This year is destined to be another year of extreme weather that continues to refresh history: Europe is facing the worst drought in half a century; Epic heat waves in Asia, North America and Africa; In the southern hemisphere, there are rare low temperatures. This kind of climatic phenomenon is no accident, and many people may remember the large-scale floods in western Europe last year, and the highest point of the ice sheet in Greenland in the Arctic began to rain.
At a time of global extreme weather, james La woollook, a well-known British ecologist, inventor and independent scientist, died a month ago (July 26), which also happened to be his 103rd birthday. A number of foreign media such as the British "Guardian" published commemorative articles for the first time to commemorate the pioneer of the "Gaia hypothesis". Such a commemoration is even more profound at a time when the clouds of the epidemic have not yet dissipated and the global extreme weather phenomenon is frequent.
James Lovelock (1919–2022), British scientist, environmentalist, futurist, founder of the Gaia hypothesis. He is the author of "Gaia: A New Vision of Life on Earth", "Gaia's Age: A Biography of earth", "Gaia's Revenge" and so on. Image source: sky news
Compared to some other familiar scientists, Lavulok's name and works are not necessarily familiar to the average Chinese reader. However, the "Gaia hypothesis" he proposed in the 1960s is indeed one of the most influential and controversial ideas of the 20th century. Around this hypothesis, Lavroc and his collaborators wrote a series of works (including Gaia: A New Horizon for Life on Earth, Gaia's Age: A Biography of the Earth, etc., have also been introduced Chinese editions), constructing a considerable theoretical system. In short, this hypothesis treats the Earth as a living organism, the earth goddess Gaia, who, through self-regulation, maintains a steady state between the living and non-living systems of the Earth.
From the very beginning, this hypothesis was criticized for challenging the mainstream Darwinian theory of evolution, and even completely dismissed as a "myth" because of its lack of falsifiability. However, over time, people slowly realized the great theoretical potential of this hypothesis, it soon had an impact on ecology, earth science, the Economist reported that this grand concept may not be a science, but still "an influential metaphor", and with the increasing focus on climate science in the 21st century, feedback systems between biological-physical systems, how bacteria in the land and ocean change the atmosphere, soil chemistry, etc. have slowly become extremely important issues. At the same time, Gaia has also attracted the attention of social science scholars for its speculative nature across science and philosophy, including Bruno Latour, many famous scholars have joined the discussion of Gaia's hypothesis, and the metaphor of "a planet with autonomous life and even consciousness" has become the most classic symbol in popular culture, leaving its own traces in countless science fiction novels and movies.
In the past two years, Gaia seems to be particularly angry, not only the global epidemic is continuing, but many countries have also suffered extreme meteorological disasters that have not been encountered in a century. And whenever the climate is abnormal, the repetition of the "Gaia hypothesis" begins to become frequent. When the Gaia hypothesis was repeatedly questioned in the scientific community, it became a philosophy and even a belief in the public space, not just by many environmentalists. As a hypothesis put forward in the last century, where is the vitality of "Gaia doctrine"? What new inspiration can it give to the future of humanity? In this issue, we share interesting ideas about this topic.
Pseudoscience, metaphysics?
Born in 1919, Ravulok most often describes himself as an "independent scientist"—not only in identity, but also in spirit. He often admonished that "the best science comes from unfettered thought," and he was remembered not only as a scientist, but also as one of the best inventors of his time. He has applied for more than 40 patents and authored more than 200 papers. Most importantly, he has always been very active in the environmental movement, especially after proposing the "Gaia hypothesis", and he has written a large number of popular books to expand this hypothesis, respond to relevant questions, and popularize science for the public.
In the words of Jonathan Watts, editor of The Guardian, "Without Ravulok, the global environmental games would have started late". In 1957, In his doctoral dissertation, Ravulok invented the ultra-sensitive electronic capture detector and revealed for the first time how toxic chemicals sneak into the air, water and soil. At the same time, he warned earlier about the threat of fossil fuels to the climate. For his significant contribution to scientific exploration and popularization, Ravulok was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974 and was awarded the Wollaston Medal by the Geological Society of London in 2006 for his work on the Gaia hypothesis.
In the 1960s, Ravulok was invited to participate in NASA's "Mars Program" to explore extraterrestrial life, and in the process, Lavulok gradually developed a thinking about the composition of the atmosphere in which life regulates. In the mid-1960s, he returned to an isolated village in England to discuss the issue with the famous novelist William Golding. After the publication and success of Golding's novel Lord of the Flies, Golding believed that Ravulok should name his past inspiration the earth goddess Gaia in ancient Greek mythology.
Stills from Lord of the Flies (1990).
In 1968, La Woolloch first proposed the Gaia hypothesis at a scientific conference on the origin of life on Earth at Princeton. He believed that the earth's ability to give birth to life and make it stable and sustainable was not accidental, but the result of its own self-regulation in a "living organism" way. The system that maintains the Earth's own equilibrium relies on the cooperative interaction of the atmosphere and the biosphere, life and non-living systems, and the Earth as a super-living body is larger than the sum of the parts of the various circles that exist on the Earth. This hypothesis has also been supported and refined by Lynn Margulis and others. Margulis is a microbiology scientist who is interested in the theory that organisms "symbiosis" by aggregation is consistent with the core ideas of the Gaia hypothesis.
Once proposed, the "Gaia hypothesis" not only brought shock to the scientific community at that time, but also influenced people's ideas in various ways and attracted a large number of followers. The Gaia hypothesis proposes that although the Earth has its own steady state, Gaia's ability to sustain itself is limited, and as a species that appeared fairly recently in this superorganism, the "human" who blindly abused industrial technology, would weaken Gaia's vitality, which to a considerable extent shook the "anthropocentric" view. People started Gaia's group, called themselves "Gaia people", and also started their own website. There are also many "Gaiaists" in many of today's environmentally friendly parties in the West, such as the Greens.
However, in the era when the "Gaia hypothesis" was first proposed, it was always a big hat of "pseudoscience" that was buckled on its head, and to this day, few people actually regard it as serious science. The well-known scholar Richard Dawkins argues that the "Gaia hypothesis" is clearly contrary to the mainstream Darwinian theory of evolution. Raoulok and Margullis came to the wrong conclusion from a chemical and microbiological point of view, focusing only on the "balance" and "stability" of life. The Earth was not created by natural selection and therefore could not have life. A 1988 review by John Postgate, a fellow of the Royal Society, in New Scientist, even said that inviting him to write a commentary on Gaia's theory was like experiencing a "convulsion."
Gaia: A New Perspective on Life on Earth, by James Ravulok and translated by Xiao Xianjing et al., Gezhi Press, August 2019.
In the decades since its introduction, criticism of the hypothesis has never stopped. In 1990, a paper in the journal Nature pointed out that the biggest problem with the Gaia hypothesis was that it had no falsifiability at all. In 2021, a Breakpoint article pointed out that the current revival of Gaia's theory is entirely a phenomenon accompanied by religious "rejuvenation". As more and more young people in the United States are obsessed with witchcraft and astrology, the theory of Gaia's theory, which provides an explanation for "mysterious intentions in the universe", will become very marketable--if you comb through the debate about whether the "Gaia hypothesis" is scientific, I am afraid that it will be difficult to write a book. However, this nature between scientific hypothesis and "belief" or "worldview" may have injected immortal vitality into the "Gaia hypothesis", allowing it to be constantly reborn in the concepts of professional researchers and ordinary people.
Breakpoint's article also points out that all types of Gaia doctrines have a "user-generated" character, "they are different from organized religions and can basically be combined with various types of beliefs... In addition to "claiming", people can't verify Gaia's beliefs", which seems to be a kind of "untrustability" at the level of belief. The article also points out that Gaiaism faces a paradox that is difficult to justify: are humans part of the Gaia system, or are they independent of Gaia? If humans are only part of the system, then "building cities, dumping chemicals and sewage into rivers, and cutting down trees are actually just part of Gaia's purpose"? If we wish to continue to claim that "it is wrong for humans to treat the earth in this way," then we can only admit that humans are not part of Gaia.
Resisting the "disenchantment" of the cosmology:
Gaia who breaks the boundaries of thought
However, if you look beyond the perspective of scientific hypotheses, Gaia's concept is not something new. Dating back to ancient Greece, Plato can actually be called an ancient "Gaiaist", in the "Timaio", he believes that there is life in the entire universe, and the earth is a living body. Not to mention the Miletus school represented by Thales, almost all of which have the rudiments of the "Gaia hypothesis" in the doctrine of thought.
From the perspective of intellectual history, a 2015 article points out an important reason why the "Gaia hypothesis" has always encountered strong opposition: it represents a strong "teleological" tendency to defend the purpose, which is also Aristotle's summary of plato's philosophical characteristics. However, the scientific revolutions of the 16th and 17th centuries subverted this teleology, and the establishment of the mechanical cosmology expelled the "purpose" and "meaning" of the universe, and likewise, as a component of the universe, the earth could not have any "purpose" of its own. "What disturbed Gaia in the scientific community is precisely that it seems to be a step backwards in the era of 'teleology'."
Of course, the article also traces ideas that question the achievements of the scientific revolution, such as Goethe, the representative of Romanticism, Schelling, a philosopher who had a profound influence on American transcendentalists, and Lorenz Okun, a naturalist. In addition, Rachel Carson, author of the most well-known environmental protection book Silent Spring, is also considered a supporter of Gaiaism. Her personal letters reveal her identification with the Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner's integrated view of nature, which emphasizes the vitality of the earth as an organism. Interestingly, Goldin, who inspired Rughlock to propose the Gaia hypothesis, was also deeply influenced by Steiner's philosophy.
Silent Spring, by Rachel Carson, translated by Ruilan Lu et al., Shanghai Translation Publishing House, April 2021.
Thus, we may be able to understand the controversy of Gaiaism from the perspective of a world disenchanted by science. The debate about its scientific nature also gives it more ideological tension. For example, in a collection published in 2005, scholar David Midgley argues in an essay titled "Individualism and Gaia's Ideas" that Gaiaism repairs subjects and objects torn apart by the scientific worldview, allowing people to see the earth not just as a "stage" or "background" for human beings, but as part of themselves. Spanning subject-object, scientific-non-scientific, organic life-inorganic, is the conceptual contribution of Gaiaism.
In his latest book, Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence, published in 2019, Ravulok depicts a human future full of super-robots, super-robots — and "cyborgs" that will replace humans who can adapt themselves to Gaia's needs, create large-scale engineering projects and bring about fundamental changes to the ecological environment, ultimately achieving a harmonious ecological balance. In the book, Ravulock quotes the 1967 poem "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", written by the American poet Richard Brautigan, which reads: "On the lawn of cybernetics / Mammals and computers / Live in harmony together", and that humans "liberate from labor / Return to nature / Return to animals / All people / all are guarded by the grace of the loving machine".
For Ravulok, the poem represents a strange and future-oriented thought. On the one hand, it contains hippie naturalism, and on the other hand, it is full of symbolic cybernetic Cold War culture. Behind the poem lies a futuristic philosophy that existing models of social organization—government and business—can be replaced by a machine-natural network of intelligence.
The New Star: The Coming Age of Superintelligence, by James Ravulok, Translated by Gu Binhe, Higher Education Press, February 2021.
The Nova: The Coming Age of Superintelligence offers a future possibility, and to some extent, it embodies Gaia's spirit of "dissolving boundaries."
A 2019 article titled "Gaia as cyborg" notes that this spirit has also resonated with many posthumanists, such as the most acclaimed scholar Donna Haraway. According to the article, Harawi once criticized Gaiaism, but also drew ideological resources from it. She paid particular attention to the cybernetic elements of Gaia's theory and questioned "Is Lavulok's reference to Gaia's homeostasis a material-mechanical phenomenon, or a biological phenomenon?" In her opinion, Ravulok's Gaia discourse obscured living and non-living things, "Lovelock's earth can also be a kind of cyborg." And this "rupture of the border" is precisely the slogan of Cyborg's discourse. In this sense, Haravi also developed Gaia's thought. And the machine-nature-breaking union has also become the subject of many science fiction writings, such as the episode "Just the Flutter of that Machine's Pulse" in the third season of this year's fire series "Love, Death, Robots". This also fully reflects the vitality of Gaiaism for the future world.
Gaia and Society:
Environmental crises and political crises at the same time?
Just last year, Ravulok's article in The Guardian sparked a lot of buzz. In the article, he inherits the Gaiaist argument, stating that "this pandemic is an attempt by the earth to protect itself, and if humanity does not repent, Gaia may create something worse next time." He also argued that human beings should not continue to treat global warming, vegetation destruction, etc. as "isolated" problems, but should be taken seriously from a systematic perspective. "Scenes in science fiction are becoming a reality, and we are entering an era of heat, with temperatures and sea levels rising year after year until the world becomes unrecognizable, and what we often underestimate is that natural change is non-linear and unpredictable," he wrote.
Since the world entered the era of the epidemic in 2020, the statement that "the epidemic is nature's revenge" has been repeatedly mentioned. But thinking of Ravulok's identity as the representative of the "Gaia hypothesis", many people still use this to express their concerns. An article this year argues that this claim implies a radical tendency to imply that humans are viruses in the body of the goddess of the earth. However, if we look at it rationally, the value of Gaiaism as an idea is not reflected in how we dogmatically practice a certain proposition, but always in the worldview behind it. Some commentators have argued that these worldviews could be helpful in re-understanding many of the issues of the moment.
Stills from Love, Death, Robots (Season 3).
An article in May imaginatively linked Gaiaism to "deliberative democracy." The article argues that the development of Gaiaism and deliberative democracy has the potential to promote each other. At present, these two are facing challenges at the same time, and these two challenges are also accompanied by each other: on the one hand, human beings increasingly see themselves as beings higher than Gaia, the carrying capacity of the ecological circle is on the verge of beings, and extreme weather phenomena are frequent. On the other hand, the political ecology of Western countries, including the United States, is moving towards polarization and is getting farther and farther away from the vision of pluralistic democracy.
The key to this, the author argues, is that the values of "intimacy and reciprocity" have disappeared, which are crucial to both Gaia's faith and the development of deliberative democracy. The essence of Gaiaism is that we completely embed ourselves in the ecosystem, cultivate sincere respect for them, and thus restore our true connection to those around us and to nature. Similarly, for the practice of deliberative democracy, what is needed is genuine participation in the democratic process, and the development of modern democracy has indeed gradually deprived this participation, people have gradually become alienated and indifferent to the democratic process, and elections have become purely a tool for showmanship and interest games. The restoration of the tradition of deliberative democracy is also a re-creation of the true connection between people and communities and nations. "In this sense, both Gaiaism and deliberative democracy are 'organic.'" Rebuilding this authentic connection requires us to pay more attention to a kind of "immediacy": to truly understand and confront the environment and community in which we live, and to practice politics "from the bottom up" by debating with the diverse communities around us.
Another article this year suggests that the values of Gaiaism will somehow correct a "Uncare Culture" that has developed around the globe since the late 1970s. This concept, proposed by the psychoanalyst Sally Weintrobe, has been extensively studied in sociology, psychology, sociology, and has countless familiar faces: narcissism, consumerism, instrumental rationality... It was formed in the neoliberal-led process of globalization, encouraging people to continue to produce and consume for their own sake. A 2015 article traces the core of this culture to a powerful "underlying fantasy" that "the earth is an indestructible 'mother' that provides us with all the food we need and absorbs the waste we make."
Image credit: aeon.co, Courtesy of Tim McDonagh
The reason why this illusion is difficult to get rid of is that the group culture of our society has undergone drastic changes in the process of globalization, and with the help of various media platforms, the culture that emphasizes individual struggle, consumption and pleasure calls on us to "feel as carefree as possible", which inevitably requires us to become "indifferent". We avoid mental anguish by breaking the loving bond with those around us.
In this regard, Gaiaism emphasizes the sense and consciousness that connects us and the earth with operational significance. As the article says, our new technology should not only be applied to grab nature, but also through satellite pictures and other ways to make us more intuitively aware of the fragility of the earth at present, restore our "pain" to it, make environmental problems visible, and thus resist the culture of "not caring".
Reference Links:
1. Gaia as Solaris: An Alternative Default Evolutionary Trajectory
https://arxiv.org/abs/2201.04956
2. A Personal Definition and Incomplete History of Gaianism
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-07-13/a-personal-definition-and-incomplete-history-of-gaianism/
3. Towards an Animistic Science of the Earth
https://wildethics.org/essay/towards-an-animistic-science-of-the-earth/
4. Gaia metaphor unfalsifiable
https://www.nature.com/articles/345470a0
5. Coronavirus outbreak is a symptom of Gaia's sickness
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7158772/
6. Is COVID-19 a Collective Rite of Passage?
https://gaianism.org/covid-19-collective-rite-of-passage/
7. Earth’s holy fool?
https://aeon.co/essays/gaia-why-some-scientists-think-its-a-nonsensical-fantasy
8. A Gaian Interpretation of COVID and the World
https://breakpoint.org/a-gaian-interpretation-of-covid-and-the-world/
9. Deliberative Democracy and Gaianism: Natural Complements
https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-05-12/deliberative-democracy-and-gaianism-natural-complements/
10. Gaia as Cyborg
https://www.gaian.systems/research/gaia-as-cyborg
11. Beware: Gaia may destroy humans before we destroy the Earth
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/nov/02/beware-gaia-theory-climate-crisis-earth
12. Alien life could survive in more places than we expect,a new theory reveals.
https://www.inverse.com/science/gaia-as-solaris
Written by Liu Yaguang
Editor/Li Yongbo Qingqingzi
Proofreading/Wang Xin