Are we abusing mother earth?

by Daya Dissanayake

“Gaia is a tough bitch - a system that has worked for over three billion years without people. This planet's surface and its atmosphere and environment will continue to evolve long after people and prejudice are gone.” - Lynn Margulis.

‘The Clone’ (2012) was written on the premise that Gaia would survive, even after mankind becomes extinct. Gaia was the name given by the Greeks to Mother Earth, and the name was suggested by William Golding to James Lovelock. It is not a new concept, and even though Lovelock brought it forth 53 years ago, people are still reluctant to accept that Earth Mother could be a living organism, because then they have to accept that they are molesting, violating, abusing and torturing someone alive.

An artist's concept of Gaia

“The name of the living planet, Gaia, is not a synonym for the biosphere - that part of the Earth where living things are seen normally to exist. Still less is Gaia the same as the biota, which is simply the collection of all individual living organisms.

The biota and the biosphere taken together form a part but not all of Gaia. Just as the shell is part of the snail, so the rocks, the air, and the oceans are part of Gaia.

Gaia, as we shall see, has continuity with the past back to the origins of life, and in the future as long as life persists. Gaia, as a total planetary being, has properties that are not necessarily discernible by just knowing individual species or populations of organisms living together... Specifically, the Gaia hypothesis says that the temperature, oxidation state, acidity, and certain aspects of the rocks and waters are kept constant, and that this homoeostasis is maintained by active feedback processes operated automatically and unconsciously by the biota.” James Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia.

In the beginning, about four and a half billion years ago, there would not have been any oxygen in the atmosphere, and organisms were extremely simple microscopic droplets containing a few genes and enzymes inside a membrane.

They fed on organic molecules that had been produced earlier in the earth's history by various non-living chemical processes.

Then half a billion years later, came the single-celled organisms, who used sun's energy to produce their own food. It would have been about one billion years later, that photosynthetic bacteria were able to split water molecules to produce sugar and release oxygen to the atmosphere. But the oxygen was toxic to these anaerobic bacteria. Their survival depended on controlling the oxygen in the atmosphere and the aerobic bacteria would have evolved around 1.5 billion years ago, which consumed the oxygen and released carbon dioxide.

The idea that green plants had arisen from a symbiotic union of two organisms had first been proposed by the botanist Andreas Schimper in 1883. Recent biology textbooks include reference to Lynn Margulis’ theory of endosymbiosis, the majority of them put it forward as the most likely explanation of the origin and evolution of life on the planet we know as Earth.

We have to get out of our anthropocentric mindset, that man is superior to all other life and we are the masters of the universe.

In reality, we do not exist as separate entities, but we only co-exist with around 30 billion other life forms including the bacteria and virus forms.

Margulis had been asked at a public lecture when human life had begun. She had answered, that human life began, as all life did, at least three and a half billion years ago.

In “God, Gaia, and Biophilia”, Dorian Sagan and Lynn Margulis says that “our evolution has brought us beyond a point of no return.”

They continue to explain that, “Gaia is Darwin's natural selector. All of these organisms have a tendency for population explosion. That this enormous population potential fails to be reached is Darwin's lesson.

There are checks upon growth at all times throughout the life cycles of all organisms.

Gaia, the sum of the interacting organisms of the biosphere, checks growth and therefore acts as the natural selector.” In the jell-like material that surrounds the embryo of the spotted salamander, there lives a single celled algae. About three years ago, Canadian scientist Ryan Kerney of Dalhouse University, Halifax discovered that the algae also lives inside the cells of the embryo itself, probably the first discovery of a photosynthetic organism living inside a vertebrate's cells.

The algae thrive on the nitrogen-rich waste produced by the embryo, and provide the embryo with oxygen and carbohydrates using its chlorophyl. Another example of endosymbiosis is found with the solar-powered sea slug or the marine mollusc Elysia chlorotica and the alga Vaucheria litorea .

The mollusc gets a protective camouflage and blends with the green algal bed while the chloroplast produces all the food needed by the mollusc to sustain it for several months, without feeding on more algae.

Biophilia was a concept introduced by Edward O. Wilson in his book of the same title, claiming a human dependence on nature that extends far beyond the simple issues of material and physical sustenance to encompass as well the human craving for aesthetic, intellectual, cognitive, and even spiritual meaning and satisfaction.

That is probably what we need, to save mankind and Mother Earth.

We do not know if Lovelock and Margulis had studied the teachings on Paticca Samuppada, or the Law of Dependent Origination.

“The causal interdependence applies to all things from the natural environment, which is an external, physical condition, to the events of human society, ethical principles, life events and the happiness and suffering which manifest in our own minds.” - Ven. Prayudh Payutto.1

Stephen Miller has summarised it thus. “The idea of Gaia may facilitate the task of converting destructive human activities to constructive and cooperative behaviour.

It is an idea which deeply startles us, and in the process, may help us as a species to make the necessary jump to planetary awareness.