Today, Mother Earth puts on a human face. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
The planet Earth has oddly
lifelike traits. Wound it and it heals itself. When
its weather or its chemistry changes, it changes to
compensate. We're part of this equation. We're like
specialized microbes in Earth's body. We carry out
processes that help shape Earth. We can also affect
Earth like a disease.
Deforest a part of Earth and it reacts. It forms
new eco-subsystems. It alters its weather.
Sometimes Earth creates a new face of beauty.
Sometimes it carries away a permanent scar.
Earth has undergone huge physical changes during
the 3½ billion years that it's sustained
life. Yet it's always responded with processes
that've held its mean temperature within
plus-or-minus 9 degrees. We do the same thing. As
we go from birth to age, our body temperature only
flickers away from 98.6.
James Lovelock has spent his life looking at these
processes. Lovelock knows gas chromatography. He's
invented very delicate instruments to measure trace
gases.
He watched Earth changing the gas distribution in
the ocean and air in ways that look almost
conscious. Earth responds to every assault on its
ecosystem by making tiny adjustments. Yet some of
those responses change flora and fauna enormously.
Every shred of the evidence says Earth runs like a
single organism made up of living parts -- the way
we're made up of living cells and microbes. Here
Lovelock knew he was on the edge of trouble. It was
too easy to guess that Earth is sentient like we
are -- that it's self-conscious -- that it thinks
and feels.
Lovelock finally threw caution to the winds and
named the Being. He called Earth Gaia -- after the
Greek Earth Mother. He didn't suggest Gaia has the
human qualities of a goddess. But he did let the
idea hover over his text.
Of course fringe groups have been quick to form
Gaia cults. Of course scientists jitter around the
Gaia concept like spit on a hot stove. Yet the
idea's gaining. We begin to see ourselves as ants
in a colony. We have some intelligence of our own.
But our real wisdom is an aggregate thing -- woven
in with the rest of the planet and its life.
So: Is Earth a great sentient intelligent being? Is
She a wise Goddess after all? Does She give us a
glimpse of the face of God? I struggle to stay
agnostic on that point. But I harbor no tendril of
doubt that Earth is far more than we'd thought.
We can't go too far wrong by honoring Her the way
we would a live being. For you and I really are
parts of a great whole. You and I misuse ourselves
if Earth's well-being doesn't guide us -- in every
choice we make.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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