Gaia, the impersonation of Earth, was a goddess of ancient Greek mythology long before Greeks knew that the Earth is a planet. In cosmogonies, it was imagined as emerging from a dark chaos and giving birth to sky, Ouranos, her consort, as well as a long retinue of other children that populated the world. Across a range of ancient mythologies and spiritual beliefs, the conceptualization of the Earth as a woman of procreative potential is a leitmotif that cannot have originated in a common cultural origin. Rather, this commonality of the Earth as a goddess expressed the empirically appreciated regenerative powers of the female body, and connected them to the Earth that generated and supported life, from plants to animals, thus linking the reproduction of the female woman with that of the Earth, imagined as a goddess. Although there are very few communities alive today that would maintain these beliefs, the ancient myths and attempts to understand and perceive the world inspired artists and activists alike, both from feminist and environmentalist movements. But curiously, as a sort of a metaphor for the planet we inhabit, the term Gaia first became fashionable in the 1970s through science, where the impersonation of the Earth as Gaia was not so much a symbolic notion but an ontological conception: the understanding of our planet as a living organism.
At the time, two scientists, James Lovelock, chemist by training, and Lynn Margulis, evolutionary anthropologist, advanced the hypothesis of the Earth as a system that self-regulated through its subset systems (what are now known as the atmosphere, biosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere etc) so as to continue to support life. So the proponents of this hypothesis did not portray Gaia as a metaphor for our planet or as a personification of it, but as a living organism. While not imbuing the planet with self-awareness per se, the notion of the Earth as a living organism, hence its naming by the female name Gaia, that regulated its organic and non-organic system in order to continue to exist, invites a sense of teleology, which falls outside the remit of science, and touches on reflections of divine design.
Although as a scientific concept it has contributed to the development of notions that are now established, such as the interaction of different systems through feedback loops, its most tenacious afterlife has been within the environmental movement. Within capitalism where the inherent aim for increasing productivity, a structural feature of the system, entails the ever-increasing destruction of the environment, Gaia became a symbol of planet Earth under persecution. Yet the core of this notion was not a metaphor but a scientific idea that in subsequent decades bifurcated into different trajectories by each of its initial pair of proponents, in process losing in scientific credibility. Crystallized thereafter in public perception, the concept found a new expression in portrayals of the Anthropocene as a devastating impact on planet Earth. It is from this angle that when some natural disaster occurs, which appears suddenly and ruptures social life, it is painted as the “revenge of Gaia”. And yet for others the Anthropocene is but one stage of the Earth’s evolution given that the anthropogenic actions that constitute it were the result of the human population, one of the planet’s species.
Taking the geologic time scale as a frame of reference, stability of ecosystems or a permanent equilibrium have never been a natural feature of Earth. Mass extinction phenomena occurred periodically over at least hundreds of millions of years ago, often eradicating a multiplicity of species on Earth. It is through these mass extinction events that human life appeared. By this logic, some diagnose the Anthropocene as the sixth mass extinction event, unfolding in our present era, with anthropogenic actions causing the loss of biodiversity, expected mass population movements, depopulation of swathes of the continental landmass, and in some recent theories, the inevitable human extinction. Albeit this understanding of the Anthropocene as another stage of the Earth’s evolutionary trajectory would be an anomalous one, since mass extinction events, which some scientists calculated as periodically occurring, have been attributed to astronomical phenomena: the effects of the motion of the Sun rotating around the Galaxy and the causation of a gravitational pull that leads to comic impacts on Earth (a still controversial explanation). Yet even if extinction events are caused by astronomical phenomena, not everyone agrees that the Anthropocene needs to be classified differently. If the actions of the humans are seen as a natural by-product of human life supported on Earth, therefore as a product of nature, then the Anthropocene too is just another epoch, one that is causing the loss of ecosystems and biodiversity through the extinction of species.
But who is to say that the Anthropocene corresponds to a mass extinction event? We get but a fleeting glimpse of the unfolding life on Earth. The mass extinction event that took place 445 and 252 million years ago, to mention just two, unfolded over such lengthy periods that obliterate any effort to relate them to the passage of time measured over human life spans or the reckoning of historical periods. While they are called “events”, they lasted eras. It is only the geological time scale that shrinks them to “events”.
Conceptualizing the Earth as Gaia, in a metaphoric way, helps understand better, on a human time-scale, the damage done to the planet when ecosystems are destroyed due to human action. But the usefulness of the term retains some of its scientific value when conceiving Gaia in the original definition of a complex net of systems interacting with one another as parts of a whole: when a part of the system is forced out of synch, the whole system faces disruption. When (illegal) mining operations in protected regions of Amazon in Brazil, designated as indigenous, for example, take place, it is not only the area of the mine itself that suffers the destruction through mechanical removal of soil and ores: the deforestation for opening roads and transporting workers and equipment and raw sources destroys swathes of the environment before the mining begins, while the by-products of the mining pollute the rivers and streams with mercury and other toxic metals, the loss of habitats for riverine and land species amount to the devastation of a natural ecosystem that supports a delicate balance of living organisms in co-dependency.
When one part of the system is attacked, the cascade effects through feedback loops extend to all of the ecosystem in the Amazonian forests, and through the latter’s contribution to global climate, to all of the planet. And this gigantic disruption of the system is not limited to the devastation of the natural environment, but extends profoundly to the social impact on communities, and cultures with the loss of homeland, generational knowledge and livelihoods. Gaia, is still a useful concept as a metaphor for the symbiosis of the living and non-living parts of the planet, and the interactions between the human civilizations and the natural environment. From the aspect of the destruction wrought on an ecosystem over some decades, a human-based time scale, the embodiment of the Earth as a single living organism helps capture devastation in an anthropocentric, easily-perceived way.
Eleftheria Pappa