modern children can hardly add a column of numbers without a calculator, they observe that this is no bad thing, since each stage of human development brings with it a full measure of skills exchanged for others no longer needed; stone-agers were probably as fully occupied with living as we are.
One group of these early humans migrated to Australia at a time when the sea levels were much lower than now and the journey by boat or raft was probably neither long nor difficult. From this group are descended the modern Australian aboriginals, often claimed to be an example of natural humans at peace with the Earth. Yet their method of clearing forests by fire may have destroyed the natural forests of the Australian continent as surely as do modern men with chainsaws. Peace on you Aboriginals; you individually are no worse and no better than we are, it is just that we are power-assisted and more numerous.
Through Gaia I see science and technology as traits possessed by humans that have the potential for great good and great harm. Because we are part of, and not separate from Gaia, our intelligence is a new capacity and strength for her as well as a new danger. Evolution is iterative, mistakes are made, blunders committed; but in time that great eraser and corrector, natural selection, usually keeps a neat and tidy world. Perhaps our and Gaia’s greatest error was the conscious abuse of fire. Cooking meat over a wood fire may have been acceptable, but the deliberate destruction of whole ecosystems by fire merely to drive out the animals within was surely our first great sin against the living Earth. It has haunted us ever since and combustion could now be our auto da fé, and the cause of our extinction.