Gaian Identity and Ecological Humility

A position paper by Anne Primavesi September 2004

What do I mean by Gaian identity? An identity provisionally based (in the usual sense of provisional as well as pro-visional) on a concept integral to Gaia theory: that of our ‘tight coupling’ with the environment. What I call ecological humility follows from understanding ourselves in terms of this coupling.  Arne Naess uses the term  modesty in a similar fashion: as a way of  understanding of ourselves as part of nature in a wide sense of the term. This way is such, he says, (using the analogy of approaching a mountain) that the smaller we come to feel ourselves compared to the mountain, the nearer we come to participating in its greatness. This understanding of our Gaian identity, of our situatedness inside Gaia, recognizes that within its greatness, and nowhere else, lies any greatness we can claim for ourselves.

In Sacred Gaia and in Gaia’s Gift I describe our tight coupling with the environment in terms of various interactive processes between what I call the SelfScape, SocialScape, EarthScape and PoieticScape. The SelfScape is the personal dimension of our coupling, encompassed by the physical, sensual and emotional boundaries of our individual bodies. However, owing to the fact that we live on Earth and are able to see stars we can and do transcend those boundaries. We can transcend them because our Gaian atmosphere is on the one hand just thick enough to enable us to breathe and to prevent us from being burned up by the sun’s rays; while on the other hand, it is not so opaque as to absorb entirely the light of other bodies in the universe. ‘What a fragile balance’; wrote Hans Blumenberg, to whom I owe this observation, ‘between the indispensable and the sublime!’ This balance is, I feel, one of the foundations of what Umberto Eco calls ‘lay religiosity’: ‘a sense of the Holy, of the Limit, of questioning and of awaiting, of communion with something that transcends us, even (he says) in the absence of faith in a personal and provident deity.’ But that sense remains Earthbound.

The boundaries of my SelfScape are also, however, extended and constrained by the fact that my body continually interacts with those of others in the SocialScape. This encompasses various reciprocal exchanges with other bodies: in conversations, foodwebs, sexual encounters, education, play, politics, religion, economics and cultural activities. These exchanges develop and affirm my perception of myself as an individual subject with a certain identity. At the same time they provide opportunities for participation in a wider field of experience and so broaden my understanding of my dependence on others and of the interdependence between us. This necessarily checks the innate tendency to make one’s own perceptions, passions, knowledge or interests the measure of all things. To quote Eco again: ‘We cannot understand who we are without the response and look of the other’. And also, ‘the ethical dimension begins when the other appears on the scene.’

The word ‘other’ is used here without qualification to signal the largest possible understanding of the SocialScape : as being inclusive of what David Abram calls the ‘more-than-human’ community of life on earth. A theological basis for seeing other species in this way (although not in this context) comes from Thomas Aquinas who said that as goodness in God is single and undifferentiated, that goodness cannot be fully expressed in any one creature but is refracted in the myriad of beings that constitute the whole community of life. The practical point that follows from this is that our interdependence on and within the SocialScape not only sustains our individual existence but also materially and spiritually enhances it through the lives and gifts of other people and of other species: as indeed it is diminished by their absence.

Now the presence or absence of members of the more-than-human community is an increasingly significant indicator of health within the largest, most obvious dimension of our tight coupling with the environment, the EarthScape. This is the the planetary system whose physical, chemical, material composition and  evolutionary processes keep Earth habitable for us. It provides the essential material and biological support system from which our SelfScapes and SocialScapes emerged; on which they depend and through which they flourish. Biological interdependence within the EarthScape is a practical Gaian reality.

This outline of various aspects of our ‘tight coupling’ with each other and with our environment belongs to yet another dimension of that coupling: the PoieticScape. This refers to the ways in which we express, share, imagine, evaluate and evoke perceptions of the emotional, practical, personal, conscious and unconscious interrelationships between the SelfScape, SocialScape and EarthScape. The PoieticScape expresses itself most obviously in creative use of metaphor; in material and imaginative word and image couplings found in poetry, drama, science, literature, art, music and religious ritual. Most importantly in our culture, it also manifests itself in the formulation and general acceptance of new scientific concepts and hypotheses, especially in and through their multi-media presentation.

 Now a most important point about the ‘Scapes’: the notional distinctions I have made between them are notional. The boundaries between them mark interactive processes that don’t have boundaries. The reality they describe is that of a living person in a particular environment at any particular time. Taken together, however, they can represent the essential energy exchanges within a human SelfScape that are the factual, biological basis for ecological humility.

It has two aspects: (a) a realization that we cannot create or maintain our own existence independently of other existences or of Gaia’s existence; and (b) feelings and actions that are reverent, expectant and modest in respect of those others and of Gaia. An exacting way of expressing this combination (because more personally and professionally demanding) is Hugh of St. Victor’s admonition that the first lesson of humility is to hold no knowledge in contempt. Then we are ready to learn from others---including the ant, the bee and the mountain goat.

So as our knowledge of the essential interdependence that characterizes our existence deepens, we come to recognize how ignorant we are about the complexity of all the interactions that sustain our lives, and how necessarily deficient our explanations or descriptions of them must be. For their reality shatters any claim I might make to isolate them within notional boundaries (such as the Scapes). From this awareness grows the capacity for awe that, as it grows, fosters the capacity for respecting and cherishing other beings; and for modesty before them.

This for me is the moment when reductionism and holism meet: the moment to recognize not only what Gaia theory says but also what it does not, and indeed cannot say. We know in part, and can only express in part, that of which we are part; and by virtue of which we know or express anything. Such awareness of and attention to our Gaian identity supports an ecological humility that resists doctrines of exceptionalism and the exercise of power over the other, however derived or legitimated: whether through biological inheritance, military strength, scientific knowledge or alleged divine appointment.