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| Elektro-L combines four visible and infrared wavelengths. |
"Since it began, life has worked to modify its environment. This is not easily explained in full because it is a complex, multi-dimensional process. I can, however, illustrate how it works with a simple computer simulation. This is called Daisyworld, which, with the atmospheric scientist Andrew Watson, I published in 1983. A main sequence star like our Sun gradually heats the planet Daisyworld until it is just warm enough for a species of black daisies to colonize the entire surface. Black daisies absorb heat so they thrive in these low temperatures. But there are mutant white daisies which reflect heat and, as the temperature rises even further, these begin to flourish. So Daisyworld is cooled by white daisies and warmed by black ones. A simple flower is able to regulate and stabilize the environment on a planetary scale. Moreover, this stabilization emerges from a strictly Darwinian process.
"Scale up this model to include all the flora and fauna of Earth and you have the system I have called Gaia. In fact, you cannot actually scale it up because the system is too complex; so complex in fact that we are nowhere near fully understanding it. Perhaps it is hard to understand because we are an intrinsic part of it. But also, I suspect, it is because we have been too reliant on language and logical thinking and have not paid enough attention to the intuitive thinking that plays such a large part in our understanding of the world. So, in short, humans may, at any moment, become extinct because of forces far beyond our control. But we can do something to save ourselves by learning to think."
There's considerable similarity with Bruno Latour's description, per David Cayley, "Instead of portraying Gaia as a unified and intelligible system that might conceivably be subject to management ["command and control" per McGilchrist], Latour portrays it as an improvised and incomprehensibly complex assemblage, with none of the coherence, neat categories and clear lines of authority formerly evident in 'Nature' – the dancer and the dance now indistinguishable." This is no doubt due in large part to the circularly causal (feedback) processes that define Gaia. If not management, then what form of relation do we have, what role might we play? The two-way interactions that describe a partnership or co-evolutionary relationship. The Daisyworld simulation is notable in that, while it highlights the vast adaptive capacity of a diverse biosphere and our participatory role within it, it also prompts us to ask: Why is homeostasis important to Gaia? Later in his book Lovelock writes: "I cannot say too strongly that the greatest threat to life on Earth is overheating. High temperatures make us vulnerable. A rise in temperature of 5 or even 10 degrees could probably be withstood, but not if the system is disabled… our present efforts to combat mere global warming are vital." Here is where our partnership can be of some use in reducing the Earth's Energy Imbalance (EEI).
Gaia is one of those big ideas that has instant superficial appeal, and thus becomes invoked frequently, but whose depth and real import is easily overlooked. Still today. Lovelock, surprisingly alive and lucid at 102, is a bit of an iconoclast himself. As for the pedigree of the notion of Gaia, I do like David Grinspoon's recounting of it in his book The Earth in Human Hands. And in Iain McGilchrist's recent massive tome The Matter with Things he cited Arran Gare's paper "From Kant to Schelling to Process Metaphysics: On the Way to Ecological Civilization" to point out that it was Schelling who was the first to describe the central concept of homeostasis. It should almost go without saying, that it is quite nearly impossible to understand Earth without understanding the Gaia hypothesis, and likewise it's impossible to understand the Gaia hypothesis without understanding homeostasis, allostasis, and related concepts (such as, perhaps, active inference). And yet, here we are.
In contemporary culture, it seems fashionable to perpetually indulge fantasies. One such fantasy is that limitations, whether of a technological or biological sort, no longer apply. The second fantasy is that self-regulation is, if not unimaginable then certainly impossible. Both are false. Life is constrained by physiologically limiting factors (the thermal limits of metazoans is <40–50 °C), and for that reason the self-regulation of these processes is precisely what allows it to occur. This is why homeostasis is important to Gaia. There are real adaptive limits and life exists within a relatively narrow range, cosmically speaking. The Daisyworld simulation shows that, within its capacity to do so, the planet as a whole has the agency to seek homeostatic control "as if it were" a single life. It also tells us that this capacity is not immune from the threat of extinction. Both are easily demonstrated within the simulation. (Gaia is in fact so fragile, given a history of several Gaian "near death experiences" that Peter Ward suggested there may be no stability at all.) When people no longer believe in self-regulation, and when they do not recognize limits, there are only a few choices they have left. These include: externally imposed regulation (salvation via supernatural means), denialism (limits aren't real/ they don't exist/ don't affect me), or nihilism (we have no agency/ failure is inevitable). Among nihilists, there's a subset that console themselves with the thought that perhaps humans may perish, but other life will persist and flourish in our absence. In Novacene, Lovelock is quick to disabuse us of any such consolations. When he speaks on topics outside his expertise, Lovelock is not always convincing. But on this subject, that of Gaia, homeostasis, and the threat of global heating to an incautious society, his warnings are very well considered and must be heeded. As an aside, his mention of the significance of intuitive thinking in the world is another deep insight (and one which Iain McGilchrist spends considerable time developing as well).
Are we leveraging the explanatory power of this simulation to full effect? How do we mobilize on climate and at the same time avoid the trap of doing so in an ethically utilitarian and mechanistic manner (as many observe is the direction today)? To briefly repeat what has been mentioned earlier, that follows from a tendency which, if taken to its logical conclusion, results in psychological fragmentation. The challenge, then, is to preserve our essential continuity in the face of this fragmentation. Now, there is a very productive sort of Heraclitean tension that must be maintained between the two, between perfect fragmentation on one extreme and seamless continuity on the other, call this "continuity amid fragmentation" if you will. Maintaining this dynamic tension is not easy, but the contours of the terrain were outlined by McGilchrist; it is essentially the task to which we must rise. Lovelock applies the precautionary principle to what might be termed Gaian astrophysics:
"The Earth's environment has been massively adapted to sustain habitability. There have been hot periods and ice ages, but the average temperature of the whole planetary surface does not seem to have varied by more than about 5°C from its current temperature: 15°C. This is because life has controlled the heat from the Sun. If you wiped out life entirely from the Earth, it would be impossible to inhabit. It would become far too hot, and life would not start again. The extreme weather we have experienced recently is only a mild sign of what might be on the way. But I think we have time, time we should spend cooling the planet to make it more robust. Planets, like humans, grow fragile with age. If all goes well, Gaia can expect a productive and pleasant period of decline – but people can have fatal accidents and so can planets.
"Our resilience depends on our state of health. When young, we can often withstand influenza or a car accident, but not when we are close to 100 years old. Similarly, when young, Earth and Gaia could withstand shocks like super-volcanic eruptions or asteroid strikes; when old, any one of these could sterilize the entire planet. An asteroid impact or a volcano could destroy much of the organic life the Earth now carries. The remnant survivors might be unable to restore Gaia; our planet would quickly become too hot for life. A warm Earth is more vulnerable, so keeping Earth cool is a necessary safety measure for an elderly planet orbiting a middle-aged star. It is vital for our survival that the sea is kept cool, since after the Sun, the sea is the primary driver of our climate. It was thinking about the consequences of asteroid impacts and other accidents that made me see why the Earth needs to stay cool. We need to keep the Earth as cool as possible to ensure it is less vulnerable to accidents that might disable Gaia's cooling mechanisms. And we should not simply assume, as most people do most of the time, that the Earth is a stable and permanent place with temperatures always in a range in which we can safely survive."
Earlier in his book Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine Lovelock wrote “In human medicine a condition of malignant debilitation sometimes occurs after severe shock. In this condition, called marasmus, metabolism and normal physiological function fade away until the power to conduct even the minimum homeostasis needed for life is lost. Gaia as a system, on at least one occasion, has come close to a fatal marasmus in the aftermath of a disease or injury, perhaps a severe planetesimal impact. The system must be large and vigorous and able to handle planet-sized problems. It is a tribute to the powers of recovery of Gaia that none of the 30 or more planetesimal impacts has ever caused a fatal marasmus.”
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| Daisyworld climate (Lovelock 1988) [cf. observed temps] |
"In about one billion years, and long before the sun’s life ends, the heat received by the Earth will be more than two kilowatts per square metre, which is more than the Gaia we know can stand; she will die from overheating. Gaia regulates its temperature at what is near optimal for whatever life happens to be inhabiting it. But, like many regulating systems with a goal, it tends to overshoot and stray to the opposite side of its forcing. If the sun’s heat is too little the Earth tends to be warmer than ideal; if too much heat comes from the sun, as now, it regulates on the cold side of ideal. This is why the usual state of the Earth at present is an ice age. The recent crop of glaciations the geologists call the Pleistocene is, I think, a last desperate effort by the Earth system to meet the needs of its present life forms. The sun is already too hot for comfort." [And again, in A Rough Ride to the Future he wrote:] "As we gather more detailed and more accurate estimates of the long-term climate and compositional history of the Earth over tens of millions of years, we see that despite the ever-increasing output of solar heat, the Earth tends to grow colder. As long ago as 1992, the ocean scientist Michael Whitfield and I published a small paper in Nature with the provocative title ‘The Life Span of the Biosphere’. In it we argued that if the goal of the Earth system was to keep its temperature close to glacial levels, the only way open to it in the face of the ineluctable increase of solar radiation was to progressively lower the abundance of CO2. It was almost succeeding, and CO2 levels 17,000 years ago reached 180 parts per million, possibly the lowest since life appeared on the Earth 3 billion years ago. The rise of CO2 abundance to 280 p.p.m. in the interglacial before the Anthropocene had nothing to do with the presence of humans: it was the response of an over-stressed system to a rise in heat received from the Sun due to small cyclical changes in the Earth’s orbit and inclination (the Milankovitch effect)."
In The Vanishing Face of Gaia, Lovelock wrote: "If the hotter Earth now were more productive than the cool Earth before the Industrial Revolution, we would be flourishing and so would the Earth. Unfortunately we moved the temperature the wrong way, and we may be eliminated as a result. Cooling would have been much better. This is how Gaia keeps a habitable planet: species that improve habitability flourish and those that foul the environment are set back or go extinct. Are we yet intelligent enough to be a social animal capable of living stably with Gaia and with ourselves now and on the changed Earth that soon will come? As I see it, our hope lies in the chance that we might evolve into a species that can regulate itself and be a beneficial part of Gaia."
Lovelock has been very consistent in the broad themes expressed within Gaia Theory through his books and papers to date (roughly half a century of work!). In particular, his attempts to understand not only how the climate system has regulated itself in the past, but also its future trajectory, its destabilization under human influence, and its vulnerability in "old age" are fascinating. The notion of "straying to the opposite side of its forcing" as an explanation for both his Daisyworld simulation and the geologic temperature record should be shocking for everyone, particularly in light of the evidence that Earth has been in a greenhouse state for about 85% of its history, compared to which it is much cooler today. If Lovelock's interpretation of this is to be believed, then Gaia has been actively regulating itself to maintain a cooling trajectory given imperceptibly rising levels of solar luminosity. Taking all of this into consideration makes the current rates of global heating even more worrisome. When it comes to the dangers of messing with the planet, there are few voices more deserving of our careful attention. While it does describe the general trajectory of Earth’s self-regulation processes, Gaia Theory can’t tell us all the details of how the future will look, but it can tell us why it will look the way it does. As Nietzsche wrote, "He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how." We will always face existential risks from black swan events. With these future contours in hand, our task is to do our utmost to prepare for their almost certain eventuality. And even if we can safely evade those global risks, we will still eventually bump up against the hard physical limits of solar evolution. There’s nothing like a common cause and daunting odds to fortify our resolve and strengthen our bonds. After all, we are literally all in this together. It’s when we lose direction and wander aimlessly that things start to fall apart. Gaia is in competition with no one, but struggles to survive in the unforgiving conditions that prevail in our corner of the galaxy. Remarkably well so far.
In James Lovelock’s last book, Novacene, he wrote “I have often wondered if the Internet could… take away useless and redundant information and dispose of it in some vast, unfathomed depth of the universe. I like to think of huge transmitters sited at the poles broadcasting junk mail, unwanted advertisements, banal entertainment and misinformation. What a splendid way to keep cool!” He was joking of course, but the idea he referenced is the atmospheric window. If there were a way to somehow enhance the process of radiating energy back out through the atmospheric window, with a sufficiently high “cooling return on investment” (CROI), it would be an interesting approach to explore. SkyCool comes to mind in this context. They combine heat pumps with a means for tuning the wavelength of the re-radiated energy so it passes through the atmospheric window, but the CROI for SkyCool is likely too low due to the complexity and material needs of this technology. But one method that meets criteria for both safety and high CROI is passive solar energy rejection through surface albedo modification (SAM). The most effective deployment of SAM will functionally reproduce a heterogeneous pattern of light absorption on Earth's surface such that the amount of rejected energy does not have a negative impact on the vertical transport of moisture, which is critical for cloud formation. Why might that be important? As water vapor rises and condenses in clouds through nucleation processes, it releases latent heat in the upper atmosphere where it can more easily radiate into space. It's another process by which the Earth stays cool. ...So while we may not achieve a high CROI through Lovelock’s fanciful idea of broadcasting junk mail into space, perhaps Earth’s energy imbalance (EEI) can be restored through the intelligent deployment of SAM that takes into account all of Gaia’s natural means of thermoregulation: convection, conduction, radiation, and evaporation. There's an organization named MEER that has been working to achieve the highest CROI by testing interventions that leverage our understanding of all these natural processes, not just one of them.
Is a runaway greenhouse effect likely in the near future? No. Is it possible? Yes. We know that as solar luminosity increases the most likely fate of Earth will be a runaway greenhouse state. This is currently predicted to occur in the rather distant future. However scientists like James Hansen, Stephen Hawking, and others have suggested we are capable of moving that date forward, perhaps significantly so, in various ways: escalating positive feedbacks (aka cascading tipping points) leading to a hotter state, or disabling Earth’s negative feedbacks (cooling mechanisms). It's important to note that both of these render the planet more vulnerable to other system shocks. So is the regenerative power of nature greater than us and able to overcome these influences, or is it vulnerable enough that we might actually critically destabilize the planet (through malice or neglect)? Maybe that’s the wrong question to ask. Instead we should be asking: What amount of preventable risk is acceptable?
Gaia's signature in paleoclimatology
In their paper "Pliocene and Eocene provide best analogs for near-future climates", the authors write “The availability of geological analogs to future climates also offers some evidence for ecoevolutionary adaptive capacity in that most future climates have equivalents in the deep evolutionary histories of current lineages. All species present today have an ancestor that survived the hothouse climates of the Eocene and Pliocene. However, these analyses also raise serious concerns about adaptive capacity. The large climate changes expected for the coming decades will occur at a significantly accelerated pace compared with Cenozoic climate change and across a considerably more fragmented landscape, rife with additional stresses. Over the past 50 My, evolutionary changes have been driven in part by species adapting away from hothouse climates to a world that was cooling, drying, and characterized by decreasing atmospheric CO2.” This analysis of climate trends supports Lovelock’s work on Gaia Theory. As noted, he was quite aware of the geologic temperature record, which was more critical to the development of Gaia Theory than many people appreciate. One of the virtues of the theory is an explanation for why warmer climates prevailed in the past, and why cooler ones have tended to predominate more recently. That general trend would’ve continued into the future had anthropogenic changes in GHG concentrations not derailed it. According to Gaia Theory, the Earth system self-regulates conditions so as to be favorable for life. Self-regulation is a complex dynamic, but we can describe several components. The first is that as solar luminosity increases (a natural process of stellar evolution), GHG concentrations on Earth would be expected to correspondingly decrease over geologic time to maintain surface temperatures favorable for life. Another (and far less intuitive) implication is that, as Lovelock described, “regulating systems with a goal [like Earth] tend to overshoot and stray to the opposite side of its forcing. This means that if the sun’s heat is too little the Earth tends to be warmer than ideal; if too much heat comes from the sun, as now, it regulates on the cold side of ideal”. Taken together, we can now see Gaia's signature in the geologic record - both temperature and CO2 has tended to slowly decrease. From the perspective of Gaia, these are naturally desirable outcomes. Not only would a hotter Earth challenge our adaptive capacity, but according to Lovelock’s theory it would contravene millions of years of Gaian evolution and place Earth in more jeopardy than it has ever experienced before. Given the potential for a hotter future, the authors find “grounds for both hope and concern” for species. That’s because self-regulatory cooling mechanisms are a part of the adaptive capacity of nearly all species. These include phenotypic plasticity, adaptive genetic change, and geographic range shifts (Thor Hanson described these in his popular book). The RAD framework developed by John Morton, Williams (an author on this paper), and others can help inform our future actions to potentially accelerate or enhance these. If we increase our scale of analysis to that of Gaia, a scale which exobiologists like David Grinspoon frequently operate on as well, then given the potential for a hotter future, do we find similar grounds for both hope and concern? Her cooling mechanisms are different, the most influential of these are albedo and the greenhouse effect. In The Vanishing Face of Gaia, Lovelock wrote, “as I see it, our hope lies in the chance that we might evolve into a species that can regulate itself and be a beneficial part of Gaia." And again in Novacene, “we need to keep the Earth as cool as possible to ensure it is less vulnerable to accidents that might disable Gaia's cooling mechanisms.” If we understand the self-regulatory capacities of species to stay within their thermal limits, and if we have the desire and ability to effectively align our goals for survival and assist them, can we say the same about Gaia?
Myth and Metaphor
Iain McGilchrist in a recent interview said: "In life we are always assessing and helping to grow certain relationships. Believing in someone means placing our trust in him or her. It puts a responsibility on us to respond and on them to be true. There is no certainty about anything at all, but that doesn't make our faith blind. For example, if you sit at home saying "I want to marry but I'll never ever leave the home", then you'll never get married. But if you want to, you still don't know who you will marry. It's entirely unpredictable. It may be chance what happens. But nonetheless you have to open yourself to the possibility, otherwise it won't happen. It has to be experiential. You have a responsibility to put yourself in the way of something happening. Or, if I am fjording a stream, and my companion has gone ahead across the stream, as I get near the bank I may need a hand. He or she holds out a hand to me. It's not a random hand. And it's not blind to trust this hand. I have to step, and I have to take the hand. That's the way I see it. That you see something that is calling to you and saying "If you understand this, it will radically change the way you think about the world". I think the same is true of our relationship with the cosmos at large, which I believe is a living, organismic entity, a conscious entity, or God (I don't want to rule anybody's attempt to make this encounter out just because of a word). I actually believe with Whitehead that the world, by which he meant the whole experiential cosmos, and God are coming into being together reciprocally, and that we therefore have a part to play, a very important part. So it actually matters how we respond to the world: what we make of it, what we see in it, and what we give back to it."
James Lovelock started defining the idea of a self-regulating, evolving Earth controlled by the community of living organisms in September 1965, while working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California on methods of detecting life on Mars. This involves the biosphere, atmosphere, hydrospheres and pedosphere, tightly coupled as an evolving system. If not a conceptual advance over earlier ideas, then it was certainly the most detailed description at that time. He noted that instead of "Gaia Theory" he could've gone with the more sedate sounding "Earth System Science" or "geophysiology", but it wouldn't have garnered nearly as much attention if he had. I think this is primarily because it gives the system a proper name (whether that's Gaia or Pachamama, Solaris or Eywa, the name itself is arbitrary) and the associations of teleonomic agency that come with it to the particular embodiment of the largest superorganism we are aware of (the embodiment is not arbitrary). This reifies something that would have otherwise remained purely conceptual and disembodied. That's the difference, as Iain McGilchrist makes clear, between attending to Earth in a a much more intuitive, and implicitly living manner (as we must), or in a purely abstract manner. As Stephan Harding wrote "Gaia is Earth personified". Hesiod's Theogony does much the same, stating that Chaos was the first thing to exist, and out of Chaos came Gaia. Perhaps at some point later the fractal structure of reality may suggest that the galaxy and universe also display life-like qualities, this might be more apparent if/when extraterrestrial life is discovered. As Lee Smolin said, "If the Earth can be understood as a self-organized system, maybe the same thing was true for larger systems, such as a galaxy or the universe as a whole". But if and when they are, we have not observed this. In the case of Gaia we have. At a smaller scale, Peter Corning noted that human society is also a superorganism, or a "collective survival enterprise" where multiple selves join together to form a "superagent". This agentic character of society, as has been frequently observed, can either promote the general health and welfare of the entire biotic community, or it can become an uncoordinated and cancer-like growth that destroys the planet upon which it depends. Earth Systems Science has gone on to become successful as well. In 2009 a group led by Johan Rockström defined a "safe operating space for humanity" as a precondition for sustainable development, which became the "planetary boundaries" concept. And in 2012 Kate Raworth combined this with the complementary concept of basic needs to create the "doughnut economics" framework. Both are very valuable, though they are also arguably incomplete derivatives of the conceptually more comprehensive Gaia Theory.
In “Gaia: Dynamic, Diverse, Source and Place of Being” Glenys Livingstone wrote “In the earliest of her stories, Gaia conceived and gave birth to all parthenogenetically – that is, solely from within her own substance and powers… In Gaia matter and mater were one.” In ancient Roman religion and myth, Tellus Mater or Terra Mater ("Mother Earth") was a goddess of the Earth. “Mater” means “origin, source, mother", and so the word “materialism” harkens back to this earlier usage. “Gaia’s Delphic shrine was closed late in the fourth century CE by Roman emperor Theodosius, who imposed Christianity as the official religion throughout the lands he controlled. Gaia was now denied. Theologian Rosemary Radford Reuther describes how the new god “sacralized domination” of the Earth. The new regime claimed transcendence of matter. On the surface of things for this period the celestial appeared to be winning the cosmic conflict with the chthonic. Though “Ge” remained threaded into language – “geology”, “geometry”, “geography,” she was increasingly understood as a passive dead ball of dirt upon which humans travailed and from which they extracted sustenance: She was no longer subjective and sentient, graciously giving forth. Evolutionary biologist Elisabet Sahtouris observes that the “organic” philosophies of Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus no longer held sway (Heraclitus' tenth fragment: "The one is made up of all things, and all things issue from the one."), but rather the “mechanical” cosmos of Pythagoras, Parmenides and Plato, which suited the new god. Gaia, as ground of being, was no longer held sacred or felt to be alive. Whereas once she may have at least been considered monstrous, she could now be placed as mere backdrop to human activities. Yet the desire for knowledge of her, for the physical world of which we the human are a part, could not be put to sleep. This desire expressed as science in more recently documented times, but expressed as empirical investigation since the earliest human writings, has always been a desire to know …was it a desire to know thyself as the Gaian priestess oracle of old admonished? …The scientists then entered, many unwittingly, into a journey of return to the chthonic, deeper and deeper into the nature of matter, the planet and the cosmos. At times this was a further desecration of her, expressed openly by some as a type of invasion of her, yet for many it was a pathway into her wonders and beauty: the restoration of the material reality, which may be a restoration of the maternal reality …a restoration of the mother.” This is an interesting account. To what extent is the contemporary, and rather polarizing, ideological conflict we see in society at large a recapitulation of the same cosmic conflict between the celestial and the chthonic, the mechanic and the organic, or, in the parlance of Iain McGilchrist, the left and the right hemispheres of the brain? The word chthonic is derived from the Ancient Greek word χθών, “khthon”, meaning earth or soil. It translates more directly from χθόνιος or “in, under, or beneath the earth” which can be differentiated from Γῆ, or “ge” (Gaia) which speaks to the living surface of land on the earth, so the metaphor is not perfect.
In his article “Gaia is dead and we have killed her”, Glenn Albrecht was critical of both the science of Gaia Theory, and the metaphor of Gaia as primordial female, which he thought might be alienating. He concluded: "Either we get rid of all sex-gender pronouns for nature and the earth or we come up with a new one that is inclusive of all." It is true that Lovelock took William Golding's suggestion to name his theory after Gaia. But if Gaia is a female, she is unlike any human female that has ever existed. There are no documented cases of parthenogenesis in humans. As early Greeks had a rudimentary understanding of the various forms of asexual reproduction, it would make about as much sense to say that Gaia reproduces via budding (like a plant) or binary fission (like bacteria). When using the Gaia metaphor, Lovelock used traditional feminine pronouns, but otherwise used neuter pronouns to describe the Earth system. Instead of deciding on one or the other, he seems to have found it beneficial to be able to use either according to context. We could also use the hermaphroditic "Eorlif", or the gender neutral "Solaris" (which means Of The Sun), or the masculine "Geb" from Egypt, or the feminine "Pachamama" of the Inca. Albrecht's premise is that the “unintentional sexism” of gendered metaphors like Gaia Theory and Susan Simard’s ‘Mother Trees’ might reinforce harmful dynamics that have characterized significant portions of human history. But alternatively, perhaps he is looking at sex and gender through a uniquely “Western perspective”, and not through the lens of earlier cultures (and contemporary non-Western cultures) for whom such concepts and relationships have not become pathologized. Furthermore, it's worth recalling that among phalaropes (birds in the in the genus Phalaropus) it is the males who are the principal care-givers in the relationship. Biology supplies exceptions to nearly every rule. In short, perhaps erasing gender from metaphor might be a false solution to an incompletely understood problem - that it’s not the metaphors so much as our culture that has poisoned them. If that’s the case, then rather than sterilizing our language, maybe we should take a hard look at our culture and our ways of attending to he world. (See Iain McGilchrist for the effects of cultural shifts in perspective.) We might also ask why different cultures chose to associate Earth with femininity. But if we ignore that association we could prematurely blind ourselves to important lessons, lessons we can learn only by being more attentive to these contextual issues.
Albrecht continued: "As a superorganism (the whole Earth as alive) with intentionality (keeping homeostasis) one would expect that humans, as but one aspect of life, would not be able to get to the point of committing, ecocide (regional) or tierracide (planetary). Gaia, in the interests of life in general and its ‘harmony’ should have ‘balanced’ us long before now." In short, there are many interpretations of Gaia Theory. While this conclusion might follow from a "Strong Gaia" interpretation, given certain assumptions about the value of humans, such a "Strong Gaia" perspective is not widely held. Albrecht also stated: "There is no life in the inner or outer core of the Earth. It is too hot even for Gaia! The deep Earth is dead." This criticism is misplaced. Gaia Theory proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating, complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet. This involves the biosphere, atmosphere, hydrospheres, and lithosphere, tightly coupled as an evolving system. David Grinspoon, in his article "It’s Time to Take the Gaia Hypothesis Seriously", wrote that "one of the original architects of plate tectonic theory, Norm Sleep from Stanford, has become thoroughly convinced that life is deeply implicated in the overall physical dynamics of Earth, including the “nonliving” interior domain".
As with the Roman Terra/Tellūs and Greek Ge/Gaia, the word Earth developed from an Old English noun most often spelled eorðe and may have been a personified goddess in Germanic paganism. (If that’s true, this might place the genderless status of “Eorlif” in doubt, from a historical perspective at least. Nonetheless, there are a thousand different names. They all have their value and their limitations. As Alfred Korzybski remarked, “The map is not the territory”. The critical aspect is whether the various imperfect maps we use can tell us anything about the planet.) Late Norse mythology included Jörð ('Earth'). The word eorðe was used to translate the many senses of Latin terra and Greek γῆ gē: the ground, its soil, dry land, the human world, the surface of the world (including the sea), and the globe itself. Occasionally, the name Terra is used, while in poetry Tellus has been used to denote personification of the Earth. There are a number of adjectives for the planet Earth. From the Latin Terra comes terran and terrestrial, and from the Latin Tellus comes tellurian and telluric. The Greek name Γαῖα (Gaia) is a mostly epic, collateral form of Attic Γῆ (Gē) and Doric Γᾶ (Ga), perhaps identical to Δᾶ (Da), both meaning "Earth". The word is of uncertain origin, perhaps having a Pre-Greek origin. The root word ge is commonly used in many words. Ge-ology and ge-ography studies the lands, features, and peoples of Earth. Ge-ometry is a way to measure the planet. The notions of peri-gee and apo-gee came later, when it was discovered that the Earth does not revolve around the sun in a perfect circle, but rather travels through space in an ellipse. And so on. Gaia or Ge had at least three sanctuaries in Greece which were mentioned by Pausanias: “It is a journey of about thirty stades to what is called the Gaion (Gaeum), a sanctuary of Ge (Earth) whose wooden image is one of the very oldest.” Some sources claim that Gaia as Mother Earth is a later form of a pre-Indo-European Great Mother, venerated in Neolithic times. A subset of contemporary environmentalists call themselves Gaians (some go even further to identify as "ecosexual"). These people seek to take an approach consistent with the Precautionary Principle that you should honor and be respectful of all life on earth. Carl Jung suggested that the archetypal mother was a part of the collective unconscious of all humans, and may even precede the image of the paternal "father." Such speculations help explain the universality of mother goddess imagery around the world.
In her essay "Was C.G. Jung into Ecology?" Sue Mehrtens wrote "Carl Jung had a wide ranging curiosity, but his interest was held the longest by the medieval alchemists who drew on the wisdom of Plato, the neoPythagoreans, Plotinus, and the Hermetic corpus. One of the key concepts they took over from Plato and others was the notion of the "world-soul", or anima mundi. Jung’s alchemical works are replete with references to this, which the alchemists defined in various ways including a projection of the unconscious, or a transconscious center which must be regarded as a symbol of wholeness." Jung noted that the unconscious is nature, "an incomparable guide" and that "we must find out how to get everything back into connection with everything else. We must resist the vice of intellectualism, and get it understood that we cannot only understand". It is not difficult to connect Jung with Lovelock. Elisabeth Ryland wrote that "the environmental angst complex and Gaia symbolism have both been activated by one of Jung’s "powerful and animating ideas" — the most powerful of all archetypes, the Great Mother. The Earth Mother, with her fertility, beauty, and protection, is a central theme in the environmental consciousness. One of the attributes of this archetype is inclusiveness, and it is a hallmark of environmental thinking that nothing is unimportant, because everything is connected to everything else in a living web which must be respected to ensure sustainability." Both Jung’s depth psychology and Naess' deep ecology explain environmental destruction as a mirror of human psychological dysfunction. (These themes, psychological dysfunction and the exclusion of a more embodied awareness, have recently regained attention through the work of Iain McGilchrist.) Jung's ideas do not enjoy universal acceptance today, in part because of concerns raised about the way in which he employs binary distinctions (such as the association of Earth with a female archetype). Why do binaries and dualisms figure so prominently for him? Aren't these more problematic than helpful? Perhaps Jung highlights these, not so much for their own reification, but because they more importantly illuminate processes that lead to their own dissolution in a sort of "Jungian dialectic", a non-dualist mystical union. According to Gerhard Dorn, whom he frequently cited, the highest grade of the alchemical coniunctio (a synonym for coincidentia oppositorum, aka the "unity of opposites") consists in the union of the individual with the unus mundus (or "one world"). Given this view, it's unsurprising that Jung believed a plurality of contradictory opinions should be tolerated. This also makes it difficult to place him within either modern or postmodern traditions. The decomposition of dualist concepts into their constituents before recomposing them in a diversity of new forms, as a way of resolving false dichotomies, brings to mind the alchemical "solve et coagula". And this appears to have resurfaced again in Zengiaro's proposal for physiosemiosis as well (described below).
In a recent interview, Tyson Yunkaporta said "Do you know where the term "Gaia" comes from? Gaia is the feminine of Gaius. The Roman Emperors all had that name, Julius Caesar was Gaius. Indeed, derivations of the name are still present in many European languages. The Romans had a line in their wedding ceremony where the woman would say "I am Gaia to your Gaius." And the man would say "I am Gaius to your Gaia." Then they would get married. A big theme in my book "Sand Talk" is the flawed relationship between men and women in contemporary society. It goes back to the central relationship in Aboriginal society, which is the mother-child relationship. The support of women in that role and relation is the center of all things, and it needs to be honored and respected. Women need to be honored and respected. If we don't have that, then it's not about "Gaia" anymore, it's just about "Gaius". So feminism is probably more important for men than it is for women. Basically we really need to embrace it. We really need to sort things out. It's not about losing power, it's about regaining our humanity and our place in the pattern of creation as really important custodians of creation. We can't do that as long as unequal relations of power are in place." The origin of Gaius is often stated as still unknown. The only known original Roman etymology of Gaius is from the Latin verb gaudere ("to rejoice", "to be glad"), although this etymology is commonly seen as incorrect. However as Yunkaporta noted, the most promising explanation can be found in the folk-etymological derivation from the Greek word γαῖα (gaîa, "earth"), specifically γῆ ("gê") or γᾶ ("gâ"), which is supported by the Roman vow of marriage that the fiancée had to give: Ubi tu Caius et ego Caia. ("Where you [will be], Gaius, likewise I [will be], Gaia.") To which the bridegroom replied: Ubi tu Caia et ego Caius. By the inclusion of Gaius and Gaia in the vow, the two names could be identified simply as "man" and "woman". But since the vow was originally an archaic rural ceremony, the vernacular explanation by the Romans, who had always been farmers, will have been "woman of the Earth" and "man of the Earth", referring also to the agricultural property of the family. ...Whether we call someone Gaia or Gaius depends on who we are in relation to them, but regardless of our identity in that relationship, it should always be defined by honor and respect.
Viewing Gaia Theory from the perspective of organicism, as Glenn Albrecht suggests, and "organismic biology" can be illuminating and does take us back to Pre-Socratic thought. Perhaps a better comparison is Whitehead's "philosophy of organism" however. Iain McGilchrist, in The Matter With Things, wrote that organicism "may be a foundational principle of the cosmos". More recently, it has become somewhat generalized as "systems thinking" or simply "holism". Fritjof Capra discussed Gaia and organicism in his book The Web of Life, where he wrote that "Organismic biology, Gestalt psychology, ecology, and later on, general systems theory all grew out of [a hunger for] this holistic zeitgeist". Donna Haraway, in her foreword to The Cyborg Handbook, noted that "Lovelock’s perception was that of a systems engineer gestated in the space program and... fed on the heady brew of cybernetics in the 1950s and 1960s". She and other "critical posthumanists", like N. Katherine Hayles, and of course Latour, have much to say about all this. Peter Corning has written extensively on both cybernetics, teleonomy, and evolutionary transitions (all of which appear more coherent through the lens of organicism). But Peter Corning was skeptical of whether the biosphere has truly cybernetic self-adjusting properties. In Nature's Magic Corning wrote "processes in the natural world mimic feedback-driven behavior but... they are not controlled by an independent feedback mechanism [a cybernetic control mechanism - a thermostat or governor]" He asked, "Where is the 'reference signal' in Lovelock's superorganism?" He also wrote that "The environment does not react to feedback... A reciprocal feedback 'cycle' can only occur when two different cybernetic systems respond to each other." These points were frequently repeated: "Without some internal 'reference signal' (teleonomy), there can be no feedback control, although there can certainly be self-ordered processes of reciprocal causation at work, or perhaps Darwinian processes of 'coevolution' and 'stabilizing selection'. The existence of systemic purposiveness (teleonomy) is what distinguishes organisms (and “superorganisms”) from ecosystems. The mere fact of functional interdependence is insufficient to justify the use of an organismic/ cybernetic analogy." How did Lovelock respond to these criticisms, which were voiced by many others as well? Through his "Daisyworld" thought experiment, which was intended to illustrate the capacity of a planet for self-regulation. As for whether Lovelock or Corning is more right, that may come down to whether any such simulation can actually be said to represent the sort of relationships that we do in fact observe on Earth.
Peter Corning's belief is that life must have a cybernetic control mechanism like "a thermostat or governor", and exhibit systemic purposiveness, aka "teleonomy". But I think these may be red herrings when it comes to Gaia Theory, as it appears that Lovelock has addressed them. They just weren't characterized in the way Corning wanted. And that's where W. Ford Doolittle comes in, by expanding the concept of life and evolution along process philosophical lines, or in the terms of a relational ontology. You may recognize that this is also the perspective of Iain McGilchrist (Carlo Rovelli, and perhaps Robert Rosen). Doolittle's work attempts to square Darwin with Gaia Theory. I think he succeeds (though he would say the work isn't done yet). Does he subsume lived experience to physiochemical cybernetic processes? He did describe a hierarchically arranged system of interactors, that would permit a sort of reductive view, but he's definitely not a reductionist of Richard Dawkins' caliber. His hierarchical system was made primarily to illustrate the way that traditional Darwinism can still be understood from a Gaian perspective, a perspective that is needed to understand how Earth might have an "agency" of its own and is not simply a mechanistic "spaceship" but a living being. Can we ever hope to characterize such a complex entity as Gaia in a meaningful way? I think that we can move either nearer or farther from such an understanding. This is indeed a contextual question, and McGilchrist's "ways of attending" thesis is certainly relevant to the quality of our interactions with Gaia, which require a very broad perspective of the sort Doolittle is working on. In an article addressing a popular audience, he wrote "Beyond the benefit to science, ‘Darwinising Gaia’ would also have some political benefits. It might encourage us to look at nature as a coherent whole, with an evolutionary trajectory that we can foster or deflect as we choose. After all, we are already doing that, whether we realise it or not.”
There’s also another, more subtle consideration to take into account. As McGilchrist might say, our concepts (maps) often determine what we see (the terrain), to such an extent that poor maps can render us almost blind to what’s staring us straight in the face. A plant, an egg, and an animal are all alive, but if we say that only that which can move quickly is truly living, then we risk “defining out of existence” other beings. Not all things will self-regulate in the same ways. But as evolutionary concepts evolve, so too does the circle of life gradually expand outward to become more inclusive. In her book Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway wrote "We need a name for the dynamic ongoing symchthonic forces and powers of which people are a part, within which ongoingness is at stake. I am calling all this the Chthulucene, from the Greek chthonios (of, in, or under the earth and seas). History must give way to geostories, to Gaia stories, to symchthonic stories. Brazilian anthropologists and philosophers Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Déborah Danowski exorcise lingering notions that Gaia is confined to the ancient Greeks and subsequent Eurocultures. All of us must become more ontologically inventive and sensible within the bumptious holobiome that earth turns out to be, whether called Gaia or a Thousand Other Names: Naga, Tangaroa, Phra Mae Thorani, Medusa, Terra, Cel, Geb, Haniyasu no kami, Spider Woman, Nokomis, Pachamama, Papatūānuku, Oya, Gorgo, Raven, A’akuluujjusi, Amalur, Atabey, and all their kin. Per Marilyn Strathern, it matters which stories tell stories, which concepts think concepts. Mathematically, visually, and narratively, it matters which figures figure figures, which systems systematize systems." Chwałczyk’s paper "Around the Anthropocene in Eighty Names" suggests that Haraway’s Chthulucene “was primarily proposed as part of the constructive and creative critique of the Anthropocene-concept”. So it’s unlikely she would’ve advanced it otherwise. Of course, any name is only a pointer, a map and not the actual embodied terrain, so to speak. But a good pointer will serve to “raise our consciousness” and enable us to better attend to whatever it is that is shaping our biggest choices today. (Donella Meadows suggests such cognitive shifts may be necessary to effectively “intervene in a system”.) With "Chthulucene" Haraway is presenting a new and definitive epoch whose organizing principle is the planetary context. She does this using the Gaia metaphor that Lovelock introduced at the suggestion of William Golding (and which in turn has numerous precedents of its own). In the process she expands the metaphor significantly.
Why select the planetary context for the organizing principle? Among many things this follows from the growing social awareness of planetary boundaries and an understanding of deep geologic time, space, and constitutive relations. Is Haraway able to leverage the power of cultural myth in this way, and point to the central place of Earth in our pivotal age? The figure of the planet reappears in almost all the new labels proposed for this age. For example, Stephen J. Pyne’s book "The Pyrocene: How We Created an Age of Fire, and What Happens Next”, which came out last year, noted that “Now we have become a geologic force because we’ve begun to cook the planet.” So even a label that describes an "Age of Fire" draws it’s meaning and import from the planetary context. We could’ve defined our age with reference to the quantum context, the human context, or the cosmic context, to name a few other dynamic scales for action, and some have done just that. In contemporary Western society, Individualism is the organizing ethos. It's a rather constricted and woefully inept context for handling global issues, yet here we are. We still grapple with many of the same ethical issues that came increasingly to the fore during the Axial Age (a time when it seems many societies got “stuck” in their current form, per Graeber and Wengrow). The planetary context is significant for being larger than any other context that has defined our sphere of interactions thus far (yet it is still not the largest that we are capable of conceiving) and we’ve become increasingly aware of the additional layer of complexity it adds. Now, not only must we resolve our infra- and inter- species frictions, but we must also do this within planetary limits. That is an affront to the ideology of infinite growth that we've become stuck in. While it's doubtful Haraway's provocative sounding "Chthulucene" will gain traction as a new label for the coming age, her critique of our cultural moment emerges from a lucid understanding of both our current context and the power of sense-making cultural processes for conveying it to the wider public. In 2014 there was an International Colloquium held in Rio de Janeiro called “The Thousand Names of Gaia: From the Anthropocene to the Age of the Earth” (I believe that subsequent gatherings and events have since been held). Haraway references this, and it's not incidental to her thesis. There are a thousand names for Earth, and so naturally there will be a thousand names for the cultural transition that is being born today. Having many names may be the best (and only) way change really takes off. Stephen Pyne was asked “Which do you think sums up our situation most: anthropocene, pyrocene, or...?” To which he replied “They all have their value - a collective pantheon. We shouldn't reduce it all to one jealous Word that will have no others before it.”
Should Gaia have dispensed retributive justice in response to ecological crimes perpetrated under colonialism and capitalism? This depends on how we interpret Gaia Theory, which can be split into a spectrum of interpretations ranging from the undeniable to the radical. On one end, "Weak Gaia" may simply mean that life and the environment evolve in a coupled way, or that life maintains the stability of the natural environment. At the other end, "Strong Gaia" or "Optimizing Gaia" go as far as shaping the planet to make it an optimal environment for life as a whole. The strongest interpretation might even suggest complete control of this process, to the point of choosing specific winners and losers and exacting retributive justice. In James Cameron's movie Avatar we saw an imaginative portrayal of how that might play out. The protagonists exclaimed "Eywa has heard you!" as the animals of the forest rallied to attack the invaders. Notice that all these interpretations, from weak to strong, revolve around a single question: Just how stable and effective are the negative feedback processes? If you hold to a "Strong Gaia" interpretation, then you should be justifiably upset and angry! Has Gaia ignored your pleas? Has she died? But a weaker Gaia could not be held responsible for failing to prevent actions she is unable to stop. If one holds such a weaker interpretation of Gaia Theory, the situation may appear very complicated indeed. We may need to consider in what ways Gaia's more limited influence over events can be contravened for a period of time. She may not appear as decisive as we may want her to be, she may not choose the winners and losers we want her to choose.
Peter Ward's response to Gaia Theory was to dismiss all such interpretations. He held that life was actually self-destructive and suicidal, and called this the "Medea Hypothesis". After all, if you think the number of species whose extinctions are attributable to human action is high, wait until you calculate the number that have gone extinct in the past. If Ward is right, that would make our current anthropogenic climate change and accelerated rate of extinction just the latest "Medean event" in a long string of extinctions extending from the past. (So perhaps the proper object of Albrecht's terrafurie is really Medea!) What can we make of all these competing theories, interpretations, and mythic personifications? Toby Tyrell wanted to find out how the Earth has stayed habitable for billions of years. He concluded that this is due to at least two things: climate-stabilizing negative feedback processes, and the good fortune that we haven't had a larger asteroid impact or solar flare snuff all life out. That suggests that some version of a weaker Gaia Theory may be correct. But there's no need for any specific personification. Lewis Thomas preferred to think of the Earth as if it were a single cell enclosed within a membrane (the atmosphere) which uses solar energy to maintain a non-equilibrium steady state. It's not a bad metaphor; Denis Noble views the cell as the basic structural and functional unit of life. It's a slightly more reductive approach, but it hearkens back to an early concept in many cultures of a "world egg". It's also an inspiration for the cosmological model of the Big Bang. In many ways, the Earth is like a cell. But the difference between a single cell or cosmic egg and a multicellular organism with a nervous system, at least from an animistic perspective, might be the relative amount of purposeful agency each is capable of exercising. A cellular conception of Gaia Theory might restrict our range of interpretations to only the weakest of them, and make more diverse capacities and aspects (some of which may be gender associated in contemporary culture) feel less accessible. Fred Pearce and others have argued that historically palpable metaphors are more fertile and appropriate than overly reductive explanations, especially for holistic and inclusive systems of which we form an integral part.
The prevailing paradigm of Western culture is one of increasing fragmentation, exploitation, and nihilism. If Gaia Theory is presented to someone within such a culture, inevitably their first reaction will be purely utilitarian. In so many words: "How can I use this to advance my personal interests and evade responsibility?" It should be clear to most people that sociopaths are capable of using almost anything as just another tool, in this case for increasing our social alienation from Nature. Gaia Theory is no exception. It is not a silver bullet. Alone, it will not lead to social change, and furthermore it shouldn't be expected to. If anything, given these initial conditions, it only begins to make sense once one has neared the end of a much longer process that begins with investigating the ways in which we attend to the world. Anyone who seeks to address human culpability is probably better off beginning with the sort of topics described by Iain McGilchrist. (But that, as they say, is another story.) Tyson Yunkaporta noted "The fundamental rules of human to human interaction do not apply to narcissists, although they weaponize those rules against everyone else." This narcissistic culture we live within will tend to look at Gaia Theory and try to weaponize it to advance its narrow, exploitative interests. This is why our starting point for addressing human culpability cannot begin with Gaia Theory, instead it has to begin with asking "Why is this culture so narcissistic?" Only later, once this is addressed, will real change be possible. There's a very large disconnect from place, from nature, and from each other in contemporary society. It's explicitly stated in the prevailing ethos of much of Western society: Individualism. This is a fragmented, atomistic view of the world, and it's reflected in every aspect of our life. The main thesis of Iain McGilchrist's book The Matter with Things is that there are, broadly speaking, two ways in which we can attend to the world. These reflect a tendency toward either seeing the parts in isolation or the connections between them. Furthermore, he shows that these lateralize to the left and right hemispheres of the brain, and that shifts in culture tend to reflect one or the other ways of attending. So one would be absolutely right to say that disconnection is central to nearly all the problems we face today. In our atomized society, the longing for connection to place, to nature, and to the planet we call home is felt strongly. (That's the motivation for writers like Haraway too.) In The Master and His Emissary McGilchrist wrote "Beauty is the most embodied of all values. An appreciation of the beauty of this world characterized the Renaissance, which saw the rehabilitation of earthly, embodied, sense-mediated existence, in contrast to the derogation of the flesh in the Middle Ages. For Montaigne, as for Erasmus, the body became present once more as part of us, therefore to be loved, rather than just seen as a prison of the soul." In Arran Gare's review of McGilchrist's book, he wrote "It is time for a new renaissance, wiser than all previous renaissances because of what we can learn from their achievements and subsequent decay, and from what we can now learn from other civilizations, their inspiring figures and renaissances. Hopefully, with this wisdom from the past we will be able to avoid a new Dark Age.”
McGilchrist has noted that contemporary culture tends to privilege theory over reality. That's a good reason for why high quality satellite imagery is more important than oversimplified virtual representations of Earth. Those do have a place. But Earth in high definition, with all it's pockmarks and blemishes visible, offers much more than any idealized representation; more beauty than any virtual globe could convey. In 1962 Buckminster Fuller suggested we use "Geoscopes" to display current global data and long-term trends. "With the Geoscope humanity would be able to recognize formerly invisible patterns and thereby to forecast and plan in vastly greater magnitude than heretofore." That might not have been a bad idea at all, especially if we want to "think like a planet", to paraphrase Aldo Leopold. Along the spectrum from theory to reality, we'll always do better to veer on the side of reality. In his book “Sand Talk”, Tyson Yunkaporta wrote “For the purposes of the thought experiments on sustainability in this book, an Indigenous person is a member of a community retaining memories of life lived sustainably on a land-base, as part of that land-base.” Ehrlich and Ehrlich echo this, paraphrasing from their recent article, “Aboriginal sustainability was built on an intimate and near universal knowledge of the biophysical environment in which the people were embedded. In current Western societies that knowledge is not only largely absent from the education system but systematically underrepresented and misrepresented in university curricula and by “leaders,” virtually all of whom revere growth and are unaware of the severity of impacts, often nonlinear, that growth can have on humanity. A lesson we might learn from the Aborigines is closing critical parts of the culture gap. It is because of the vast culture gap, and the antique structure of educational systems (think “subjects” and “departments”), that few people in our society are able to draw inferences on the basis of knowing how the climate works. They require visiting very many silos to learn about accelerating changes in the ecological theatre in which the human drama is being performed. For example, the most recent 300 out of 300,000 years have been abnormal in the sense that a fever of 107 degrees Fahrenheit is abnormal when, for most of a person’s life, her temperature has been at about 98.6 degrees. What sort of inferences should we be drawing from this? We know that the climate has always played an outsized role in cultural change. In fact, it has been suggested that, while increased demand as a consequence of population growth was central to agriculture being taken up, it may have been reinforced by the loss of much coastal foraging territory to sea-level rise as glaciers melted some 11,000 years ago.” Unless we address the social dynamics that have led to our current situation, a similar shock awaits us.
Gaia and Art
There is no definition of Gaian artwork, but "shanshuihua" (literally "mountain and water painting"), which refers to a style of traditional Chinese painting that depicts natural landscapes, could arguably be included in such a category if it existed. In these paintings we can see the importance of water, not only for life but also the geography of Earth. It appears in rivers, lakes, and swirling mists. Wide expanses are framed by the sky and provide a depth of perspective. And of course there are plants, some of which maintain a tenuous grip on virtually inaccessible craggy cliff sides and karst features. It's a combination that is representative of a living planet. The Taoist philosophy of Laozi and Zhuangzi strongly influences shanshui. Zhuangzi in particular focused on themes of interdependence, transformation, and perspective, arguably attributes of Gaia and a Gain understanding. The uplift and erosion of mountains through the planetary water cycle represents the essence of nature and the inseparable and complimentary opposites of yin and yang. Shanshui, and Chinese aesthetics more generally, in turn influenced the art of Japan, as can be seen in Hasegawa Tohaku's "Pine Trees" screen. And landscape art is of course not a purely Eastern phenomenon. Ansel Adams' photographs of American landscapes have revealed the startling beauty of nature, as did Caspar David Friedrich's paintings to a more European audience. And in film, James Cameron was inspired by the Huangshan mountains (commonly seen in shanshui) to create the "Hallelujah mountains" of the fictional living world Pandora. In "Being, Becoming, Landscape: The Iconography of Landscape in Contemporary Chinese Art, Its Ecological Impulse, and Its Ethical Project", Elena Macri notes how shanshui carries "a metaphysical approach to the natural world, one heavily indebted to Daoist philosophy and well exemplified in the concept of Tianren heyi (harmonious unity between nature and humanity)". As this relationship has become less harmonious and more alienated over time, contemporary artists are finding new ways of depicting the world. Liu Wei’s series "It looks Like a Landscape" (2004) takes a somewhat humorous approach, while many of Yang Yongliang's landscape pieces, such as "Artificial Wonderland" (2010) are more directly critical of the consequences of industrialization.
The Semiosis of Gaia
During the 2022 Gatherings in Biosemiotics, Nicola Zengiaro presented "Semiogenesis of the Inorganic: A Biosemiotic Reading of the Threshold Between Life and Non-life". He wrote, “Although biosemiotics has had the great merit of moving away from an anthropocentric perspective on semiosis, it has maintained a largely biocentric view. However, it is increasingly difficult to separate what is life and what is not. When it is not possible to establish what is life once and for all, it is likewise not possible to establish where semiosis begins." Zengiaro will find support on these points, however there's disagreement when he next proposes to give up any attempts to do so and "rethink semiosis as an intrinsic activity of physical matter that differs in degree and complexity up to the most complex life forms". He leverages this continuum perspective to explain "the emergence of organic life on the planet" and the consequent "production of meaning for someone or something". As he points out, "Inorganic matter is relevant to the sustenance of the biosphere and this seems to have been somewhat removed from the research. The biosphere cannot be thought of as a composition of living things that are impermeable to the inorganic substratum. In this sense, James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis will be reinterpreted through the principles and methodologies of semiotics. The aim is to activate a new concatenation model between ecosemiotics and physiosemiotics that avoids reductionist analyses and considers semiotics in its evolutionary and transversal dimension." That is an ambitious program of research! Interestingly, instead of defining Gaia in terms of the binary distinction between life and death, the semiotic perspective allows us to define Gaia using the more nuanced terms of signification (meaning, goals, etc) that exist on a complex continuum or landscape. One may then suppose, as Zengiaro does, that plants and fungi have one or another form of semiotic capacity, animals another still, and Gaia a yet different form altogether. It is a very useful maneuver that identifies the similarity between these very different forms, but without implying an equivalence between them or imposing a false dichotomy. And it's not entirely unprecedented. N. Katherine Hayles utilized the semiotic framework as well, precisely for the nuanced understanding of telos and signification that it allows.
John Deely (and many others, such as Michael Levin) would've been in broad agreement with Zengiaro. In "Physiosemiosis and phytosemiotics" (1990) he even distinguished between the continuum perspective afforded by physiosemiotics and the “dangerously misguided” binary perspective of pansemiotics, which would designate the belief that the same form of semiosis is present in all things, whether living or non-living. In "A Sign is What?" (2004) he wrote "I venture to guess that a physiosemiosis will prove to be at the heart of evolution.” This brings us to James Lovelock and his chapter for "Gaia in Turmoil" (2010) where he wrote "It is painful to wonder if we would have avoided [anthropogenic global heating] had Darwin developed a Gaian view as part of his concept of evolution. When Darwin came upon the concept of evolution by natural selection, he was almost wholly unaware that much of the environment, especially the atmosphere, was a direct product of living organisms. Had he been aware, I think he would have realized that organisms and their environment form a coupled system and that what evolved was this system, the one that we call Gaia. Organisms and their environment do not evolve separately. If Darwin had known this, Gaia might have been part of his concept of evolution; we would have known sooner the consequences of changing forests to farmland and of adding greenhouse gases to the air."
Despite the monumental achievements of Darwin, and how well they have stood over time, evolutionary theory as it was initially described was incomplete. And so the “evolution of evolution” has inevitably continued. The “modern synthesis” was an early expansion of our understanding of the mechanisms of heritability, and an “extended evolutionary synthesis” (EES) has more recently been argued for to account for other observations. Considering the amount of pushback Darwin received in his day, as well as other limitations, I really don’t think it is reasonable to have expected him to incorporate a Gaian view along with everything else. Lovelock is likely just entertaining the counterfactual to illustrate the power that a single change in perspective can have. But that change in perspective has now arrived, whether in the mechanistic sounding terminology of “Earth system science” or the more agentic/ semiotic figuration of “Gaia Theory” (of the two, this is the more concordant with EES concepts for that reason). Perhaps no greater sign of this is seeing former notable critics become vocal supporters. One of these is Ford Doolittle. He recently wrote that “beyond the benefit to science, ‘Darwinising Gaia’ would also have some political benefits. It might encourage us to look at nature as a coherent whole, with an evolutionary trajectory that we can foster or deflect as we choose. After all, we are already doing that, whether we realise it or not."
Nick Lane elaborated upon the cell metaphor for Gaia: "The analogy between the cell and the planet is beautiful. A cell has an electrical charge on the membrane. On the inside it's basically saturated in electrons, making it more negative. On the outside there are more protons, making it more positive. This creates a charge on the extremely thin membrane. The planet is basically the same. The iron core is electron dense and relatively negative. But the outside (atmosphere, oceans, and so on), because the gases that are coming from volcanoes and so on are such a high temperature, is relatively positive. The sun will also tend to oxidize the surface of the planet. You end up with a kind of a relatively positive charge in the atmosphere and a relatively negative charge inside the Earth. This is basically the same structure as a cell. And just as a cell membrane has proteins that sit in it where you have movement between the inside and the outside, hydrothermal vents on Earth are the equivalent kind of conductance between the negative charge of the interior and the positive charge of the exterior. This is exactly how cells work, and it's not a coincidence. Effectively there's an electrical charge on the Earth between the inside and the outside. And these hydrothermal vents are pores between the inside and the outside. There's an electrical charge on cells between the inside and the outside. They both have an equivalent topology because they've all been formed by the same process, as you might say. The hydrothermal vents are where there is a mixing zone between the inside and the outside, so it naturally forms pores where we have this. The same charges form, and those charges are more or less necessary to drive the reaction between hydrogen and carbon dioxide to make the organic molecules that make up life. Cells emerged from the mixing zone between the inside and the outside. They are effectively part of a circuit, and are driving copies of themselves by making more "miniature Earths", if you like, by reacting the hydrogen from the inside with the CO2 from the outside to make organic molecules. This also occurs on a planetary scale. I find it beautiful that the planet has the same basic topological structure as a cell."
In an earlier interview Nick Lane described the origin of life. “You need a living planet. It needs to be a planet with water. It needs to be a planet which is capable of turning over its surface, making that water work, and turning it into hydrogen. But once you've got the living planet, I think the rest of it is thermodynamics all the way. A cell is basically just a micro version of the planet. …James Lovelock originally described Gaia as an organism that had somehow evolved. He's not wrong, but he was immediately attacked by lots of people and backpedaled somewhat because of that. The science is now called “Earth systems science”, and it’s about how the planet regulates itself such that it remains within limits that are hospitable to life. And it does it amazingly well! But it's not evolving by natural selection - it can't because there's only one of it. All the evolution is happening in the parts of the system. However there are other forms of evolution and change. To make an analogy, cities propagate themselves through human societies, and human societies propagate themselves through individual humans. So there's a kind of hierarchy there.” Nick Lane is an excellent science writer, so he’s familiar with W. Ford Doolittle, but perhaps he’s not sufficiently familiar with his paper “Darwinizing Gaia” (2017). There Doolittle wrote “I suggest that we look at the biogeochemical cycles and other homeostatic processes that might confer stability - rather than the taxa (mostly microbial) that implement them - as the relevant units of selection. By thus focusing our attentions on the "song", not the "singers", a Darwinized Gaia might be developed… In the prologue for her 1998 book Symbiotic Planet, Lynn Margulis recounts how a former student, in remarking that “Gaia is just symbiosis seen from space”, established a previously unrecognized (or so she claims) connection between her two principle theoretical preoccupations, serial endosymbiosis at the cellular level and Gaia as an evolved global homeostatic system.” Doolittle, it should be noted, offers perhaps the most lucid view of Gaia yet written. An excellent paper that’s worth reading if only for the impressive scope of his analysis.
In this presentation by W. Ford Doolittle for "Sciences of the Origin: The Challenges of Selection Effects and Biases" (June 3-5, 2021) he answers the question "Which came first, the song or the singers?" The final slide in his presentation states that one of the benefits of "It’s the song, not the singers" (ITSNTS) thinking is that it provides "a rationale for microbial pangenomics and a renewed focus on higher levels of phenotype and community-level adaptations. Construction of community-level interaction maps at local and global scales (relevant to climate change). These things are already happening but without adequate evolutionary explanation." As he explains, ITSNTS theory "Darwinizes" Gaia: "processes do not differentially reproduce, but differentially persist (are re-produced). As he wrote in his earlier (2017) paper, "biogeochemical cycles and other organismal interaction patterns are in fact much better persistors than the organisms that implement them, and are reliably re-produced." Doolittle makes significant use of data from microbiome populations. Their genomic composition and interaction in circadian processes of digestion may be understood as a paradigmatic example of ITSNTS. It allows us to make an analogy: the microbiome is to the holobiont (and it's large-scale behaviors) as human society is to Gaia (and global-scale dynamics). David Grinspoon has made this analogy as well when describing his book Earth in Human Hands. We can also see clear ties between ITSNTS and processes of cultural evolution. Note the similarity between Ford Doolittle's notion of "re-production" and Iain McGilchrist's use of the notion of "imitation". Imitation is essential to processes of language acquisition during child development (and for adult language learners as well). It is uncommon to come across theories, such as ITSNTS, whose scope is wide enough to encompass topics as seemingly disparate as Gaia and language learning, but there it is!
In "Water Gaia: The Earth as Aquifer" Bruce Clarke describes the "circular Gaian dynamic: no life, no water → no water, no plate tectonics → no plate tectonics, no life. The Water Gaia thesis suggests that a major factor in both Venus and Mars’ drift toward their present parched state has been either the absence of life altogether or the unhappy loss of the nascent life needed." This is a perfect encapsulation of Chopra and Lineweaver’s paper. The article begins and ends by placing regional aquifers within this much larger context: “no Earthly formation can be taken for granted either as eternal or as independent of far wider environmental and ecological contingencies”. This draws out the very real ethical questions that a Gaian perspective imposes upon us. The line that connects these is difficult to draw, but we need to see it. Adam Frank, David Grinspoon, and Sara Walker have also been drawing out this line of reasoning. After the Gaian bottleneck, “planetary intelligence is a requirement for the longevity of planetary-scale civilizations” they wrote in “Intelligence as a planetary scale process” (2022), noting that "while our current, early-Anthropocene phase displays features of a planetary intelligence, it appears to lack the critical characteristic of self-maintenance... Thus, we might consider the current Earth state as representing an ‘immature technosphere' in which the full suite of properties we would associate with planetary intelligence have yet to emerge... 'Mature technospheres' will be purposely Gaian and designed to maintain the sustainability of both the biosphere and the technosphere as a coupled system." The paper also includes the line: "We make no absolute claims at this point as to the underlying cognitive nature of species that could create a planetary intelligence, but a minimal criterion might be that they should be social." The concluding sentence notes with trepidation that “we have not yet emerged on the other side where we are in it for the collective good”. What is most notable about the paper are the broad contextual contours that are drawn across biology, technology, and culture. A possible implication the reader might come away with is that the underlying cognitive nature of any species endeavoring to intentionally create a planetary intelligence is that it be capable of adequately attending to such broad contexts. Carlo Rovelli illustrated the importance of context in his book Helgoland. He showed how an understanding of quantum physics can actually shed light on, and indeed inform, political organization (the story of Lenin and Bogdanov). But going beyond narrow examples such as this, Iain McGilchrist in his two most well known books, The Master and his Emissary and The Matter with Things, showed the connection between human cognitive nature and cultural evolution. Our contemporary “ways of attending” to the world affect every aspect of life, and we can clearly see how preferentially attending in one or the other of these ways can even promote or prevent the emergence of planetary scale cooperative dynamics with the biosphere of the sort described.
In a popular article, Adam Frank, David Grinspoon, and Sara Walker write "we propose that life on a planet can collectively evolve through four distinct states". These are immature biosphere, mature biosphere, immature technosphere, mature technosphere. "In Earth’s mature-biosphere phase, an early form of planetary intelligence that worked toward the entire system’s habitable self-maintenance emerged long before humans did. Just as important, an intelligent, technologically capable species does not necessarily make a planet intelligent." This leads to the counterintuitive conclusion that collective planetary intelligence is not directly correlated to evolutionary state. A mature biosphere is in fact more intelligent than an immature technosphere (and this reflects our experience today, teetering on extinction). The authors affirm that "our [immature] technosphere is... formally stupid." We have direct evidence for the planetary intelligence of a mature biosphere (Gaia), but we have very little evidence for the sort of planetary intelligence of a mature technosphere. We can barely characterize what that would be. I suspect a significant amount of biomimicry to allow greater integration with the biosphere, but exactly how... who knows?
Michael Levin described (in several podcasts) the obstacles for understanding the composite goals and semiosis of technospheres: "If you put down a piece of oat near the slime mold Physarum polycephalum, it wants to go get the oat. It sort of grows towards the oat. You can then conduct an experiment by taking a razor blade and separating the piece that's growing towards the oat from the rest of the culture. Now think about the decision-making calculus for that little piece: "I can go get the oat, and therefore I won't have to share those nutrients with this giant mass over there. The nutrients per unit volume would be amazing! I should go eat the oat! But, if I first rejoin (because once Physarum is cut it has the ability to join back up) then that whole calculus becomes impossible - there is no more "me" anymore, there's just "we", and "we" would go eat the oat." This is game theory, but the number of agents isn't fixed. It's not just "cooperate or defect", it's more like "merge and whatever". So how does it decide? Empirically we found it tends to merge first, and then the whole thing goes to eat the oat. Do we have the economic game theory for this? Is there some sort of hyperbolic discounting involved? This idea that the actions you take not only change your payoff, but they change who or what you are, and that you could take an action after which you don't exist anymore, or you are radically changed, or you are merged with somebody else... as far as I know we're still missing a formalism for even knowing how to model any of that." ...At the very least, this implies that cooperation, and what that can confer in terms of persistence and security, may be more valuable than competition, and that economic theories which consistently ignore such values in favor of growth may be missing something important.
Levin again: "It's an existential level need for us to be able to develop a better science of predicting the cognitive goals of composite systems. If I create a composite system (this could be the Internet of things, or swarm robotics, or a cellular swarm, or whatever) what is the emergent intelligence of this thing? What level is it going to be at? And if it has goal directed capacity, what are the goals going to be like? We are building these things all the time. We're building physical structures, social-financial structures, and so on with very little ability to predict what sort of autonomous goals those systems are going to have, of which we are now cogs. Learning to predict those things is critical."
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| Source: American Chemical Society |
• James Lovelock. Novacene. (2019) "The effective temperature of the Earth when seen from outer space is hotter than Venus. Yet the Earth is 30% further from the Sun." See "Surface Temperature" reference (below).
• James Lovelock. A Rough Ride to the Future. (2014)
• James Lovelock. The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning. (2009)
• James Lovelock. The Revenge of Gaia. (2006)
• James Lovelock. Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine. (1991) Lavishly illustrated and well written. “During the ice ages the withholding of water from the oceans to form land glaciers lowered the sea level by more than 100 meters, exposing large areas of land on the continental shelves - much of it in the near Equatorial regions of South East Asia and the Pacific.”
• James Lovelock. Ages of Gaia. (1988)
• Gavin Foster et al. Future climate forcing potentially without precedent in the last 420 million years. (2017) When it comes to global heating, the change in radiative forcing (ΔF, in watts per square meter) is the most useful metric. See “Figure 2: Temporal evolution of climate forcing" and it illustrates the combined effect of both CO2 and solar forcing to reveal the unprecedented global heating that awaits us. (Most people are only familiar with the top portion of this figure showing CO2 PPM alone, as it appeared in IPCC AR6, Technical Summary, Figure TS.1)
• Timothy Lenton. James Lovelock (1919–2022). (2022) “Jim realized that dimethyl sulfide produced by marine algae oxidized to form cloud condensation nuclei, that more small water droplets make clouds brighter, and that the resulting cooling of the surface would affect the algae producing dimethyl sulfide. Such linking of biology, chemistry, and physics in feedback loops gave us a new understanding of Earth as a dynamic system.”
• Lynn Margulis & Dorion Sagan, “God, Gaia and Biophilia”. (In The Biophilia Hypothesis) (1993) “The sun’s increase in luminosity implies the surface temperature of earth should have increased correspondingly—but it hasn’t, which suggests that the biota, cybernetic interactions of life with its environment, in a word, Gaia, has behaved in ways that have cooled the planet.”
• Mary Midgley. Individualism and the concept of Gaia (2000) Some resistance to Gaia may be due to misogynistic attitudes. (A fuller version of this article appeared as a DEMOS pamphlet, and a still longer, rather different one formed the conclusion of Science and Poetry.)
• Bruce Clarke. Gaian Systems. This website has articles from many authors.
• Bruce Clarke. Gaian Systems: Lynn Margulis, Neocybernetics, and the End of the Anthropocene (2020)
• Bruce Clarke. Writing Gaia: The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis (2022) See a presentation on this topic.
• Bruce Clarke. Earth, Life, and System: Evolution and Ecology on a Gaian Planet. (2015)
• Fritjof Capra. The Web of Life. (1996) Excellent short overview of Gaia Theory.
• Glenys Livingstone. Gaia: Dynamic, Diverse, Source and Place of Being. (2009)
• Stephan Harding. Animate Earth. (2009) “Although Leopold wrote before James Lovelock articulated the Gaia Hypothesis, science had not yet caught up with his perception.” Harding also traces the usage of terms such as “Anima Mundi”.
• Aldo Leopold. Some fundamentals of conservation in the southwest. (written 1923, published 1979) “It is at least not impossible to regard the earth’s parts—soil, mountains, rivers, atmosphere etc,—as organs or parts of organs of a coordinated whole, each part with its definite function. And if we could see this whole, as a whole, through a great period of time, we might perceive not only organs with coordinated functions, but possibly also that process of consumption as replacement which in biology we call metabolism, or growth. In such a case we would have all the visible attributes of a living thing, which we do not realise to be such because it is too big, and its life processes too slow. And there would also follow that invisible attribute—a soul or consciousness—which many philosophers of all ages ascribe to living things and aggregates thereof, including the ‘dead’ earth. Possibly in our intuitive perceptions, which may be truer than our science and less impeded by words than our philosophies, we realize the indivisibility of the earth—its soils, mountains, rivers, forests, climate, plants and animals—and respect it collectively not only as useful servant but as a living being, vastly less alive than ourselves, but vastly greater than ourselves in time and space. Philosophy, then, suggests one reason why we cannot destroy the earth with moral impunity; namely that the ‘dead’ earth is an organism possessing a certain kind and degree of life, which we intuitively respect as such.”
• Joanna Thompson. Life Helps Make Almost Half of All Minerals on Earth. (2022) "Historically, scientists have artificially drawn a line between what is geochemistry and what is biochemistry. In reality, the boundary between animal, vegetable and mineral is much more fluid. And this means our watery, living planet is probably much richer in mineral diversity than other rocky bodies in the solar system."
• Christopher Spencer et al. Composition of continental crust altered by the emergence of land plants. (2022) "The evolution of land plants caused a sudden shift in the composition of Earth’s continents and the dynamics of melting in Earth’s mantle." (news release)
• Yogi Hendlin. Multi-pathway signaling cascades, trophic cascades, and climate change. (2020) Features a video clip narrated by George Monbiot.
• Iain McGilchrist. The Matter With Things (2021)
• James Lovelock & M. Whitfield. Life span of the biosphere. (1982) “In human terms the crisis is still infinitely distant but in terms of the life span of the biosphere, rich with familiar metazoans, we might forecast an end to the long spell of cool and favourable climate."
• James Lovelock. Some thoughts on the year 2000. (1966) “By 2000 a large proportion of the total energy turnover is going towards the avoidance of ecological disaster.” This prediction didn't come true.
• Wikipedia. Gaia hypothesis. (2022)
• Ted Mosquin and Stan Rowe. A Manifesto for Earth. (2004)
• Srdja Janković et al. Gaia as Solaris. (2022) Stanislaw Lem, Isaac Asimov, and David Brin are among many authors who have explored the idea through science fiction. See also Eywa (Avatar) and Ego (Guardians of the Galaxy).
• David Cayley. Gaia and the Path of the Earth. (2021) "Purpose was driven out of science and thereby fated to return endlessly as heresy", but one must understand "causal circularity" and how "the range of temperatures and conditions at which life can exist sets the tolerances, the goal of the self-regulating system Gaia". Cayley concluded, "Latour has answered many of Illich’s practical objections to the Gaia theory, such as that it is abstract, other-denying, and earth-denying". Iain McGilchrist may also provide a response to Illich’s concerns, particularly the difference between "model and reality", which he has shown tend to strongly lateralize to the left and right brain hemispheres.
• Leah Aronowsky. Gas Guzzling Gaia, or: A Prehistory of Climate Change Denialism. (2021) Historically Gaia Theory has served multiple political projects. It has been a corporate tool for forestalling the threat of anthropogenic change, a device for naturalizing fossil fuel emissions, and thereby insulating the capitalist status quo. But the radically planetary view of life has also upended the nature/culture dualism of modernity and become a symbol of the existential threat that global warming poses.
• Steve Curwood. Imagining Gaia, the Earth, as 'one great, living organism' (2021)
• Douglas Rushkoff. Team Human Episode 146: James Lovelock. (2020)
• W. Ford Doolittle. Is the Earth an organism? (2020) Doolittle added important elements to evolutionary theory which Lovelock and Margulis did not. He calls them "persistence" and "interaction." “When it comes to Gaia, then, perhaps the relevant unit of selection is the process that multiple and redundant species implement – not the collective made up of those species itself. According to ITSNTS, interaction patterns or metabolic processes are re-produced whenever species capable of performing the steps are present: because there are singers, there’s a song... Beyond the benefit to science, ‘Darwinising Gaia’ would also have some political benefits. It might encourage us to look at nature as a coherent whole, with an evolutionary trajectory that we can foster or deflect as we choose. After all, we are already doing that, whether we realise it or not.”
• W. Ford Doolittle. Darwinizing Gaia. (2017) “The philosopher Frédéric Bouchard has, since the early part of this century, been arguing that: “for many species, Persistence Through Time (PTT) is the property maximized by evolution by natural selection: maximization of relative reproductive success is only one strategy for persistence of a lineage, but for many asexual species (but not all) reproductive success is actually minimized if not eliminated." Bouchard takes his cue from clonal organisms like Populus tremuloides (particularly a grove named Pando), Lomatia tasmanica, and the seagrass Posidonia oceanica.
• W. Ford Doolittle. Making Evolutionary Sense of Gaia. (2019)
• W. Ford Doolittle. Processes and patterns of interaction as units of selection: An introduction to ITSNTS thinking. (2018)
• Frederic Bouchard. Causal processes, fitness, and the differential persistence of lineages. (2008) “When we carefully examine some cases of biological evolution, from ecosystems, to colonial organisms to some asexual organisms, we quickly realize that nature does not ‘care’ what is selected (parts or wholes) and so we might wish to replace the ‘struggle for survival’ by the ‘struggle for persistence’.” Or as Doolittle put it in Darwinizing Gaia, “The individual species responsible for these reactions are largely irrelevant—as long as the metabolic processes are transferred across geologic time.”
• Aditya Chopra and Charles Lineweaver. The case for a Gaian bottleneck: the biology of habitability. (2016) “If life emerges on a planet, it only rarely evolves quickly enough to regulate greenhouse gases and albedo, thereby maintaining surface temperatures compatible with liquid water and habitability. Such a Gaian bottleneck suggests that (i) extinction is the cosmic default for most life that has ever emerged on the surfaces of wet rocky planets in the Universe and (ii) rocky planets need to be inhabited to remain habitable.”
• Toby Tyrrell. Earth has stayed habitable for billions of years (2021) "Earth must therefore possess some climate-stabilising feedbacks but at the same time good fortune must also have been involved in it staying habitable." Good fortune brought us thus far, and has given us remarkably stable conditions.
• Sean Raymond. A Step-by-Step Guide to Our Solar System’s Demise. (2022) A deep time perspective on the future.
• Timothy Lenton et al. Selection for Gaia across Multiple Scales. (2018)
• Dorion Sagan. Gaia versus the Anthropocene. (2020) "Early work on Gaia was in part an extension of the puzzle of the temperature of the early Earth. The composition of the early atmosphere was deliberated as part of the puzzle of what was called the Faint Early Sun Paradox. According to nuclear models of the life of stars, our early sun was up to 70% less luminous. But then how did Earth life survive without freezing early on? The greenhouse gas methane could have warmed the planet. And how does Earth life survive without burning up now? Similar thinking suggests that as the sun increased its luminosity, photosynthetic organisms have progressively taken more carbon out of the atmosphere, cooling the planet."
• Karl Friston et al. Future climates: Markov blankets and active inference in the biosphere. (2020) "Active inference is an account of autopoiesis in dynamic terms, provided that such systems are at non-equilibrium steady state (NESS)."
• David Grinspoon et al. Intelligence as a planetary scale process. (2022)
• David Grinspoon. Living Worlds Hypothesis. (2016)
• Rex Weyler. Gaia: everything on Earth is connected. (2019) "In the 1940s Howard Odum developed systems ecology, which describes one great ecosystem in which all life co-evolves. And in 1945 Erwin Schrodinger pointed out that, from an energy transformation perspective, any life form functions as “a system in steady-state thermodynamic disequilibrium that maintains its distance from equilibrium (death) by feeding on low entropy from its environment, emitting high-entropy outputs... In Greek mythology only Chaos precedes Gaia. Gaia was the Greek goddess of Earth, mother of all life, similar to the Roman Terra Mater (mother Earth) reclining with a cornucopia, or the Andean Pachamama, the Hindu, Prithvi, “the Vast One,” or the Hopi Kokyangwuti, Spider Grandmother, who with Sun god Tawa created Earth and its creatures." Incidentally, Lynn Margulis hated the mother metaphor. She did say “Gaia is a tough bitch."
• Liz Bentley. The Earth is a Sentient Living Organism. (2016) "Earth acts to regulate flows of energy and recycling of materials. The input of energy from the sun occurs at a constant rate and for all practical purposes is unlimited. This energy is captured by the Earth as heat or photosynthetic processes, and returned to space as long-wave radiation. On the other hand, the mass of the Earth, its material possessions, are limited. Thus, while energy flows through the Earth (sun to Earth to space), matter cycles within the Earth... a system open to the flux of matter and energy but that maintains an internal steady-state."
• Matt Ridley. The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature. (1995) In evolutionary biology, the Red Queen hypothesis was proposed to help understand predator-prey and parasite-host interactions. Why are some pathogens more virulent and others more benign? In the context of accelerating planetary disruption we should probably expect to see more disease outbreaks and the emergence and spread of new bacteria and virus strains that are increasingly virulent. Former friends become new enemies as our kin evolve under these conditions, and our relations evolve with them.
• Ugo Bardi. Gaia in Red Tooth and Claw: Do Ants Sacrifice Themselves to the Fungus God? (2022) “Gaia is not a Goddess -- she is a Daimona (Δαίμονα), a servant of the Almighty, just like all of us. She just happens to be the highest-ranking daimon ("holobiont," using a more modern term) on Earth. Holobionts are not necessarily cruel, but they are not necessarily benevolent and merciful, either.”
• Ugo Bardi. Is Gaia a Superorganism? No, she is a holobiont! (2020) “Every living being on this planet is a holobiont, and there are holobionts formed of smaller holobionts: think of a forest. Trees are holobionts, a forest is a holobiont formed of trees. Holobionts are a self-similar entity operating at various scales.”
• Rainer Matyssek & Ulrich Lüttge. Gaia: The Planet Holobiont. (2013) “Therefore, we can scale up examples of endogenous symbioses to ecosystems, biomes and the entire biosphere as holobionts, where the planet holobiont is Gaia... The biosphere is a dynamic system, stabilized via feedback coupling mechanisms so that our entire planet is considered to be one single living being, a supra-organism.”
• Scott F. Gilbert. Metaphors For A New Body Politic: Gaia As Holobiont. (2020) “Holobiont appears to be a useful term. It was independently coined at least four times. The current usage of the word was introduced by Lynn Margulis in 1991. It designates the amalgamation of the big organism (the macrobiont, the host) plus its persistent symbionts. The holobiont view claims that the host and the symbionts form the complete organism… it calls into question the distinction of organism and environment.”
• Erik Assadourian. An actual Gaian interpretation of the world. (2022) “Gaia is a holobiont — a being made up of various interdependent species — just like a human — and these species have, over billions of years worked together to keep the planet livable, even as the sun has warmed.”
• Michael Ruse. Earth's Holy Fool. (2013)
• Elisabeth Ryland. Gaia Rising. (2000)
• Scott Sampson. The Gaia Hypothesis. (2012)
• Liu Cixin. The Wandering Earth. (2000) A fanciful description of the ultimate result of solar evolution, the context of which can only ever be highly speculative from our perspective. Many other authors have done the same, with varying degrees of scientific rigor.
• Chris Hedges. We Are Not the First Civilization to Collapse, But We Will Probably Be the Last. (2022) Hedges speculates that the creation of a new social world is not possible today because our society has accelerated global heating (not cooling), and an ecological deficit (not a surplus).
• Nicola Zengiaro. Semiogenesis of the Inorganic: A Biosemiotic Reading of the Threshold Between Life and Non-life. (2022) "Although biosemiotics has had the great merit of moving away from an anthropocentric perspective on semiosis, it has maintained a largely biocentric view. The biosphere cannot be thought of as a composition of living things that are impermeable to the inorganic substratum. In this sense, James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis will be reinterpreted through the principles and methodologies of semiotics. The aim is to activate a new concatenation model between ecosemiotics and physiosemiotics." (From the abstract available here.)
• Nick Strobel. Surface Temperature. (2022) "Setting the rate of solar energy absorbed equal to the rate of energy radiated by the planet, you find using the values for the distances and albedo that Mercury should have an average temperature of 163 deg C, Venus should be -41 deg C, Earth should be -18 deg C, and Mars should be -64 deg C. Their actual temperatures are: Mercury = 167 deg C; Venus = 462 deg C; Earth = 15 deg C; and Mars = -58 deg C. The difference between actual temperature values and the calculated values are because of the effect of a planet's atmosphere. Atmospheres can hinder the rate that energy flows outward to space from the warm ground, so the ground must heat up to increase the energy leaking out enough to balance the inflow of solar energy. This blanket effect of the atmosphere is called the greenhouse effect.
• William Anders. (2022) "We came all this way to explore the Moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.” “If you can imagine yourself in a darkened room with only one clearly visible object, a small blue-green sphere about the size of a Christmas-tree ornament, then you can begin to grasp what the Earth looks like from space. I think that all of us subconsciously think that the Earth is flat ... Let me assure you that, rather than a massive giant, it should be thought of as the fragile Christmas-tree ball which we should handle with considerable care.”
• Elektro–L (Russian: Электро-Л) satellite imagery. High resolution available here and here. (2022)
