Gaia and I in 2022.
Connectedness: Our place in Gaia, the Living Earth.
Genesis
My first “Gaia and I” was published in April 2020 when I asked myself: What can I do about Climate Change? At the time, Australia was being assaulted by extreme events of flooding, drought and bush fires. Living in Sydney, I had asthma induced by smoke from fires surrounding the city.
Now, in 2022, the situation feels darker. We still have the same events, but they are further acerbated by climate change with fires in Western Australia burning the soil, severe long lasting floods in Northern Australia isolating communities, and the lingering effects of devastating droughts in Eastern Australia.
The Koala Bear, emblematic of Australia, has now been declared endangered in Eastern Australia due to prolonged drought, bushfires and developers cutting down trees. Lack of effective climate action and the sixth extinction event is in the front of our minds. The pandemic has only made things worse.
“What can I do about Climate Change?” The answer relies on understanding what it means to live with Gaia. In 2020, I approached this question from an engineering system perspective. Now in 2022, I feel a strong spiritual understanding and connection to Gaia. I feel a sense of belonging. It is my spirituality that inspires my answer to this question. This story narrates my path to the answer.
Walking in Reddy Forest, Then and Now.
In early 2020 my forest walks were recreational. They cleared the mind, exercised my old legs, and put a smile on my face. At that time, the forest, a small remnant of the forest that once clothed the land, was undergoing extensive regeneration work. The results are plain to see when comparing the 2020 to 2022 pictures.
In 2022 we’ve had pandemic lockdowns and working on-line. I felt and still feel confined to my apartment. My forest walk is no longer a “nice-to-have”, it has become vital to my wellbeing. I treasure my forest time, in my walks I feel Gaia’s peace renewing my spirit. How did this come about?
Meeting Gaia in the 80’s.
I first met Gaia in Isaac Asimov’s 1980’s book “Foundation’s Edge”. Asimov’s story of the planet Gaia intrigued me. Humans on Gaia were part of a sentient self-regulating balanced ecosystem. They were devoid of the attitudes of owning, dominating and exploiting the planet; entirely at odds with the other humans populating Asimov’s Foundation and Galactic Empire.
Now, some 40 years later, Asimov’s story with its sharp contrasts continues to resonate at a deep personal level as I live my life in a locked-down apartment disconnected from the land. The calamitous droughts, bushfires and floods in Australia exacerbated by climate change, have impacted everyone’s lives. Even I, disconnected as I am, had asthma bought on by bush fire smoke blanketing Sydney in 2020. The reports of the 2022 fires that set the soil aflame in Western Australia were stark reminders of my coughing.
Learning about Gaia.
During my PhD research, I became reacquainted with Gaia through James Lovelock and his Theory of Gaia. This Gaia, the living Earth, emerged from the connections and interactions between all of Earth’s ecosystems. I will just call these connections, relationships and interactions “Connectedness”.
In 2022, I extend these physical connections — traceable, researchable and verifiable to include spirituality. Spirituality is something that is beyond what we can hear, touch, or see. I speak of spiritual connectedness as a sense that my connection to something is greater than I think because it adds a deeper inexplicable quality to my life.
In my early investigations, I thought of Gaia as being akin to Mycelium which links the trees of a forest, providing them with water and nutrients and in return receiving sustenance from them. But, Gaia is far more than mycelium. Lovelock sees Gaia as a “self-regulating system made up of the totality of organisms, the surface rocks, the ocean and the atmosphere, all tightly coupled as an evolving system”.
Unlike mycelium, Gaia has the goal of the “regulation of Earth’s surface conditions so as always to be as favourable as possible for contemporary life”. In this light, Gaia emerges from the complex non-sentient connectedness of Earth’s ecosystems over billions of years. So, where do we modern humans fit?
Humans and Gaia.
Gaia is all encompassing and we, with our brains, are a component ecosystem of Gaia. Our intelligence and wilfulness allowed us to dominate Gaia. Human activities have impacted Gaia to the extent of compromising her goal of regulation. We have caused the acceleration of global warming. In 2022, I realised that perversely it is the human component of Gaia that has enabled the spiritual link between myself and Gaia.
Being a part of Gaia means that we humans are not the owners of Earth, nor are we the Earth’s custodians. Furthermore, the Earth has not evolved solely for our benefit, and any changes we make to it are, as we have seen, at our own risk. This way of thinking makes clear that we have no special rights over Earth. I believe, our future depends upon re-focusing our intelligence and spirituality to influence Gaia’s behaviour and bring Earth’s condition back into some sort of balance.
My Learning Process.
I’m an engineer and systems analyst by training. My experience is that to develop a deep appreciation of a system I must roll-up my sleeves and get my hands dirty building models and tools.
I remembered an article on aquaponics. Historically aquaponics involved using fish, geese or ducks to provide the nutrients necessary for food plants to thrive. In my apartment I was a bit cramped for room, so a large lake and honking geese was not practical. Instead, I used a modified school aquaponics demonstration unit (see picture) to explore how aquaponics “worked”.
My aquaponics kit recirculates the fish tank’s water containing wastes (excretions and uneaten food) to the plants. The wastes are processed by naturally occurring bacteria to provide food in the form of nitrates to the plants. In taking up the nutrients the plants filter the water to prevent a build-up of toxins that would harm the fish. The full spectrum LED grow lamp above the plants provides all the light necessary for the plants. Gaia is an elaborate balancing act.
My aquaponics kit was a small and limited example of Gaia’s self-regulating behaviour and for that matter, our role in Gaia. Even so, there were many ways of setting-up, choosing plants and fish and interacting with the kit to understand the inter-working of the ecosystems.
My aquaponic experiment demonstrated human intervention in Gaia. At the start, I helped the plants with small doses of completely organic fertiliser that did not kill the fish. Feeding the fish is an obvious beneficial human intervention, but it may require more plants to process the wastes. Whereas, turning off the LED lights is an example of our detrimental behaviour to the environment. No light means no plants, so fish die from toxin build-up in the water.
Even in my aquaponic experiment it was obvious to my systems mind that I was trying to cope with complex biological-physical processes and their interactions. I used my engineering mindset and followed a learn-by-doing methodology (some call it tinkering): try something, see what happens; make small changes; observe results and try again.
Suffice to say, I was unable to get the aquaponic systems balanced. Contrast the bland aquaponic basil of 2020 with my 2022 large pot of basil on the veranda under natural sunlight. In 2022, the soil is rich in organic fertiliser and well watered. The full flavoured basil thrives and I enjoy it immensely in my cooking. On the veranda a spider has taken up residence to eat any bugs silly enough to go near the basil. Love that spider. What helped my spiritual journey?
The Vanilla Vine.
I have two LED gardens. I use one for growing flowers, herbs and seedlings for my son’s garden. The other LED garden in the picture supports my vanilla vine. The vine has been growing since mid-2018 and started off as a small seedling. I estimate its around 25 metres in length. When it flowered I went through a stressful time learning how to do the hand pollinating. The resulting vanilla pods are precious and ripening.
Looking after and tending my much loved vanilla vine deepened my understanding gained from the aquaponics. I felt responsible for the vanilla vine, I love tending it, checking the soil, adjusting the air-roots, fiddling with the LED’s (the vanilla is very sensitive to light levels). It is through this process that I started to feel the spiritual side of Gaia.
The mental stress of the lock-downs and my treasured walks made me sensitive and open to Gaia in my daily forest walks. Over time, I felt my spiritual connectedness with Gaia deepening. In the forest I found peace and healing of spirit. Now I get that sense of Gaia when I tend my vine.
What can I do about Climate Change?
In 2021, I wrote extensively in Illumination on Gaia and climate projects. I sought to organise my own projects locally in Australia. My take home lesson from these somewhat misguided efforts was that climate action would rely on the accumulation of the efforts of many people doing small things. One successful example of how many individual actions add up is the continued increase in installation of solar power on the roofs of Australian homes. Solar power is now a significant part of Australia’s power supply.
My personal action on climate change is simply that I will use my knowledge and skills in engineering to teach climate awareness and inspire my students to minimise, remediate and hopefully eliminate the impacts of engineering projects on climate.
In supervising student projects, we explored and demonstrated such things as the profitability of using electric mining trucks over diesel equivalents; practical steps in open space cooling in cities; adoption of drone technology in agriculture to reduce the use of pesticides; and so on. Hopefully these students will form the next generation of climate activists through application of their engineering skills.
Acknowledgement.
I want to thank Dr Mehmet Yildiz for encouraging me to reflect and write about my stories on Gaia. My first story “Gaia and I” was both my longest story in reading time and incidentally my most read story. In reflecting on the original, I realised how much more spiritually connected I feel to Gaia and this inspired my new story.
