The Gaia hypothesis is the idea that the Earth’s living things and their surroundings (air, oceans, rocks) work together as one self-regulating system that has kept the planet fit for life for billions of years. It was put forward in the late 1960s by the independent British scientist James Lovelock (1919 to 2022), and named after the Greek goddess of the Earth. It sits close to Therapeutic Shamanism’s experience of the Earth as alive and of everything as interconnected, though Lovelock himself called the living Earth a metaphor.
Who was James Lovelock? #
A British scientist who worked for most of his life outside the universities, described in his publisher’s note as “an independent scientist”.1 Schooled, as the Jungian analyst Andrew Fellows puts it, in chemistry and physics,2 he spent his first “25 years in medical research”.3 The ecologist David Wilkinson notes that he is credited with giving a “rather definitive answer” to the question of how freezing damages living cells, and that his work on instruments for detecting tiny amounts of chemicals led him to NASA in the 1960s, to help design experiments to look for life on Mars.4 He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974.5 He died in July 2022, on his 103rd birthday.6
What is the Gaia hypothesis? #
It grew out of that work on Mars. Lovelock realised that a planet with life on it would have an atmosphere quite unlike a dead planet’s, kept in an unusual balance by the living things on its surface. On Earth, he concluded, life does not just adapt to its surroundings; it helps to shape and steady them. In his words, Gaia “is a dynamic physiological system that has kept our planet fit for life for over three billion years”, and it “appears to have the unconscious goal of regulating the climate and the chemistry at a comfortable state for life.”7
He came to “the hypothesis that living organisms regulate the climate and the chemistry of the atmosphere in their own interest, and in 1969 the novelist William Golding proposed Gaia as its name.” A few years later he began working with the American biologist Lynn Margulis, and together they wrote that “the Gaia Hypothesis views the biosphere as an active, adaptive control system able to maintain the Earth in homeostasis.”8 Margulis, Lovelock writes, “more than anyone has stressed the primary importance of microorganisms in Gaia”.9
Did Lovelock think the Earth was alive? #
In a sense. He often spoke of “the living Earth”, but added: “do not assume that I am thinking of the Earth as alive in a sentient way, or even alive like an animal or a bacterium.” Picturing the Earth as an animal, he wrote, “has never been more than metaphor”, like a sailor calling his ship “she”.10
Yet he thought the metaphor mattered. We need to “imagine it as the largest living thing in the solar system, not something inanimate like that disreputable contraption ‘spaceship Earth’”, he wrote, because until that change of heart happens, “we will not instinctively sense that we live on a live planet that can respond to the changes we make”.11 He also saw us as part of the system, not apart from it: “we are part of, and not separate from Gaia”.12 And though he called himself an agnostic, he wrote: “there is a deep need in all of us for trust in something larger than ourselves, and I put my trust in Gaia”.13
Was the idea accepted? #
Not at first. Lovelock recalls that the idea “was unpopular with both Earth scientists and life scientists”. Biologists, with Richard Dawkins as Lovelock’s leading opponent, objected that natural selection works on individual living things, so a whole biosphere could never evolve to look after itself. Lovelock came to agree that Darwinian evolution, “as it was then understood, was incompatible with the Gaia Hypothesis.”14 His answer was Daisyworld, a simple computer model of a planet covered in dark and light daisies, which steadies its own temperature with no planning at all. It “was invented to show that Darwin’s theory of evolution from natural selection is not contrary to Gaia theory, but part of it.”15
Fellows reports that Gaia theory helped to start what scientists now call Earth system science, which studies the Earth as one connected system, though Lovelock felt it paid only “lip service” to his idea.16 Wilkinson reports a consensus that the early versions, in which life controlled the planet for its own ends, were “wrong because it is not life alone but the whole Earth system that does the regulating”. But he also concludes that “the Earth system is Gaian”, since life plays a major part in keeping it stable.17 The scientist Toby Tyrrell, whose book Wilkinson reviews, goes further, concluding that some parts of the idea are right but that Gaia as a whole is not.
How does this connect with Therapeutic Shamanism? #
Closely, though the books do not discuss Lovelock. They do list Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia, by Stephan Harding, in their bibliographies. And at its heart Therapeutic Shamanism shares Lovelock’s sense of a living Earth of which we are a part. “The Earth is indeed our Mother”, and “This experience that everything is connected and part of Mother EarthMother Earth. The sacred Feminine pole: pure potential, from whom all the Peoples arise. The Lower-World is her realm, and she is all the realms: “The Earth is indeed our Mother.” More about this is the natural state of being for people who live (or lived) shamanically.”18 In words close to Lovelock’s own, “we humans are not apart from Mother Earth but literally a part of Mother Earth.”19 See What are the Sacred Masculine and Sacred Feminine, Father Sky and Mother Earth?
Both are also deeply concerned about the harm humans are doing to the Earth. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors “did not see themselves as owning the land, but as being a part of the land; of belonging to the land.” Since farming took hold, the change has been profound: “We are now in the beginnings of the sixth mass-extinction event, the first one ever caused by a living species; caused by us humans.”20 See What is the Fall?
Where does Therapeutic Shamanism see things differently? #
In three ways. First, for Lovelock the living Earth was a metaphor and a scientific model. For animism it is an experience: “The environment itself is alive. It has its own Soul.” Animists know the land, the sea and the mountain as living beings, not as parts of a mechanism.
Second, Mother Earth in Therapeutic Shamanism is far more than this planet: not “just in the sense of the planet that we live on, but in the vastly bigger sense of the Great Mother, the Creator Goddess”.21 And where Lovelock, late in life, pictured Gaia as “a mother who is nurturing but ruthlessly cruel towards transgressors”,22 Therapeutic Shamanism speaks of “Mother Earth, the ultimate mother who shows unconditional love.”23
Third, they differ over hunter-gatherers. Lovelock thought it wrong to see early humans as living in harmony with nature, and suggested that Aboriginal Australians’ use of fire “may have destroyed the natural forests of the Australian continent”.24 In Therapeutic Shamanism the picture is different: there is no record ever, anywhere in the world, of any hunter-gatherer tribe destroying whole ecosystems, though this is not to make saints of them, since there is evidence that occasionally they hunted some species to extinction.25 The archaeologist M. A. Smith reports that the use and effects of fire in Aboriginal Australia are “well documented ethnographically”, but that “there is little archaeological or palynological data to show that ‘fire-stick’ farming was a major factor in transforming the Australian vegetation.”26
