Is the Earth alive? Does it have an intelligence? Can we 'know' the Earth?
This hypothesis has been offered by many – the weird and wacky and the straight dead serious. It also has a long pedigree. The ancients had to devise mythological stories to account for their world's conception, the most familiar being the Greek story of Gaia, the primordial deity and mother of all. A similar idea in the Hindu pantheon is that of Bhumi the goddess that sits on a square dias that is carried by four elephants, a motive that may also sound familiar as it likely spawned other origin myths. That these Earth Mother ideas sprang naturally to our ancestors should come as no surprise – we each have parentage and to anthroporphically transfer this idea to non-human species and even inanimate objects is understandable.
A more recent and popularly-adopted idea of a living planet Earth comes from atmospheric scientist with John Major glasses, James Lovelock, who in his 1972 paper, Gaia as Seen Through the Atmosphere, proposed a simple idea – that various non-living mechanisms in the earth, the atmosphere and oceans actively regulate the rest of the biosphere and that this indicates that the whole Earth is some sort of living entity, that it works together as more than simply the sum of its parts. Not only that, the biological entities that inhabit the Earth also change and co-evolve with the planet. The inference is that the Earth (or at least these systems) is alive.
On the face of it, this seems a simple and easy-to-understand idea: our Earth, the cradle of life, is a complex web of interactions on the biological level that implies a greater whole. What the Gaian Hypothesis postulates further, however, is that this then infers that the Earth is more than just a home for animate things, or even that life effects changes to the planet, but that somehow this complex organic-inorganic system is alive. It is a system that actively promotes life in all its forms over time. Further still we, as part of this living whole, are connected with the rest of it. In effect, we are part of Gaia.
For many in the scientific community, such as the outspoken Richard Dawkins, this idea is beyond controversial. That the organic and inorganic elements of this world are somehow connected and that this presupposes some sort of intelligence of the planet is ludicrous. The very basis is unverifiable (how can you test for this system?) and therefore qualifies as a burn-at-the-steak heresy – a pseudoscience.
It is also lampooned as another flowery manifestation of 60s hippie thinking, a love-in idea of wistfully-minded environmentalists who see what they want to see. Surely Science has ALL the answers without resorting to anthropomorphic wish-wash?
Which standpoint is right? Well, it depends. The Gaian hypothesis would have been acceptable to many of our ancestors because it fitted with their mythological understanding of the complexity found on Earth – 'complex' meaning intelligent. From the time of Newton, however, the popular understanding would have changed. Newtonian physics assumed that the structure of the universe was such that it behaves according to principles that can be measured and predicted. Such certainties led to ideas that required no reasoning for natural activities, no first cause and no interpretation: things are the way they are because that's how they are. Darwin's ideas of natural selection fitted quite nicely into this pre-existing model because the principle was direct and required only the idea of adaptation to the environment to account for diversity. There was no need of a overall controlling factor, an unknown teleological God-like addition to the mix, in order to understand the Earth as it exists.
So, the objections to the Gaian Hypothesis stem directly from a philosophical perspective that; insists on a lack of intelligence, divorces fact from human-centred interpretation, and insists that the Earth cannot and will not be alive no matter how much we imagine it to be so. This is so firmly entrenched a position that any opinion that even hints at contradiction is labeled pseudoscience and entirely written off. The homologous but contrary straight-jacket viewpoint is generated from unwavering Gaian adherents who see all the earth and everything in it as an expression of a mothery deity hard-done by nasty polluting humans. The Earth 'cries out' to us to help it, stop the destruction and despoiling and views the efforts of Science as little more than a manifestation of black arts. The arguments for and against will no doubt eternally extend along the same lines as religious and atheist perspectives: in essence it is possible to interpret them as the same thing.
For myself, the Gaian Hypothesis is a useful way to interpret our place in the world around us. For what harm can come from an understanding of complex and interacting systems that infers an intelligence beyond our understanding? If our world really is unique and there are none others in the entire cosmos that are made up of trees and fish and polar bears, then this makes it incredibly precious. Each species extinction is a cosmic tragedy and the breakdown of a system could be universally significant, let alone vital to our continued existance. If our world is one of billions and life exists everywhere, the argument still holds – species rights will be vital to our future wherever they are: even our species. This chattering human animal sees, records, changes, builds and destroys the environment within which it exists. We are part of the Earth as much as viruses, plankton, elephants and earthquakes. We get to 'know' it intimately in all its manifestations. Even if we believe the Earth can do without us, we cannot exist without it. We are now so widespread that we have become a contributing factor to its continuation, or otherwise. Some argue our change of the atmosphere is unstoppable whereas others argue the Earth's Gaian systems will account for it and adapt, even if that means removing us in some great Noachian extinction event.
Whatever is the truth, we must not forget our place as perhaps the only creatures capable of thinking of the Gaian Hypothesis, the only creatures who are able to destroy their own planet and the only creatures able to rescue and fix it. We are Gaia.
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