Gaia Ecology and Mind |
| The mechanistic world view, so long a pillar of modern society, has failed, with the most drastic of consequences. Humanity's abuse of the natural world has undermined the existence of the planet and all species. From "Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming" by Nancy and John Todd, p.15: "Dr. [Gregory] Bateson terms it 'an inappropriate coupling of biological systems,' implying, obviously, that we treat other living systems as inert tools in our mechanical model of the universe. This led him further to question whether the information after being processed through the conscious mind is adequate for understanding another biological system, the behavior of which is based on complicated patterning on a non-conscious level. ...Alfred North Whitehead observed, 'Our science has been founded on simple location and misplaced concreteness,' and 'science divides the seamless coat - or to change the metaphor into a happier form, it examines the coat, which is superficial, and neglects the body, which is fundamental. The disastrous separation of body and mind which has been fixed on European thought by Descartes is responsible for this blindness of science.'" Long enduring mechanocentric concepts have lost their relevance, in the face of the disintegrating relationship between humanity and the planet, in the face of new evidence and challenges of holistic paradigms. As the Todds say in "Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming", pp.16, 17: "As the concept of a mechanistic universe and a shizophrenic attitude to nature are relinquished, we find ourselves on the verge of a cosmology potentially far more cohesive intellectually, more sound intuitively, and more peaceful spiritually. ...Such a realization led Murray Bookchin to state in the introduction to ''The Ecology of Freedom,'' 'Such a philosophy has always been more than an outlook or a mere method for dealing with reality. It has also been what philosophers call an ontology - a description of reality conceived not as mere matter but as active, self-organizing substance with a striving toward consciousness.' ...Gregory Bateson, in ''Mind and Nature'', asked ...'What pattern connects the crab to the lobster and the orchid to the primrose and all four of them to me? And me to you? And all six of us to the amoeba in one direction and to the backward schizophrenic in another? What is in the pattern,' he goes on to ask, 'which connects all living creatures?...the pattern of patterns?...the metapattern?' ...he added that...there was no conventional way of even beginning to describe the tangle of the vast network of interrelationships and our ideas about them which would be necessary to grapple with the metapattern." The individual is embedded in the system of the world, in the metapattern of being in general. The energy of the individual is not contained by a closed system or hermetically sealed space. The energy of mind and being flows into the world, branching, extending self into the environment. The distinction between self and world is an artificial construct that fails to deny open horizons, and the filtering of consciousness into the permeable environment of universe. In the essay "Form, Substance and Difference," by Gregory Bateson, in "Ecology and Consciousness", edited by Richard Grossinger, Bateson says, p.30: "The individual mind is immanent but not only in the body. It is immanent also in pathways and messages outside the body; and there is a larger Mind of which the individual mind is only a sub-system. This larger mind is comparable to God and is perhaps what some people mean by God, but it is still immanent in the total interconnected social systems and planetary ecology." The metapattern connects humanity to the natural world, the landscape of Being is extensive and inclusive. A brilliant theory which begins to address the question of metapattern was conceived by Dr. James Lovelock of England and Dr. Lynn Margulis of Boston University. They called their theory the Gaia hypotheses. Gaia was the Greek goddess of the Earth. The Todds in "Bioshelters, Ocean Arks, City Farming" say, p.19-21: "...the Gaia hypothesis...suggests that the Earth together with its surrounding atmosphere constitutes a continuum, an entity which, taken as a whole, exhibits many of the properties of life. There it hangs in the blackness of space, like a great, luminous, pulsating cell in and on which, in Dr. Lovelock's words (from 'Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth', pp.9 & 11): 'The entire range of living matter on Earth from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae could be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of maintaining the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts...[Gaia can be defined] as a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback of cybernetic systems which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.' The maintenance of relatively constant conditions by interacting active control processes may be conveniently described by the term ''homeostasis'' - meaning those coordinated physiological processes which maintain most of the steady states in a living organism. The Gaia hypothesis sees the Earth as maintaining homeostatic conditions with the biota actively seeking to keep the environment optimal for life. Dr. Lovelock postulates: '...the physical and chemical condition of the surface of the Earth, of the atmosphere, and of the oceans has been and is actively made fit and comfortable by the presence of life itself. This is in contrast to the conventional wisdom which held that life adapted to the planetary conditions as it and they evolved their separate ways.'' ...the thought that the world around us is alive and continuous with us and through us in ways more profound than we can know, comes as something of a shock to urban-bred cultures...This living entity, made up of billions of interlocking, mutually interdependent, non-human lives surrounds us, contains us, and yet is one with us. Such evidence of a metapattern confronts the human intelligence with questions of a larger intelligence or mind...[an example of Gaia's cybernetic capability for self-correction is that the oxygen content of the atmosphere, which is twenty-one per cent, is the safe upper limit for life. Over sevral hundred millions of years, oxygen content has been so regulated as to prevent fires of total devastation to all standing vegetation.] ...As Gregory Bateson remarked, 'Insofar as we are a mental process, to that same extent we must expect the natural world to show similar characteristics of mentality.' James Lovelock co-author of "Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth", says, p147: "To what extent is our collective intelligence also a part of Gaia? Do we as a species constitute a Gaian nervous system and a brain which can consciously anticipate environmental changes?" Our media and sensing technologies are extensions of and propagators of humanity's collective mind, which is interwoven in the fabric of planetary cybersystem. Networks are co-extensive with nature networks and may evolve to self-regulation in harmony with organic meta-patterns of Life. |
©Robert Dunn, Project Director, TeleCommunity |