Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia: 1 (Berlin Technologie Hub Eco pack)

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Yet I realize now that in that tearful longing a demand had slipped in, a wish of innocence for the terms of my historical and enculturated white body on this land to be something other than they are.

Within that paradigm, questions of ‘right action’ and ethical behaviour flounder against a backdrop of silence. What is asked of those of us within whom hierarchies of worth, eradication, and dispossession are folded into the foundations of our imaginations and knowledge systems—medical, scientific, legal, ethical, and beyond?

Though humanity caused the sickness, some say through excess consumption, humanity is composed of billions of individuals. While it might push the animism angle a bit too hard for some tastes (and I'm sure more than a few people will be put off by the book's constant poetic reference to the earth/gaia as "She"), overall it was really just a benign exploration of the Gaia Theory (which I hadn't realised is so controversial), starting with the history of how the theory was developed, and then looking at all the various networks that the earth uses to regulate itself. The mystery of how water, illness, forest, earth can choose to communicate with us is incommensurable, not able to be measured, compared, or known. This dream, the defining mark of modernity that refuses the description of a disabled ecology and its ethical attunement, has disabled the earth. Nothing could have prepared me to feel the dissonance of this enchanted and violated forest, on the lands of the Salish and Kootenai people.

Stephan Harding, a professor at Schumacher College, worked with James Lovelock and others on developing the Daisyworld model. Some ideas were good, interconnectedness, personal involvement and reconnection to nature / Gaia, but overall?

In the chapter on the fungi kingdom, Harding speculates how the network of mycylea may resemble the animal brain --- intelligent, a view I've also written about in my blog entry, The Secret Life of Fungi. Based on James Lovelock's Gaia theory, Harding argues for a new perspective and relationship with the earth. In my notes I had written, “My grief and longing for this act leads small punctures of pain and sorrow to move through me, the surface of my eyes now damp. He believes that traditional mechanistic science has inadvertently fuelled the crisis and that we urgently need to develop an expanded science that cultivates intuitive wisdom alongside rational knowledge so that we can experience everything, from the smallest microbes to our planet’s great life-sustaining cycles, as deeply interconnected.