The Earth has been called many names and suffered many insults, but the biggest insult humans may have inflicted upon her is to call her a thing. IT, as one refers to a mere object. It is the third rock from the Sun. It has water. It, incidentally, supports a thin crust of life over its molten core.
Gaia is the ancient Greek name for the Earth, personified as a goddess. That Earth was never an It. She was the ancestral mother of all life. Not just the Greeks believed this, all cultures did. Today, all that remains of that Gaia is her etymological root ge, demystified and deployed for building words such as geology, geometry, and geography. The mechanistic-materialistic branch of science killed Gaia and buried her body underneath a pile of heavy bricks called blind rationality.
The Gaia hypothesis, first originated by the scientist James Lovelock and later refined by the revolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, states that the entirety of Earth is a self-regulating system, where all life forms on earth, together with the atmosphere, the oceans, the soil, etcetera, form a single planetary being. In other words, the environment is not separate from the ecosystem of all life forms; the environment is part of the system.
This view, even though it is clearly stated as a scientific hypothesis, still causes many a hard-nosed materialist-reductionist scientist to get worked up. It conjures up for them that ancient Gaia of mythology, or the sixties-era psychedelic Gaia, perhaps imaged as a naked green-skinned woman sprouting flowers from her head and spouting hippie nonsense from her mouth. An easily dismissed anthropomorphic personification of an inert system as a conscious feminine entity by those silly, stupid nature nuts.
Still, is this really so strange a claim? The entire Earth is a self-regulating system, and all lifeforms are part of that single planetary being.
Let’s take the first part of the hypothesis, and examine the evidence for self-regulation.
The Earth’s atmosphere is not a passive collection of gases. Nearly a fifth of it is a violently reactive gas, oxygen. Hundreds of other highly reactive and volatile gases that simply shouldn’t exist alone or together, still persist. Other planets’ atmospheres consist almost exclusively of inert CO2 and are consequently stable just on that basis. Equilibrium chemistry won’t cut it for explaining the Earth’s atmosphere. How has it maintained a continuous presence of highly reactive substances over thousands of millions of years? It is the biological control that sustains the remarkable state of disequilibrium. Every pinch of soil, every drop of seawater, contains billions of microorganisms, each of which breathe or exude gases to contribute to the atmosphere. This is homeostasis, no different from how the blood of animals maintains its pH at a stable setpoint. Stable instability is the name of the game, and life on Earth conspires to create and maintain the atmosphere for its own purposes.
Self-regulation is clearly also at play with the Earth’s temperature. Relative to the extremes that other planets experience, the Earth has maintained tight control on its temperature, and for a long time despite drastic external changes. Since microbial life originated three plus billion years ago, the Earth’s mean surface temperature has stayed in an amazingly narrow range between 5℃ and 25℃ continuously. Over that time, the Sun has gotten bigger and 30% hotter, but the Earth has maintained its cool without frying to a crisp or the oceans evaporating. The Earth’s oceans have never frozen over either, even when massive volcanic eruptions lasting thousands of years blocked out the Sun completely. Who controls the thermostat? Life does. The global sum of all life, the biota, arranges the warming and cooling capacity of the Earth via its control of heat retaining gases.
Conscientious objectors to self-regulation may at this point squirm because they might have concluded that to relinquish control of the Earth’s temperature to the biota means that humans have no responsibility for global warming. This is a mistaken conclusion. That there is self-regulation going on doesn’t mean things will stay the same no matter what. New equilibria may be reached, like turning the thermostat to a new setting. Humans are like the runaway viruses from within causing the body of the Earth to react. Our activities may be raising the set-point of the Earth’s temperature, just as a fever raises the set-point temperature of the body. Even in the midst of a raging fever, there is temperature regulation going on. The raised setpoint usually causes some suffering for the creature, while serving its intended purpose of taking out the target of the fever, the runaway virus.
In the words of a brilliant comedian, the late George Carlin: “The Earth will be fine. The Earth has seen many disasters of horrific proportions. Massive asteroid collisions that released the energy of millions of nuclear bombs. Giant volcanoes that spewed ashes for thousands of years and blocked out the sun completely. The Earth has endured all that, and survived. It is the humans that are fucked. And in the end, the Earth will shake off the parasite on its surface called humanity, like a bad case of the flu.”
Nothing mystical is necessarily required for life to accomplish homeostatic control, although a feeling of awe may be natural when one contemplates the planetary scale magic that Gaia renders every second to keep us breathing, warm, and fed so that we can forget about her and instead distract ourselves with the latest outrage in the news or a personal drama. In the long run, life always finds a way to thrive, and its relentless march is opportunistic and non-judgemental. Whenever an old niche empties or a new niche opens, organisms rush in to fill that gap, thus restoring the balance, even though the new equilibrium may not be the same as the old equilibrium. When one species disappears from an area, many new ones fill the vacuum. Where the tundra melts, the land sprouts grass and turns green. Where one predator disappears, other forms of predation take over, or the predator-free population simply implodes and collapses on itself. When oxygen producing bacteria arise and poison the air for anaerobic bacteria, new oxygen consuming life evolves. This dance is what has kept life going despite everything.
Life is a verb, not a noun. It’s a doing that we call a thing, but we get confused and mistake snapshots in time of the doings doing their doing thing for mere things themselves.
Yet another of the dozens of examples that support the case for self-regulation involves salt. The oceans should in theory be getting cumulatively saltier over the eons. Rivers and runoff carry salt into the oceans in a one-directional flow. Yet, the ocean has maintained its salinity in the narrow range necessary for life for billions of years. Nothing strictly geological can remove salt from the oceans. Evaporation of sea water only concentrates the salt further. So how is the salt being removed? The answer involves microbes. The exudates or cellular secretions of certain bacteria trap salt within it, preventing it from dissolving and raising the salinity. These salt-carrying exudates then pile up along ocean shores, and occasionally get raised back on higher ground land whenever tectonic plates heave, thus filtering salt out of the oceans. If this is just a coincidence, it is a pretty darn magical coincidence.
Life is a verb, not a noun…
It’s a doing, but we confuse snapshots of a doing with a thing.
The tectonic activity that sifts salt out and also moves continents itself may be a function facilitated by life. Bacteria that trap bubbling carbon dioxide as carbonate – limestone – deep within the crust, may then simultaneously destabilize and lubricate the plates and set off the movement of continental plates. Over geological time, little microbes create massive change. Geology is biology. If further proof of the unity of these two sciences is needed, consider all the other elemental cycles on Earth – the Nitrogen cycle, Carbon cycle, Oxygen cycle, Sulphur cycle, Phosphorus cycle, the list goes on. In each one of these cycles, the driver of circulatory activity is life itself, specifically, the organisms that transport and transform gigatons of the stuff. The body of the Earth circulates these minerals and nutrients no different from how we circulate these same minerals in our bodies.
On the twentieth anniversary of the Moon landing, the researcher and essayist Lewis Thomas wrote: “Viewed from the distance of the Moon, the astonishing thing about the Earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive… If you could look long enough, you would see the swirling of the great drifts of white cloud, covering and uncovering the half-hidden masses of land. If you had been looking for a very long, geologic time, you could have seen the continents themselves in motion… It has the organized, self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvellously skilled in handling the Sun.” Indeed.
Now let’s tackle the second claim in the Gaia hypothesis, that all organisms are part of a single planetary being.
The idea of a living Earth violates the cherished Western rational scientific norm of only granting human beings with consciousness, agency, and subjectivity. There’s no proof for this assertion – we can’t even agree or prove that all of us ourselves are conscious – and it is simply a convenient and self-serving assumption, like many such assumptions we hold regarding the big questions of life. With this assumption in place though, the rest of the world becomes merely a mechanism to be observed and if possible manipulated for our own purposes. So the Earth must necessarily be a mere rock with some life on it. Pride gets in the way of us seeing the possibility of a living Earth.
To say that the Earth is a living being really gets some people worked up. For one thing, they imagine that this is the same thing as saying that it has eyes and ears and four limbs and organs. Maybe we need to loosen up our rigid notions of what an organism, especially a super-organism, must look like and how it should be put together. Insisting that organisms must be organized just like us or possess familiar features to qualify as life will get us nowhere far along the tree of life. Fungi, lichen, molds, corals, and all the microbes will sniff at us for our anthropocentrism. And if we are willing to grant a label of low-level life to our cells, why not to the Earth, which is after all far, far, larger and more complex? Even Hollywood is occasionally able to show imagination in conjuring up alien life forms that aren’t just depicted as humanoids.
Most organisms are actually nested structures, consisting of progressively simpler forms residing inside composite forms. Russian dolls are the rule rather than the exception for life forms. We carry on and inside our bodies billions of mites, which contain protozoa, each of which bear smaller bacteria and archaea, which in turn harbor viruses. Our body’s cells themselves are full of former bacteria – known today as mitochondria and plastids – that eons ago took up a symbiotic residence inside a simple eukaryotic cell after being engulfed by it. So, more than half of the 80 trillion odd cells making up our body are current microbes, while the other half that we call human cells are former microbes inside former microbes. We contain multitudes within multitudes. Plant cells similarly contain photosynthetic former bacteria known as chloroplasts. This was Lynn Margulis’s masterpiece discovery of the endosymbiotic origin of life, which has since been backed up by DNA analysis. The entire planet is ruled by oxygen producers and oxygen consumers who live inside plant and animal machines.
One thing that gets into a way of seeing the Earth as alive is our poor eyesight – an inability to visualize creatively. Our imaginations have been dulled by modernity and dogmatic scientific thinking into being nearly blind. Where ancient cultures breathed life into all things, we only call something alive when it moves or grows. When we look at the body of Earth, at rocks and soil and water, we only see inert matter, so how can we call the Earth alive, a being? Yet, in the last few decades, our electron microscopes and DNA sequencing machines are increasingly revealing our cognitive dissonance in this regard. What looks dead really may be alive.
It used to be that to count microbial species, one would culture them in a lab then be able to study and identify them once they had multiplied into a sufficiently large colony. The problem with this approach is, not all microbes can be cultured. The missing ingredient is sometimes some chemical nutrient or growth catalyst or signaling molecule or precise combination of pH, temperature, pressure, but these aren’t always sufficient. DNA sequencing is revealing a whole host of species – the majority of those on the planet, in fact – which simply can’t be cultured in a lab, at least in human lifetimes. The missing ingredient is time. The dwellers deep in the Earth’s crust just sit there, replicating very slowly indeed by our standards. One can’t add time to a test tube.
The microbiologist Karen Lloyd gives an example of how if humans lived only for a day, they might think that leafless trees in the winter were just dead things that do absolutely nothing. We are like that when it comes to seeing what microbes are and what they do on our planet.
Whenever we see rocks, we should think about bacteria and their bones. Some rocks are microbial food, a substrate that is being eaten, minerals being worked on by bacteria to transform it into other minerals. Some rocks are essentially microbial mats, structures built by bacteria over billions of years, as they continue to do under our feet. Other rocks are the bacteria themselves, since these robust microbes can persist for millennia under harsh conditions, replicating maybe once every tens of thousands of years or not at all. There are billions of these organisms called Chemolithoautotrophs who eat rocks for energy, living independent of the Sun, in every cubic centimeter of rock. They eat rocks, they make rocks, they look like rocks. The largest ecosystem of life on our planet isn’t just inside the Earth’s crust, it IS the Earth’s crust. Geology is biology.
Some see rocks, others see life. Turns out that the largest ecosystem of life on our planet isn’t just inside the Earth’s crust, it is the Earth’s crust.
The same story holds true deep in the oceans and underneath the ocean floor. It turns out that the Earth is a giant battery, with rock + sea water reactions sustaining life in the deep ocean. This is the largest ecosystem in the oceans, and a source of food for marine life, especially since the Sun cannot penetrate its depths. Seawater runs in giant aquifers underneath the ocean floor, carrying minerals and microbes in a soup of life that sustains all creatures above it as well. And the protective skeletons of myriad sea creatures from diatoms and radiolaria to invertebrates accumulate minerals in vast quantities, which over the millennia turn into limestone such as found on the white cliffs of Dover or wash up as sand on beaches all around the planet. Once again, what looked like inert stuff turns out to actually be the stuff of life itself.
Our views of life’s diversity have also turned out to be embarrassingly narrow. The number of species on Earth was once estimated at 3 million, then 30 million, but when we began to count microbes with sequencing, we ran into a problem. Bacteria share genes promiscuously between themselves. Strains shift like sands to defy our categorical thinking for what a species is. Imagine that there is a giant shipping container, the size of a building, with an unknown but vast number of socks of different colors inside. Our job is to estimate the number of colors in the container. We can drill holes into the container in different places to extract a few hundred socks at a time and count the colors we see. If each pull of socks reveals just the same few colors over and over again, one may be able to get a rough statistical bound on the count. If on the other hand we keep extracting new colors each time, one cannot even estimate an estimate. This is the situation scientists find themselves in when they count the microbes in different samples from the planet. The graph for the number of phylotypes versus samples collected has not yet flattened, despite years of counting. The latest estimates put the number of species at “a trillion”, which is another way of saying, we have no clue. Turns out, species is a specious concept.
The sum total of the Earth’s intelligence then, is mind-bogglingly large. It includes unknown trillions of species, and all the fungal networks, the interconnected trees, the quintillions of insects and the ten Nonillion (10³¹) (that’s 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000) estimated microbes, all sensing intelligently. This infinite connected network of fungi, microbes, viruses, plants, trees, insects, birds, fish, animals, humans, and other lifeforms that is Gaia, represents a great unknowable that we can’t ever comprehend. We are like the microscopic mites that live on the hairs of a giant bear, unable to see anything of the creature itself. For us, it’s just all an endless forest of giant hair.
Species Accumulation Curve for Earth. Help… the whole thing’s alive! But we’ll keep trying to ‘flatten the curve’
Another big hindrance to our ability to comprehend a far superior intelligence is time. Human lifespans are infinitesimally short compared to the galactic timeframe that the Earth operates on. Smarter things don’t run faster; they rely on simpler things to do the quicker thinking that adds up to the wisdom of eons. The higher up an entity is on an intelligence network, the longer and more relaxed a view of time it takes for its machinations. High level entities assimilate the creative work of subordinates, but this resulting superior intelligence is simply not perceptible or available to the lower level entities, who while not aware of the big picture, still believe themselves to be in charge and the center of the universe. That’s us humans. Children engaged in mere play as they run around the feet of galactic elders.
As an illustration, imagine a computer program playing a video being slowed down to the point where one may visualize individual bits flipping 0 and 1 in the silicon. The image on screen would freeze solid, and move at a glacial pace, perhaps a nearly imperceptible change every few million years. The only activity would be in the computer innards. The chip level bit flip-flops would appear haphazard, with no purpose to be discerned from their frenetic activity. Meaning is not yet apparent. It is only when one moves up the chain, to levels where changes are less frequent, that one might see a pattern. With enough patience, a sort of intelligence becomes evident. “Aha, this sub-routine adds numbers as they come in” one might say. At a higher level still, one might discover the parts of the program that render an image or fetch the next frame. Only at the very top, where things are slowest yet access the highest levels of intelligence, can one finally say, “Oh, this is a cat video”.
Are we then just some cells wrapped around a dead skeleton? If one could talk to our cells, that’s what they might say. Guys, it’s just us here, many cells all around, and we do smart cell things, and that’s what we call life, and we live on this big thing called bone, and that’s what we call our planetary home, and that’s that. That is their level of intelligence. Yet, we know how dumb that sounds, given that we operate at a much higher level, that of the creature. The Earth is that giant creature, a super organism as far advanced from us as we are from our body’s cells. Life is one continuum, a unified tissue of the Earth, alive to the core, in and through which different units may appear to be growing separately. Fish cannot exist without the sea, and come out of the sea, so they are swimming forms of the sea. Trees come out of the earth, and incorporate air into their bodies too, and are thus forms of rooted air and respiring dirt.
People are also like trees. All of them. They arise from the Earth, they are made of earth and sun and air and the magical intermixing of ingredients that makes life out of the dead and the dead out of life. One could say dead matter is living matter pretending to be something else while it’s its turn to hide in the eternal game of hide and seek. It takes a mere switch of context and some imagining to turn the same word from a noun to a verb, from existing to doing. An apple tree is said to “apple” when it bears fruit. People and trees both arise from the Earth. So the Earth “peoples” and the Earth “trees”. Just because we come into being mobile and contained in a bag called skin makes no difference to our provenance.
Once upon a time, a long long time ago, when a woman named Gaia with big plans for herself first came of age and into fertility, there proliferated in her warm and wet womb two kinds of little beings. The first kind were extroverted producer types who loved being near all sorts of energy sources. They liked to hang out in the sun or near a volcanic vent, and performed all sorts of tricks to transform this energy into matter. The second kind were somewhat introverted consumer types, but also very creative, since consumption is but creative destruction. These beings preferred to hang out in the shadows, but not too far from their producer siblings, since what that kind created was what this kind consumed. A few eons passed. Individuals came together and formed alliances of various nifty structures and larger beings still. Some of the consumers clumped together to form something called an eye to let themselves see, and they saw that they themselves were mostly brown and red while their producer siblings were mostly blue and green. The brown-reds and the blue-greens mingled and played and fought and made up as all children do.
After maturing some more, the blue-greens, who were always competing with each other for more sunlight, got tired of being stuck to the surface and easily picked off, like so much pond scum. They began to build houses for themselves, both for protection and to get away from the masses. Eventually, they figured out how to stack their dwellings on top of each other, creating ever taller structures reaching towards the sun in skyscrapers millions of cells tall, known variously as plants and trees, seagrasses and kelp. The brown-reds were no less resourceful though, and began fabricating fantastic mechanisms and means of movement into mobile units all bearing appendages to scoop up ever bigger quantities of blue-greens and of each other. These machines reached high and roamed wide on Gaia’s body, bearing names such as insects and fish, birds and animals. One of these animals became human.
For a while, the entity called the human felt no different from the rest of the beings. Then the human hit upon another trick, and its world and the world itself would never be the same again. It learnt to think consciously, think of itself as a separate entity called an ego, separate from Gaia, separate from blue-greens, separate from the other brown-reds, separate from each other even. This trick gave the human all sorts of powers and dominion over the world, but also doomed the human to feel forever alone in the world.
The very definition of the human ego then is the part of our psyche that persists in this illusion of separateness from Gaia. The reality is far simpler. We are Gaia and Gaia is us.
