The Earth an Unconcerned Observer

This series of blogs were originally written in 2010. I have extracted the salient points made then in blue and provided updated commentary, detailing things as I see them today.

“I would feel more optimistic about a bright future for man if he spent less time proving that he can outwit Nature and more time tasting her sweetness and respecting her seniority.”

Elwyn Brooks White

I feel a deep resonance with James Lovelock’s notion of Gaia, whilst on one level it is metaphorical in that it suggests the Earth’s biota is a sentient being, I believe it is helpful conceptually for us to consider it as such since it offers us the opportunity to identify with it and develop a better way of relating to it. However, I believe we also need to recognise the hard truth of the matter, the Earth does not care about us, we have evolved out of the complex history of life on Earth, but we are not essential to it, in fact nothing much is, certainly nothing that is alive. Species have come and gone throughout the ages based on their ability to adapt to, or survive in, the ever-changing environment on Earth. We seem to believe that we are somehow special, more important than other creatures, perhaps we are but only in so much as we have developed the ability to cause so much harm. The point we must remember is that life on Earth will continue well after our extinction, yes it may look very different and there may be time needed to recover from the impact of humankind, but it will indeed happen.

My thinking here has not changed, I believe it is essential that we recognise our absolute dependence on the Earth. We must begin to truly work cooperatively as one species to live in harmony with nature and to undo the damage we have already done. The Covid-19 pandemic is a minor nudge from Gaia (the Earth) to remind us of her omniscience. Unfortunately our response has done little to suggest that we have understood the urgency for and required scale of, the changes we need to make in our ways of being in the world. I fear our antipathy will result in the emergence of a far more virulent Covid variant (CV-27).

IGAIA takes its name from James Lovelock’s theory with the ‘I’ recognising the potential of the connectivity of the World Wide Web to assist in coordinating collective action which transcends geographical, cultural and political boundaries. Unfortunately, as of today, the positive potential of the World Wide Web has been hijacked by those seeking to promote greater unsustainable consumption and aggregation of wealth and power.

The real concern therefore is not for the good of the Earth, it is for the good of ourselves because we are the only ones who really have a vested interest. I believe we need to start to see this as an issue for Humankind’s survival and not about saving the planet, an irritant we may be but a long-term threat we are not. If people truly believed that their own children and grandchildren were going to suffer, they may actually be willing to re-examine what really matters to them and forgo their desire for more and settle for being more.

IGAIA’s Social Change Platform ‘ICare Enough’ is designed to enable both adults and children to work together to build a better future for all. A series of short videos introducing the platform were released early in 2019, as a prelude to an abandoned global crowdfunding campaign to fund its development and roll-out. We have now almost completed the development of a new social media topology called ‘The Nexus’ which will circumvent all the current obstacles inherent in the existing social media space. ICare Enough will be hosted in this secure and inclusive environment.

I truly believe that we are living at a pivotal point in human history, they say that the night is darkest just before the dawn and looking at our world today with all its crisis’s including global terrorism, social unrest, corporate exploitation, political nepotism, environmental devastation, climate change and Covid-19 to name but a few, things certainly look extremely dark to me. So, what might the dawn bring? Perhaps a time where we meet in our sameness and not in our difference, a realisation that we all need to collaborate to avert the impending disaster and in so doing, we might actually learn that there is a different, more meaningful, morally richer way of relating to each other and the world around us. If, like Martin Luther King, I had a dream, this would be it.

I wish that now, ten years after I first wrote the original blog, there was some evidence of progress having been made. The Climate Change Summit 2019 showed up vast differences in perspectives across different nations and absolute indifference from the USA. For once, I find myself in full agreement with Kristalina Georgieva the Chairwoman and Managing Director of the International Monetary Fund, when she said “We are clearly the last generation that can change the course of climate change, but we are also the first generation with its consequences,”