GAIA: The Quiet Revolution

Also see The GAIA Model by the same author.

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A Manifesto by Thomas I. Ellis, Ph.D.

 

“We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. … Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly.”

“Gaia, “the ancient Greek name for the primordial Earth Goddess, has gained currency in recent years a kind of shorthand for the Earth when viewed as a complex adaptive system, unique as far as we know, in which the processes of life—photosynthesis, respiration, evapotranspiration, speciation, predation, and decay—act collectively to sustain the biogeochemical conditions that in turn sustain life. In short, Gaia is the only name we have for the Earth as a system rather than a mere resource—a resilient but perishable system of which we ourselves are a part, from which we came and to which we will return.

Part 1: Glomart and Gaia

We all live today in two worlds—two complex adaptive systems that determine both the possibility and the conditions of our existence. One is the money-based global market economy, for which I have coined the shorthand “Glomart” (by parodic analogy to Walmart of K-Mart); the other is the living Earth, or Gaia.  Glomart is the world we have made; Gaia is the world that made us. We need them both, of course—Gaia for the basic necessities—the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat, the ecosystems that sustain us and recycle our wastes, and Glomart for our livelihoods and our material well-being—our houses, cars, computers, mass media, and everything else that money alone will buy. At the convergence of Glomart and Gaia is a rapidly vanishing zone called “community”—the place where we negotiate to resolve the inevitable conflicts between private interests in personal gain and the public interest in clean air, pure water, healthy topsoil, and biological diversity.

The crisis of our time can be summed up very simply: Glomart is rapidly co-opting all of our communities—local, state, national, and international, yet the basic operating rules of Glomart are fundamentally incompatible with the realities of Gaia.

Glomart is based entirely on the money system, a zero-sum game based on nothing but  arithmetic, an abstract transform of information about the marginal exchange value of commodities. The binding rules of Glomart are therefore based entirely on an arithmetical logic of maximization—the major premise is that more is always better. Hence every corporate enterprise in the world has as its inescapable mandate the maximization of profits and the minimization of costs. No other basis for operation is possible, if the enterprise is to survive in a competitive global market. Because of this central mandate, Glomart has created a global culture of consumerism, where advertisers are in mutual competition to seize every opportunity they have to convey one overriding message to their potential customers: You are what you own.  These two messages—more is always better and you are what you own—are conveyed through ceaseless advertising on television, films, print journalism, and billboards, because the central mandate of a money -based economy, where everyone is in competition to maximize their profits,  is to create endless demand for consumer products, regardless of their consequences.

This drive for maximization of profits has also engendered another widespread cultural premise among decisionmakers in both the private and public spheres—Nothing has value until it has a price. That is, no finite resource—trees, land, minerals, fossil fuels, wildlife, parks, or anything else—has any “real” (market) value until it has been parceled out, sold, extracted, and transformed into commodities that turn a profit—board feet, real estate, jewelry, gasoline, furs, or snowmobile playgrounds.

Despite growing widespread public recognition of the social and ecological costs of this paradigm of endless growth in production and consumption, all corporate decision making, and increasingly the decision making of the politicians whom they have bought, is governed by only one consideration—The bottom line is the bottom line. Whatever maximizes corporate profits is the course of action to follow, regardless of social and ecological consequences. Hence, even when a corporate CEO is environmentally conscious, such as William Clay Ford, the current CEO of Ford Motor Company, there is  little or nothing he can do to prevent his company from aggressively marketing SUVs or lobbying to prevent the passage of higher gas mileage standards, despite their otherwise commendable investment in retooling the Rouge River Plant as a model of ecologically sensitive industrial design. Corporate leaders are not bad people necessarily; they are operating, however, entirely within a culture of maximization—a culture where “more is always better” is the inexorable major premise of every decision.

If our planet were infinite, the logic of Glomart would work exactly as its free-market proponents claim it does—to steadily raise the general level of affluence and educational opportunities everywhere, while stimulating technological innovation that will make environmental protection more affordable. But in the real, finite world we inhabit—a biologically driven world only 25,000 miles in circumference, with over six billion human inhabitants, fished-out oceans, limited and overstressed arable land, and rapidly disappearing forests, fuel, freshwater, and topsoil—the Glomart logic of mandatory maximization can yield nothing but a feeding frenzy on vanishing resources, and a monopoly game in which the major players become fewer and fewer, until one player owns everything and all the rest have nothing and are in debt to him.

The operating principles of Gaia, the biosphere on which we all depend, stand in diametric opposition to these mandatory rules of the Glomart system. The table below illustrates this distinction very clearly:

Let us look at these distinctions more closely:

1. More is always better/Enough is enough. In contrast to Glomart, a system which is entirely based on the arithmetical logic of maximization, Gaia functions entirely on a logic of optimality. In biological systems, too much or too little of anything is toxic to the system. If we get too hot, we die; if we get too cold, we die. If we eat too much, we die; if we eat too little, we die. If populations of any species expand beyond their carrying capacity, they die off; if they drop below a critical population, they are no longer in genetically viable and they die off. As Gregory Bateson once said, “there are no monotone values in biology;” nothing for which more is always better. Similarly, in indigenous cultures that live close to the land, excessive consumption is always considered a vice to be condemned, as it was in medieval Europe, where gluttony and avarice were among the seven deadly sins. Yet today, Glomart’s advertising exists entirely to promote avarice and gluttony by appealing to the other sins, such as pride, envy, lust, and sloth.
2. Owning vs. Doing. Private, zero-sum ownership—what’s mine is not yours—is the foundation of the money economy. We are therefore constantly encouraged by advertising to emulate or envy the rich, to despise or pity the poor, and to make as much money as possible in order to buy the status symbols that will make us acceptable to others—cars or SUVs, clothing, computers, suburban houses. To acquire these status symbols, we are encouraged to go into ever-increasing debt through credit cards. Yet in the natural world, and in indigenous societies, private ownership does not exist, and sharing is the norm.  A woodpecker who pecks a hole in a tree to build a nest will share that nest with a host of other creatures, both simultaneously and consecutively. Animals are territorial, of course, but the boundaries of their territories are fluid, not fixed, and they will drive off other creatures only if they pose an immediate threat. Whereas we derive our identity from our possessions, other living things (and people in indigenous cultures) are defined by their function, either in their communities or in their ecosystems. Doing is far more important than owning.
3. Value as Commodity Price vs. Value as Systemic Functionality. The difference between Glomart and Gaian systems of valuation can best be perceived if we look at a tree. By Glomart logic, a tree is worthless unless it is either cut down and transformed into wood products for the market, or (occasionally) left standing as an “amenity”—something in a park that is nice for visitors to look at (after they have paid admission). But by Gaian logic, a tree serves the following purposes simultaneously: oxygen through photosynthesis, evapotranspiration to provide cloud cover, habitat for a wide range of species, nitrogen fixation (in symbiosis with mycorrhyzal fungi), shade to provide microclimates, water retention, and after they die, a “nursery log” and topsoil builder, and ultimately, carbon sequestration. Yet none of these ecological functions of a tree enter into the value calculations of the global market. As a consequence, forests all over the world are disappearing rapidly, at an incalculable cost to our future.
4. The Bottom Line vs. Life. The profit margin is an abstraction; it is simply a number. Yet this profit margin is necessarily, according to the rules of the money game, the sole criterion for all corporate decision-making, regardless of the adverse consequences of those decisions on forests, oceans, biodiversity, air, soil,  or water quality, or human welfare. Yet for Gaia, the biological world, the only “bottom line” is life itself—its health, competence, and adaptive flexibility from one generation to the next. This is the fundamental distinction between the market economy, which operates entirely to maximize the short-term gains of individual or corporate players, and the living Earth, which operates on far longer time cycles, and has no purpose beyond its own continuation and diversification.

We can see, then, that our global ecological crisis is rooted in a fundamental contradiction between two “operating systems”—the infinitely maximizing logic of arithmetic (money) that drives Glomart, and the optimizing bio-logic that drives Gaia. To use an organic metaphor, Glomart is a cancer on Gaia—an explosively growing economic, political, and cultural subsystem that has lost sight of its total dependency on  its sustaining biological system, and is now heedlessly parasitizing and poisoning its host. This is nobody’s fault; it is not the result of any evil conspiracy. Rather, the cancerous tendencies of Glomart are inevitable, given the maximizing, zero-sum logic of the money game. These destructive maximizing tendencies could only be constrained by government regulation in the public interest,  but when the market burst the bounds of nation-states and became global, all such regulation was rendered futile, and governments simply became the captive handmaids of corporate interests. The global market now regulates itself, through self-appointed international agencies such as the WTO, IMF, and the World Bank, according to the sole criterion of maximization of corporate profits at any social or environmental cost.

Cancer, of course,  has only two possible outcomes: spontaneous remission, or death (systemic collapse). A Gaian future—or no future. If the Glomart monopoly game continues in its current headlong juggernaut toward total political, economic, military, and cultural domination of the world, our future holds nothing but an ever-widening gap between rich and poor nations, and rich and poor people within these nations, coupled with a corporate feeding frenzy on what remains of the world’s vital resources—fossil fuels, water, topsoil, minerals, forests, fisheries, biodiversity, and arable land. Wars over dwindling resources will become commonplace, led by militaristic superpowers like the United States—once a model of responsible democratic governance, but now little more than Glomart Central, its government, military, and media hijacked by corporate interests. The game will continue until the peak and decline of world fossil fuel reserves—the abundant cheap energy source that drives  the global market– starts to bite hard, causing prices to skyrocket, the economy to collapse, and the world to degenerate quickly into shrinking, heavily defended islands of wealth in a turbulent, growing sea of poverty, destitution, random violence, and ecological devastation. A global dieoff.

Unless…

Part 2: Gaia: Myth, Model, Metaphor, and Movement.

How can four letters—G-A-I-A—possibly help us in this dire state of affairs?

The short answer is this. The world we live in is the collective consequence of individual decisions we each make every day. Those decisions are based on what we consider to be important—on our values—as well as on our habits and impulses. To the exact extent we assume responsibility for the social and ecological consequences of our decisions, we can reshape our future.  But the vast majority of us make our significant decisions—where and how we spend our money, where and how we gain our livelihood, what we do with our stuff, and how we relate to other people—based on a combination of impulse, habit, and short-term self-interest. Glomart relies on this fact in all their advertising. But we already know that people are fully capable of sacrificing, or at least moderating, their short-term self-interest when a larger “self” with which they identify—their community, religion, or nation—is threatened or in need. In World War II, people readily accepted rationing of vital needs like gasoline, sugar, and textiles in the interest of a common cause—defending our nation and the world against the aggression of Germany and Japan. On a more modest scale, most people routinely moderate their self-interest in deference to the prevailing norms and interests of their community—they do not steal or kill, they join their neighbors in cleaning up after a hurricane, they volunteer to help the elderly or needy. In short, they identify with one another, and act accordingly, passing laws to promote such identification and to curb self-interested behavior that is destructive to the larger systems (community, state, or nation) with which they identify.

So what would happen if Gaia became a household word—if the majestic image of our blue-and-white living planet against the blackness of outer space cropped up as often as the American Flag? What if Gaian consciousness—awareness of our embeddedness in, and total dependence upon, the biosphere of the only living planet we will ever know—pervaded our educational system from kindergarten to graduate school? How might this happen?

At present, very few people even know what Gaia means. Ironically, however, this fact can work in our favor, since most people are already sick and tired of hearing about “the environment.” Using the word “Gaia” in its place—as the only word we know which embraces humanity-in-nature as a single system—could thus give new life to the environmental movement.

Nevertheless, this will be difficult. Those few who have heard of the word “Gaia” at all, mostly scientists, tend either to dismiss it as New Age nonsense, or (if they are neopagans) embrace uncritically the mystical idea that the Earth is a living being with whom they can commune by the right rituals.  In short, the word has been safely marginalized and ignored by the corporate media, and stripped of its more rigorous meanings and revolutionary implications. But this marginalization is reversible, and Gaia can gain respectability in the intellectual and social mainstream,  if we begin by a clear definition of Gaia that does justice to all the current uses of the concept, while simultaneously distinguishing clearly between them. Hence I have defined Gaia as a myth, a model, a metaphor, and a movement. Let’s look at each of these definitions,  the constituencies associated with them, and both the continuities and distinctions between them.

• Gaia as Myth: In its origins, of course, Gaia was the ancient Greek name for the Earth, conceived as an all-nurturing, all-consuming mother goddess, the consort of Ouranos (the sky). This concept of the Earth as Great Mother or Great Goddess was not unique, of course, to Greek civilization; rather, it is a common theme, with many variations, in indigenous cultures throughout the world. But many people today are unaware that this concept was embedded in Western European civilization as well, as the allegorical figure of Natura, often portrayed as a nude female, with one foot in the water, one on land, and her head extending all the way up to the “fixed stars”, with a chain on one wrist connecting her to God, high above the visible universe, and the other connecting Man to her as her pet monkey. (I refer, of course, to the famous cosmological chart published by Hermetic philosopher Robert Fludd in 1619). The implication of this allegorical image is clear: Man is at the service of, and dependent upon, Nature in the same way that Nature is at the service of, and dependent upon, God. This archetype of Gaia-as-Natura figures in Shakespeare as well, in the opening lines of Friar Lawrence’s flower sermon from Romeo and Juliet: “The Earth that’s Nature’s mother is her tomb; What is her burying grave, that is her womb…” So as a mythic archetype, Gaia is nothing new.
• Gaia as Model: Precisely because it is a mythic name, James Lovelock stirred controversy throughout the scientific community, while at the same time drawing widespread public attention from the religious community and the “New Age” fringe, when he adopted this mythic name to refer to his revolutionary hypothesis about the nature of life on earth, back in 1970. Lovelock, a world-class British atmospheric chemist who had already designed the Electron Capture Detector, responsible for the discovery of traces of ozone-depleting PCBs in the upper atmosphere, worked with his colleague, bacteriologist Lynn Margulis, to propound a revolutionary new model of codetermination between the processes of life—photosynthesis, respiration, calcification, nitrogen fixation, etc.—and the thermal, atmospheric, oceanic, and topsoil conditions responsible for rendering the Earth habitable. The short form of his hypothesis was that life itself sustains the far-from-equilibrium conditions that sustain life. Through photosynthesis, life turns raw solar energy into biomass, making it available to other life; though filtration, life keeps rainwater fresh, rather than salinated, thus making it available to other terrestrial life. Through topsoil-building, life chemically transforms the mineral substrate by mixing it with organic matter, thus rendering those minerals available to other life. And through photosynthesis and respiration, life oxygenates the atmosphere, fixes nitrogen, and sequesters carbon, making both vital gases—oxygen and nitrogen—available to other life, while removing excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. These are only a few of the homeostatic Gaian mechanisms that Lovelock, Margulis, and others have identified, by which life sustains and enhances the terrestrial conditions that favor its own propagation.
• Gaia as Metaphor: As scientists, Lovelock and Margulis focused only on the codetermination of the physiosphere and the biosphere, largely ignoring humanity, other than to suggest that, on a geological timeline, the human imprint would be insignificant, even if we destroyed ourselves. It fell to others—leading edge humanistic philosophers such as Fritjof Capra, William Irwin Thompson, Rosemary Radford Reuther, and Ken Wilber—to explore the cultural implications of Gaia. Through a number of such publications, Gaia has emerged as a central metaphor for the intellectual revolution spurred by the holarchic paradigm, originally developed by thinkers such as Teilhard de Chardin, Gregory Bateson, Arthur Koestler, and Ervin Laszlo. A holarchy (Koestler’s term) refers to a hierarchy of holons, of entities which are simultaneously self-organized wholes on their own, and parts of larger wholes. The Gaian holarchy, then, consists of three concentric spheres—Physiosphere, Biosphere, and Noosphere. The physiosphere refers to the physical substrate of life—Earth (minerals), Air (gases), Fire (energy) and Water. The Biosphere is, of course, the web of life itself, which, as we have seen, depends on and simultaneously transforms the physiosphere—Earth into topsoil; Water into fresh water; Air into oxygenated air; and Fire (solar energy) into biomass through photosynthesis. The Noosphere, then, is the sphere of information that emerged with the evolution of human language. It consists of four social determinants—four distinct categories of information that interact to engender our social world: money (information about the value of commodities); politics (information about authority and privilege); technology (information about how to do things); and culture (information about meaning and value).  The Noosphere emerged from,  depends on, and transforms both the Biosphere and the Physiosphere, just as the Biosphere emerged from,  depends on, and transforms the Physiosphere. And just as solar energy is the ultimate driver of the Biosphere, culture is the ultimate driver of the Noosphere. And culture is propagated through words—like “economy vs. ecology,” or like “Gaia.”
• Gaia as Movement: The emerging worldwide Gaia movement, then, consists of all the current and potential political and cultural manifestations of the holistic thinking embedded in the Gaia concept as myth, model, and metaphor. It both includes and transcends the global environmental movement, for it embraces not only politics, but also technology, economics, and culture. Technologically the Gaia movement is manifested in all the emerging technological innovations that reduce our dependence on fossil fuels (solar and wind energy), conserve biodiversity and topsoil (organic farming, holistic land management, and permaculture), clean up pollution (bioremediation),  facilitate recycling and full-cycle throughput (industrial ecology), and redesign buildings and communities accordingly (sustainable architecture). Economically, the Gaia movement manifests as shareholder activism, green consumerism, and socially responsible investment, as well as in critiques of the dominant Glomart models of economics. And culturally, the Gaia movement can be seen in the growing recognition, among holistic practitioners and the “cultural creatives,” that what is best for the Earth is also best for our communities and for our bodies, minds, and spirits as well—whether it is community-based agricultural cooperatives, organic gardening,  herbal healing, or simply walking and bicycling.

Part 3: The Quiet Revolution

So how do we get there from here? How do we move from Glomart–a dysfunctional global industrial and economic system that is parasitizing our planet, wasting our communities, poisoning our minds with television, and destroying our future—to Gaia—our vision of a peaceful, symbiotic, and sustainable world in which humanity fully acknowledges its total dependence on the health of the biosphere, and acts accordingly?

I do not pretend to have a definitive answer to this, the most urgent question of our times. But I have some idea, I believe, of what would be required for such a comprehensive cultural transformation. It would have to be what Douglas Hofstadter has called a “viral idea”—a self-validating and self-propagating set of interrelated ideas and practices that quickly catches on and spreads across cultures because it provides a coherent explanation for people’s experience, gives them a basis for identification with others, even across cultures, and meets their deepest psychic needs. Examples of such viral ideas in history include Buddhism, Christianity, Islam, Protestantism, Democracy, and Communism. All have their attendant pathologies, but all have radically transformed large parts of the world in a remarkably short time, even though the first three spread only by word of mouth and manuscript, in the era before mass communications.

Despite their dramatic differences, these viral ideas all had certain common features, including imagery, symbols, and key concepts, as well as coherently stated epistemological premises, ethical precepts, and self-validating practices. Although many were associated with one or more charismatic founders, they were all propagated by the example set by communities of practice, whether itinerant monks, churches, mosques, or revolutionary committees.

If Gaia is to become a successfully propagated viral idea, it needs all of these characteristics, without the attendant pathologies. And the concept itself is ideally suited to these requirements. It already has a coherent epistemological foundation (holism or systemic thinking); an emotionally compelling image (the image of the living Earth from outer space), and a key concept (Gaia as myth, model, metaphor, and movement). What is needed, then, is to articulate the ethical precepts and prescribe the core practices that derive from this understanding.

It is important to emphasize from the outset that Gaia is not to be regarded as a new religion. The Gaia model and metaphor is an explanatory framework for understanding self-evident and inescapable scientific realities—the codetermination of life and the physical conditions that support it, and the dependence of humanity on the health of the biological world. It has nothing whatsoever to say about the traditional questions of religion—the nature of divinity, the purpose and destiny of humanity, or life after death. One can therefore, without contradiction, be a Gaian Christian, a Gaian Jew, a Gaian Muslim, a Gaian Buddhist, or whatever else. In fact, Gaianity is the only completely nonexclusive category there is, since everything that breathes, eats, and drinks upon the Earth, everything that is born, lives, and dies, is ipso facto a Gaian.

However, one can derive distinct and reliable ethical precepts from a scientific understanding of Gaia as a finite complex adaptive system. Here is one such attempt. We (conscious Gaians) hold these truths to be self-evident:

• That humanity is a part of, not apart from, the natural world or Gaia.
• That Gaia is a holarchic system consisting of nested individual (tightly coupled) and aggregate (loosely coupled) holons. The former include cells, organisms, and organizations; the latter include cell colonies, ecosystems, and societies. But all these are subsystems of Gaia.
• That the three basic survival criteria of all biological systems, at all holarchic levels, are health (internal homeostasis), competence (specialized abilities to function within a specific context or niche), and adaptive flexibility, (or the ability to adapt to unpredictable changes within one’s context or niche; a potentiality which always depends on diversity, either of  species, skills, or ideas).
• That any biological system—individual or aggregate—which thrives at the expense of the larger systems that sustain it will eventually destroy itself. The cancer cell kills its host, and thus dies.

From these premises, self-evident to any biologically literate person, we may derive the following Gaian categorical imperative: Make all decisions based on that which simultaneously promotes the health, competence, and adaptive flexibility of ourselves and all the larger communities on which we depend for our survival: our communities, societies, bioregions, nations, international community, and Gaia. Any self-serving behavior by any agent—personal, corporate, or national—which compromises the health, competence, and adaptive flexibility of any of the larger systems on which it depends, is dysfunctional.

The Plan: GAIA International.

How, then, can we best propagate Gaianity, as defined above? My plan is to create a nonprofit organization devoted entirely to this purpose, called GAIA International (Global Awareness Interdisciplinary Alliance). Its mission is to sponsor projects, events, and publications that promote ecological awareness, understanding, and responsibility in every academic field, in public policy, and in every domain of human endeavor.  To the already existing image and concept of Gaia, this organization is adding a readily recognizable symbol—the Gaia Logo—for its participants to display in conjunction with all its projects. The Gaia Logo consists of a white negative space Solar Cross (tetradic mandala) on a square dark blue background, with a green “G” and “I” superimposed on it, thus creating an anagram of “Gaia” as well as the initials.  The Solar Cross was selected because it is a universal symbol of wholeness and unity, recognized as such by cultures the world over. It is also the astronomical symbol of the Earth. In conjunction with the mythic name of Gaia and the deeply moving photo-image of the whole Earth, the Gaia Logo immediately strikes those who see it as a powerful archetypal symbol.

GAIA International will set up chapters on college campuses all over the world, which will engage in sponsoring and organizing two ongoing projects: Gaia Forum and the Quiet Revolution.  A Gaia Forum consists of three parts: (1) an ecovisionary guest speaker, to address one or more global ecological issues; (2) a panel of faculty respondents from diverse disciplines, who bring their own disciplinary perspectives to bear on the issues raised by the guest speaker; and (3) a break-out session, in which participants get to discuss the presentation and are charged to brainstorm local initiatives that will move in the direction of solving the problems and issues raised by the guest speaker and the panelists. The active participation of the audience is a crucial part of Gaia Forum events, setting them apart from normal guest lectures, where the audience is usually quite passive after the Question and Answer period. The goal is to give participants a chance to network, to think creatively, and to become personally involved, rather than simply listening and then going back to their normal routines.

The Quiet Revolution is the outreach, fundraising, and publicity component of GAIA International. It consists of local projects, presentations, and campaigns organized around three basic themes, accessible even to young children:

• Good Buy—projects that promote responsibility for the social and ecological consequences of the money we spend and invest.
• Good Work—projects that promote career paths or volunteer activities that encourage people to do one or more of the following:
  • Learn Gaia—learning all about ecology, about the biosphere and our effects upon it.
  • Teach Gaia—teaching others, especially young children, to assume responsibility for the ecological consequences of their behavior.
  • Heal Gaia—getting involved with local environmental groups, or with ecological restoration projects.
  • Create Gaia—creating community cooperatives, organic gardens, new solar technologies, or other projects to facilitate our collective transition to a Gaian lifestyle.
• Good Will—projects that encourage working with any and all existing organizations, both public and private, to encourage ecological responsibility without finger-pointing or polarization. Taking  invitational, rather than confrontational approaches to creating a Gaian culture, whenever possible.

The Quiet Revolution will be propagated by any or all of the usual promotional techniques for rapidly disseminating information and getting people to identify with our cause—buttons, bumper stickers, posters, coffee mugs, all festooned with the Gaia Logo, the Earth Image, and slogans like “Join the Quiet Revolution: Ride a Bike!” or “Join the Quiet Revolution: Recycle.” These can also be used in collaborative publicity and fundraising campaigns with other organizations with similar goals.

Future goals of GAIA International include a transaction-enabled website for purchasing books, videos, and promotional materials, as well as for links to campus chapters as they grow, and to the vast array of other, more specialized organizations working on similar Gaian goals. I also hope to start a scholarly journal, Gaia Quarterly, and to sponsor regional and international Gaia conferences. Once the Gaia movement catches on, an infinite array of other such projects for promoting sustainability and collaborating with other organizations will arise.

I hope I have persuaded you that I am onto something here. I am quite confident that Gaia—as myth, model, metaphor, and movement—has all the requisite ingredients to become the nodal idea of this century and beyond, catalyzing the spontaneous remission of the cancer of the Earth.

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