Gaian Identity and Ecological Humility

Comments from Pat Spallone on Anne Primavesi's paper
September 2004

There are many perspectives from which to reply, so let me position myself. I come to the Gaia network with an interest in science as a way of knowing, and within that my engagement with ethics.

This conversation with Anne was prompted by Umberto Eco's essay which shows sympathy with a Gaian perspective, 'When the Other Appears on the Scene'. He writes, 'even the vision of a great and single cosmic substance in which one day we shall be reabsorbed can reveal a vision of tolerance and benevolence precisely because we are all interested in the equilibrium and harmony of this sole substance. The is so because we tend to think it impossible for this substance not to be in some way enhanced or deformed by the things we have done over the millennia.'

This is a relational view of human existence, which is not far from the 'tight coupling' with the environment which Anne identifies as a concept integral to Gaia. There are real conditions of living, though many ways of knowing them; and from that we may get a 'lay ethics'. But there are choices, I want to add. Some ways of understanding and some choices are better than others in accounting for the world and in setting our ethics. This is where difficult questions lie.

My concern is with science as a powerful knowledge system in our time and place. What sorts of societies do we make that are science and technology based? You can get to a dodgy political theory from Gaia, e.g., I can see someone coming up with an oppressive form of communalism which sets individuals in the service of the commune, and defines women in narrow biological terms as those who have their role in the domestic sphere more than in public life. Here is my feminist concern. Feminism understands very well the uses of 'the natural' to naturalise ideas about human difference. Nineteenth century biological and medical sciences mediated sex roles, gender difference and social stability. Scientific ideas can be understood as mediations, 'they speak to and contain implications about matters beyond their explicit concern', as historian of science Ludmilla Jordanova puts it. Mediation as a term draws attention to the multiple transformable meanings of ideas in culture. Scientific ideas are not immune to this.

So my concern with Anne's idea of 'the factual biological basis for ecological humility'. This seems too linear, placing biology prior to culture and feeling. I am perhaps caught in my own history and problematic theories about the supposed biological basis of women's behaviour, of intelligence, of criminal tendency. These it seems to me are 'another' reading of the fact that there are biological conditions of living from which our understanding may proceed.

The best definition of democracy I know is from WH Auden. He said it doesn't matter what form democracy takes; the form is secondary. What matters is that it is a completely open society. My concern is that Gaian Identity should not become a closed doctrine. Anne's paper serves that concern implicitly with its sense that scapes are notional concepts, and with her seriously important qualification that we need to recognise not only what Gaia theory says but also what it does not and cannot say.

But a hard question arises. In assessing science-based claims, whether about the environment, about animals, about human conditions and human behaviour, where is the burden of proof? Respect for the multiplicity of knowledge is crucial for an open society. But what do we do about lies, about violence to the environment, to people, to animals, which could after all be done in the name of Gaia?

Do we need to foreground and make explicit the ways that Gaia theory is limited? Or is that overplaying a concern, a waste of time and an impossible task? Maybe the point is to be crystal clear that social thought (for want of a better word) and scientific theory are distinct even if intimately related and 'tightly coupled' as cultures of knowledge. I suppose this distinction is why I'm resistant to naming an identity as Gaian. But that isn't really important. What is important is that this distinction is vital in the political realm. There are lies and liars at the extreme; there is violence in the world and to the world that is extreme. And there is business as usual, as in the debates and struggles over what kind of societies we make. I'm thinking of the USA here, the up and coming presidential election.

Anne's perspective stimulated me to think in another register, to be open to another way of thinking altogether. She refers to Eco: 'to communion with something that transcends us', adding 'that sense remains Earthbound'. I resist the idea of transcendence in asking 'transcendent to what?' Is not the idea of transcendence at loggerheads with Gaia? Is this about existence of a deity outside the world? Or does transcendence here mean something closer to enlightenment in Eastern thought? Does this sense of transcendence allow acceptance as earthbound reality those aspects of being human that can not be explained by science as we know it? What I like about Anne's rendering, on further thought, is that while being earthbound, it doesn't hold a grudge against a sense of the sacred or spiritual.

By not shunning the idea of transcendence, Anne gives us an opening to make choices about the stories we tell and the political systems we make; choices that are not obliged to rely fully on a burden of scientific proof to inform our value judgments, but are earthbound nonetheless. It gives us an opening to do the right thing, while giving science, scientific concepts, and scientific explanations a rightful place in creative endeavour and imagination. It may also be a notional idea.

Finally, I'm going to venture that Eco's understanding is part of a larger set of social transformations, something I want to call the Gaian turn. In my own areas of work, I see it happening in several places. It is happening in social theory in the concepts of 'new materialism'. It is happening in the practical discipline of medical ethics where the idea of the patient as autonomous individual, disconnected, is most fragile. I see it most clearly in the biosciences in the apparent turn away from reductionism towards 'systems biology'. Systems developmental biology may argue - this is very Gaia - that there is no such thing as the environment, but rather we are the environment, dependent and related and in the process of becoming. The organism is an agent in its own development.