Good Morning Future Positivists, I am pleased to announce that Jivan Vatayan is joining the SynEARTH.network as a contributing editor. I have found his writing both wise and beautiful. You can read samples here: Population Consumption and the Banality of Evil or Meditation—A powerful response to social problems. You may have followed our GAIAN dialogues. A reader sends a note commenting on those dialogues.
To Timothy Wilken and Jivan Vatayan:
I must say I’m thoroughly enjoying this dialogue. It is rare to find a “place” even on the Web, where thoughtful and reflective Gaians can debate these basic issues in such depth, and with such insight.
A few comments:
(1) about names: It seems that many of us (and I don’t exclude myself) are caught up in inventing our own idiosyncratic languages to describe insights into reality that the conventional (dualistic) language of our dominant culture seems to miss altogether. Jivan has created, and is attached to, “The Ecodiversity Lifeform” as his term of choice for what Timothy and I (and most others in this emerging field of inquiry) call “Gaia,” in deference to the seminal insights of Lovelock and the ancient Greek myth and metaphor underlying it, while mainstream scientists might prefer to call it simply “the biosphere.” But these concepts are essentially interchangeable, so I prefer to stick to the one with the widest currency and (for me) greatest metaphorical resonance–“Gaia.”
Similarly, my invented name for what we all agree to be the Cancer of the Earth is “Glomart” (short for “Global Market Economy”); others have used a wide variety of coinages for this money-based socioeconomic monstrosity within which we all coexist–I’ve seen “IndCom”(for “Industrial-Commercial”) as well as simply “the global corporate elite” or whatever. But despite our idiosyncratic choice of names, it is clear that we’re all talking about the same thing–the fundamental incompatibility of our man-made self-maximizing order of money with the finite, self-optimizing order of nature (which, of course, both engendered and sustains us).
(2) about the evolutionary role of humanity on Gaia: Timothy envisions a noble role for humanity, where we somehow metastasize from the terminal Cancer of Gaia into the central nervous system of the next evolutionary phase of Gaia–and I hope he is right, but I haven’t the slightest notion of whether this is true. Others consider humanity an evolutionary dead-end, doomed by the invention of language and the discovery of fossil fuels to enter a boom and bust cycle, like any other invasive exotic that has no natural predators–only this time the “bust” will be global, and catastrophic not only to humanity, but also to the diversity and resilience of Gaia. Again, I don’t know which view is right. Maybe both, or neither.
But I think we need to guard against carrying the organismic model too far. Gaia is an aggregate (loosely coupled) system like an ecosystem, not an integrated (tightly coupled) system like an organism. As Tyler Volk, a leading Gaian scientist, has put it, “Cells are cells; organisms are organisms; and Gaia is Gaia.” In other words, analogies only go so far. Gaia, as an aggregate system, needs no “central nervous system”–although we (the global human community) might well need one, to keep from consuming one another in bloody, internecine tribal warfare. Gaia can do perfectly well without us, but we cannot do at all without her.
–Tom