The Goddess and the Geoscientists
The ten-foot tall blue natives in the recent movie, Avatar, plug the tips of their braids into the flora and fauna of their world for communication, and the human invaders realize that the entire planet Pandora is a living, inter-related entity. Before Cameron’s film, Disney’s The Lion King preached the circle of life, but neither Cameron nor Disney invented the concept. Three thousand years ago, the Natural Philosophy espoused by the Greeks taught the world is a living creature – Gaia, the Mother Goddess – from which all things spring, and in which all things are connected. Some went even further and taught that all parts of the universe are capable of influencing each other.
Buddhism too speaks of our deep connection to our planet; in the words of Zen Master Dogen, “You and the streams and the mountains are one and the same.” And in the New World in 1854, Chief Seattle spoke for many Native American leaders and mystics when he said, “All things are bound together, all things connect.” Remnants of this world view can be found in the pronouncements of astrology, but in the west it went out of style with the advent of Judeo-Christianity and the belief that the world and its inhabitants were created to be a hierarchy (with Man at the top), and closer to our time with Darwin’s theory of how things evolved. Not much interrelation there, other than the kind that says if the nutritious leaves are up high, herbivores like giraffes will grow longer necks to reach them. In fact, neo-Darwinian evolutionary biologists were the ones most opposed to the idea of interconnection when it first was presented to the scientific community in the twentieth century.
Scientific viewpoints began to shift in the 1970s, along with the emerging cultural-environmental views of the era, away from separation to cooperation. Two scientists in particular were responsible for the new paradigm, Jim Lovelock, a chemist, and Lynn Margulis, a biologist; they became the godparents of the new science of Gaia with their groundbreaking theory of the Earth as a self-regulating system. Life, these two proposed, “has a substantial, ever regulating, impact on Earth’s geochemical cycles and climate – an impact that tends to favor organisms and living processes.”
Some theoretical scientists were willing to go even farther than that already revolutionary view, in support of the “strong” version of the Gaia hypothesis – that the Earth itself is alive – speculating that humans have evolved to be the consciousness of the whole. This is perhaps a natural progression from Schrödinger’s cat which showed us that in the quantum world, things seem not to happen until the observer enters the equation. In 2001, a joint conference of several different branches of Earth sciences meeting in Amsterdam summed up the middle ground: “The Earth behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components.”
Since then, there’s been an explosion of scientific research into areas such as the co-evolution of life and the environment, thermodynamics and the “purpose” of life, the importance of even the least species to the health of the biosphere as a whole, and even an astounding recent report (2009) that minerals, including some semi-precious stones, have evolved from the primitive Earth along with – and because of – life itself. Sometimes, the scholarly papers in this emerging field of science read like science fiction itself!
So let’s consider whether the genre has kept up with the science or been ahead of the curve as we would hope. Even before the geoscientists had clarified their thinking on just how far the inter-connectedness of all Earth’s systems might extend, SF authors were already exploring the possibilities. Examples of living worlds (the “strong” Gaia hypothesis) appear as early as 1912, with R. A. Kennedy’s The Triuniverse. Murray Leinster’s short story “The Lonely Planet,” A. E. van Vogt’s “Process,” Brian Stableford’s “Wildland,” and Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Vaster than Empires and More Slow,” were all published long before the Amsterdam conference agreed on the more conservative, so-called “weak hypothesis” of active feedback mechanisms operating on the planet as a whole. And other authors were extending the idea of living worlds to stars and nebulae, for example, Fred Hoyle’s short novel The Black Cloud (1957), and Gregory Benford and Gordon Ecklund’s If the Stars Are Gods (1977).
To me, the most interesting conception of a planetary consciousness occurs in Stanislaw Lem’s Solaris, which was first translated into English in 1970. Lem’s intelligent ocean, one of the best portraits of an “inscrutable alien” in science fiction, becomes the antagonist in the novel, driving the action. The novel has been filmed twice, both versions are unfortunately unmemorable. And maybe the strangest version of the Gaia hypothesis occurs in David Brin’s 1990 novel, Earth, filled with eco-collapse, black holes, artificial intelligence and – perhaps – a form of an emerging planetary mind.
Once again, as we’ve come to expect, science fiction outpaces science in offering explanations about our world. But what explains the layman’s interest in the hypothesis that the Earth is a living entity, a belief that predates scientific exploration by at least three thousand years? Lucky guess? Or do we carry a gene that programs us to look for the presence of the spiritual – or “God” – in our world? Could it be that the mystics had it right? Recently, a scientific article in the New York Times asked, “Is There an Ecological Unconscious?” Apparently, such concepts are no longer the stuff of arcane mystical exploration. If the world is indeed a living entity and we are part of it, only learning separation as we grow out of childhood, then it would come as no surprise that we should harbor vestigial traces of that knowledge.
“You can’t go home again,” the skeptics are fond of telling us. But what if we never left? What if there is no conflict between Mother Gaia and the Geoscientists who would explain Her in modern terms? If we can answer that question in the affirmative, maybe there’s hope for us and the ailing world we inhabit.
The author of eight novels, more than thirty short stories, dozens of poems and articles about science fiction, SHEILA FINCH has received several awards, including the Nebula Award, the Compton Crook Award for Best First Novel in the Field, and the San Diego Book Award for Young Adult fiction. She has given workshops at writers’ conferences all over Southern California and recently retired from twenty-eight years of teaching creative writing and science fiction at El Camino College, California. She lives in Long Beach, California, with a cat and two retired racing greyhounds. To learn more about Sheila, see her website or read her blog.
