geo wrote: Mary Midgley, a British philosopher, saw the Gaia "theory" as a useful myth for our times.
Midgely’s 2001 article ‘Gaia – The Next Big Idea’ is available at
demos.co.uk. She explores how reverence for the Earth as sacred, as a self-organising system maintaining conditions in which life can exist, is a new holistic mental model for our place in the world, overcoming the pervasive way of thinking which separates us from the world, and different parts of the world from each other.
This new thinking should be central to climate policy. However, the way this Gaia line of thought is derided and mocked by the mainstream mentality that is destroying the earth directly demonstrates the stumbling block preventing climate action.
The modern detached fragmented vision of the scientific and commercial individual finds the integration of the Gaia theory unacceptably mystical. Yet such an integrated vision is required to understand the science of homeostasis, the ability of complex systems to maintain stability. Just as health of the human body must be diagnosed at the level of the organism, so too must the planet be studied as a unitary whole.
That planetary perspective means to live as a part of nature, not apart from nature, a paradigm shift that is still only gradually percolating through prevailing thought, and whose implications for climate and commerce are still weakly understood.
Wholistic thinking is a theme that I wrote about in my Masters Thesis, where I argued that the Cartesian mentality of western science is intrinsically defective in its failure to see things in a relational way, its inability to think about how everything is linked to everything else.
Midgely notes that this conceptual gulf appears in the abusive attitude of science towards wholistic thinking. She sees the idea of Gaia as not only useful but as scientifically necessary. She poses the problem of Gaian thinking as “the increasingly urgent question of intrinsic value. We must learn how to value various aspects of our environment, how to structure social relationships and institutions so that we value social and spiritual life, as well as the natural world, alongside commercial and economic aspects.”
Harry Marks wrote:Like most mythos, [the Gaia theory] is not a description or an explanation but rather a motivational narrative.
On the contrary, Lovelock presents
planetary homeostasis, the scientific basis of the Gaia theory, as a descriptive explanation of how global systems have maintained stability. You are right that the importance is motivational, but this simply shows how the myth of Gaia as earth goddess bases its theory of value on facts.
Linking to the theme here of how to maintain climate stability, the geoengineering view is Gaian in seeing warming as a chemical imbalance of the biosphere that can be remedied to some extent by addition of sulphur, iron and salt to the air where these are deficient for planetary health. Geoengineering, as a sound philosophy, must extend the core Gaian principle that life regulates the composition of the atmosphere to maintain dynamic stability through the use of technological methods.
Midgely observes that coal, oil and chalk are storehouses of carbon removed from the air by life, and that biofeedback stopped the earth from heating up as the sun heated over the last billion years. The implication now for climate science is that these biofeedback principles must now be employed with technological acceleration to use living systems to store carbon to prevent dangerous warming.
Harry Marks wrote: If people can see themselves as part of an adjustment process that all of nature shares, they may be influenced both to think less extractively toward nature and to feel more reflective and capable about formulating a conscious, deliberate response.
This concept of extractive thinking is deeply embedded in Western culture, and especially in the American pioneer mentality of the endless frontier. The Biblical tradition of imagining God as a personal supernatural creator who blesses human dominion over the earth has the perverse consequence of justifying the extractive mentality of alienation from the earth.
By seeing spirit as superior to nature, and by imagining that our real heavenly home in the afterlife is infinite and eternal, superior to the finite temporal conditions of life on earth, traditional religion supports the wide and easy path of destruction. That is not to attack religion as such, only to say religion should return to its authentic origins, for example by thinking scientifically about what the hard and narrow path of salvation proposed in the Bible might mean in evolutionary terms.
We are now riding the tiger of extraction, constantly extracting more to sustain prosperity. Carbon removal as a climate response offers the key way to shift from the destruction inherent in extractive thinking, repurposing carbon dioxide from waste to asset to enable a circular economy with enduring value.
Harry Marks wrote: I rather suspect most mythos narratives for our time will have to combine some element of scientific understanding with some way of helping us feel good about being part of larger mechanisms of causality.
Now Harry you are making me think I should add a seventh category to the poll, to say the top climate priority is a change of thinking. How I see what you call a mythos narrative as emerging now is to make science the foundation, and to build upon scientific knowledge a systematic story of meaning that is grounded in religious tradition, looking especially at the Christian Gospel story to see Jesus Christ as an authentic existential hero presenting the path to a transformed and evolved consciousness.
Harry Marks wrote: A simple example might be rejecting the use of genetic modification for purposes of enhancement of the powers of biologically normal people (which the college admissions scandal does not give a lot of hope for – but at least the value will be part of some mythic narrative).
There are so many sick values that our consumer society endorses – envy, vanity, inequality, appearance, fantasy, exclusion. This gene tampering example you give supports the model of a tiny elite locking themselves away from the suffering masses. I simply do not think such a mentality will remain politically feasible.
Harry Marks wrote: If people get used to monitoring their own footprint, then it will be much more meaningful to them if their power company does something to substantially reduce that footprint.
We are shifting towards a planetary moral vision in which waste is seen as a primary sin, so people do see the end results of their actions as morally relevant. Monitoring your personal ecological footprint involves minimising waste, supporting the vision of the circular economy, where all waste is transformed to asset. That can only transform our theory of value as governments move to regulate corporate activity to ensure that externalities are incorporated into profit and loss results.
By the way, I had a chat with my astronomer friends about my previous comment about the sun pumping out two billion times more energy than hits the earth, and this has actually been quite extensively studied by no less than Freeman Dyson, hence the
Dyson Sphere.