By providing a new way of viewing our planet – one which connects with some of our oldest and most primordial intuitions regarding the animate Earth – Gaia theory ultimately alters our understanding of ourselves, transforming our sense of what it means to be
By providing a new way of viewing our planet – one which connects with some of our oldest and most primordial intuitions regarding the animate Earth – Gaia theory ultimately alters our understanding of ourselves, transforming our sense of what it means to be human. For much of the modern era, earthly nature was spoken of as a complex yet mechanical clutch of processes, as a deeply entangled set of objects and objective happenings lacking any inherent life, or agency, of its own. Such a conceptual regime helped sustain the cool detachment that was generally deemed necessary to the furtherance of the natural sciences. Yet the thorough objectification of earthly nature also served to underwrite the sense of human uniqueness that has permeated the modern era. As long as the Earth had no life, no agency, no subjectivity of its own, then we humans could continue to ponder, analyze, and manipulate the natural world as though we were not a part of it; our own sentience and subjectivity seemed to render us outside observers of this curious pageant, overseers of nature rather than full participants in the biotic community. The thoroughgoing objectification of the Earth thus enabled the old, theological presumption – that the Earth was ours to subdue and exploit for our own, exclusively human, purposes – to survive and to flourish even in the modern, scientific era.
Gaia theory, however, gradually undoes this age-old presumption. By demonstrating that organic life is reciprocally entangled with even the most inorganic parameters of earthly existence, Gaia theory complicates any facile distinction between living and non-living aspects of our world. By showing that Earth’s organisms collectively influence their environment so thoroughly that the planet’s oceans, atmosphere, soils, and surface geology together exhibit behavior more proper to a living physiology than an abiotic system, Gaia theory suggests that the biosphere has at least a rudimentary kind of agency. It suggests that like any living entity, the biosphere is not just an object but also, in some curious sense, a subject.i
To the extent that we take seriously the ongoing disclosures of Gaian science, we cannot help but feel a transformation in our own relation to the planet. If agency is an attribute of the biosphere as a whole, then the felt sense of our own agency need not isolate us from the material world that surrounds us. Just as our life is now recognized as part of a vast, planetary metabolism, so human sentience can now be felt as an extension, an elaboration, even an internal expression of the organic sentience of the biosphere itself.ii Rather than the sole carriers of awareness within an essentially inanimate or mechanically determinate world, we now find ourselves fully embodied and embedded within a nature that has its own wild intelligence, and our own subjectivity seems no longer entirely ours…
Of course awareness – or consciousness – is an exceedingly amorphous and ephemeral phenomenon, one that is notoriously difficult to pin down. Numerous scientific papers and books have been published in recent years trying to account for the emergence of consciousness, or to explain how awareness is constituted within the brain. Yet many of these explanations are dramatically at odds with one another, for there exists no clear agreement as to just what this enigma that we call “consciousness” actually is. Part of the difficulty stems from the intransigence of old notions – in particular our age-old assumption that consciousness, or mind, is a uniquely human property, an utterly intangible substance that resides somewhere “inside” each of us.
It may be far more parsimonious, today, to suggest that mind is not at all a human possession, but is rather a property of the breathing Earth – a property in which we, along with the other animals and plants, all participate. The apparent “interiority” that we ascribe to the mind would then have less to do with the notion that there is a separate consciousness located inside me, and another, entirely separate and distinct consciousness that resides inside you, and more to do with a sense that you and I are both situated within it – a recognition that we are corporeally immersed in an awareness that is not ours, but is rather the Earth’s.
Our experience of awareness actually has much in common with our experience of the planetary atmosphere that circulates around and between earthly organisms, and that circulates within them as well.[i]ii Like the quality of awareness, we are steadily informed by the fluid air, and yet it is very difficult to catch sight of: we glimpse it only indirectly, as it bends the branches of an oak or rips a note from our hand and sends it tumbling along the street. We partake of the air ceaselessly, yet seem unable to fully bring it to our attention. Itself invisible, the atmosphere is that element through which we see everything else – much as consciousness, which we cannot see or grasp, is that through which we encounter all other phenomena. We are unable to step apart from consciousness, in order to examine it objectively, for wherever we step it is already there.
Consciousness, or awareness, is in this sense very much like a medium in which we are situated, and from which we are simply unable to extricate ourselves without ceasing to exist. Everything we know or sense of ourselves is conditioned by this atmosphere. We are intimately acquainted with its character, ceaselessly transformed by its influence upon us. And yet we’re unable to characterize this medium from outside. We 