The Earth is a Higher Power
We certainly are amazing creatures. We can split the atom, sequence the gene, send probes to Mars and walk on the Moon. We can communicate in a second across the world, have explored almost all the earth’s surface and our scientific knowledge grows deeper by the day. These are no mean achievements for the naked ape. And it is hardly surprising that we have come to think of ourselves as somehow ‘in charge’ of the world. Our institutions are unashamedly human-centred. We speak of the earth as our ‘environment’ and as ‘ecosystem resources’, as if it all revolves around us and it is all about us. And we acknowledge no higher power than ourselves.
Robert MacFarlane has described this condition as ‘aloofness’. You might also say it is arrogance. Because the truth is that we are still creatures and, as creatures, we are subjects of the earth.
In The Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall there is an earth sculpture called the Mudmaid. It depicts a human-like form made of earth lying on the ground with its lower half submerged below the soil. For me, it represents our true human condition. We are inextricably bound up with the planet from which we arose and totally dependent on it. Yet modern society has developed the capacity to ignore this reality. We drift through our lives, supported by the machines of our creation, implicitly pushing aside all evidence of our relationship with the earth. Moments like birth, death and the onset of ageing or disease come like a shock to the system we have created. They remind us of a dread reality. Earth to earth, ashes to ashes.
It was not like this, of course, for traditional societies. They naturally conceived the world in terms of a higher power. Religions evolved in every human society, forming a focus for the emerging institutions and a source of cohesion, but also humbling the human mind before something greater than ourselves. Religions have been largely dethroned in the modern era, but they have been replaced with nothing to curb the human ego. We are left unchecked, roaming free and tragically destructive of the very earth on which we depend.
So, what is the answer? I believe that we need to revisit our scientific knowledge, of which we are so justifiably proud, and ask what it teaches about the Earth. We know that life forms have existed on Earth for more than three thousand million years and that they have changed and developed during that time. But how do we characterise that change? How do we tell this story? Some have portrayed it as an unending competition of ‘selfish’ genes. Others want to see it as cooperation. But I believe there are three key words that we need to use to characterise evolution. They are relationship, variation and emergence.
Ecology teaches us about the relationships within which each life form exists. Every organism has an ecological niche within which it thrives. This includes the physical characteristics of places, like their temperature, pressure, moisture and soil type as well as the biological characteristics of the other life forms with which they interact. Every round of reproduction offers the potential for new variant forms to emerge, which may adapt better or worse to this particular niche. Human beings have recently experienced this process of emergence as we have agonised over the occurrence of new variants of the RNA virus Covid 19 and seen them sweep across the world.
The interesting thing about these relationships is that living things affect the physical characteristics of their particular niche. We might immediately think of birds making nests, or insects degrading wood, but such localised interactions are but signs of physical interactions on a grander scale that pervade the history of life on Earth. Bacteria, for example, existed for more than a thousand million years before any multicellular creatures, like ourselves, arose and they set in train rnomentous changes to the physical makeup of the earth. It was bacteria that began to form our oxygen-rich atmosphere, set about degrading rocks and beginning to form soils in which our plants now grow. Bacteria are the true founders of the Earth as a living system.
Multicellular organisms, like us, arose from bacteria. Remnants of bacteria are found in every cell of our animal bodies as cell nuclei and as the mitochondria which turn oxygen into energy, vestigial remains of an ancient symbiosis in which bacteria fused together to form the first complex cells. Plants emerged similarly but with another bacterial derivative in their cells, the chloroplasts, which capture the energy of sunlight and create oxygen.
We may like to think of human beings as having transcended any particular ecological niche. After all, we use our technology to live almost anywhere. Yet we are fools if we fail to recognise the great dependencies which have been created on earth. We depend on our oxygen-rich atmosphere for every breath we take. We depend on plants for all our food. There can be no meat without plants. We depend on soil to grow our plants. We depend on the great flows of fresh water that nourish our lives and the weather systems that sustain us. And, if any of these big things change, we are in trouble.
One way of describing this dependency is to recognise that the earth is a higher ‘order’ of life, that it is the ecosystem of ecosystems, that within which it all exists. As bacteria were, and are, the simplest form of life and foundational to it all, so the Earth can be conceived as a higher order of life arising from the various life forms on earth, but also having enormous power over them.
It may even be right to say that the earth is alive. I mean by this, not simply that it contains life, but that it works as one great and powerful living system on which all life depends. Many of us may have been taught at school that life is defined by traits like growth and reproduction, features which are derived from thinking centred on multicellular creatures like ourselves. But there are other ways to think about life. Lyn Margulis, a well-respected microbiologist, taught that life could be defined as a self-maintaining system separated by a boundary such that the system within was at a higher energy state from that which was around it. She spent her life studying single-celled organisms, like bacteria, which have a cell wall and maintain a complex internal living system different from the environment around. Margulis was imaginative enough to see that the same sort of thinking could be applied to the earth itself. It has a boundary, in its atmosphere, that separates it from space. And within that boundary lies a system that maintains itself so as to create a planet quite different from any other that we yet know. Margulis claimed that our planet is alive.
So, was this right? Should we think of the earth as alive? The power of the earth to maintain itself is clear. We know that earth history has included five or more mass extinctions of species, when atmosphere, water, sunlight and geological forces adjusted. We lost the dinosaurs and a host of other multicellular species, but the system recovered. We experience this type of self-maintenance today on a smaller scale through the rewilding movement, which is demonstrating the regenerative power of nature, as in instance after instance, we see that leaving nature alone, with minimal human intervention, is enough to replenish biodiversity.
We don’t like this, of course. We have been brought up to tidy nature. We like close-cropped grass and well-organised growing systems. If it looks ordered, it appeals. Yet nature is not like that. Its regenerative power can only be found in the diversity of ecological interactions that arise in a disordered state that is left alone. Wilding is proof of the power of the earth to maintain itself.
To claim that the earth is alive is not to imply that it works like an organism. It does not have its own DNA that instructs and informs its life. Its systems are less tightly coupled. But the earth may still be deemed alive in the sense of being a self-maintaining system on which everything within it depends.
Human beings are already beginning to test the limits of this self-maintenance. In June 2021 the little village of Lytton in British Columbia experienced temperatures of 49.6 degrees, four degrees higher than ever before. It was due to a heat dome that had settled over this part of the world. The great heat resulted in lightning storms and wildfires that reduced this beautiful village to debris in the space of a few short weeks. Evidence of shifting weather patterns is now accumulating around the world. The years 2020 and 2021 saw a train of extreme weather events around the world, with massive loss of wildlife and extreme human anxiety. These are the first danger signs of the Earth as a higher power, which we tamper with at our peril.
The great proof of the Earth as a higher power is the fact that the Earth could die and, if it did that, everything on Earth would die with it. James Lovelock was famous as a maverick, independent scientist with an expert knowledge of atmospheric chemistry. He made the bold claim that you could tell a living planet from its atmosphere. It was clear, he said, that Mars and Venus, were largely dead, because their atmosphere was almost all carbon dioxide. Earth’s atmosphere, on the other hand, was rich in oxygen and nitrogen, which was both the product of life and the means to sustain life. This difference in planetary atmospheres is a vital sign of life on Earth. It is like our beating heart. It also signifies the possibility, at least in theory, that the earth could die, becoming like Mars and Venus, and all life be extinguished. Nothing could live on a dead earth. If the earth’s great systems fail, then all life dies. This demonstrates beyond all doubt that the Earth is a higher power.
We are not used to this idea. We know that we are causing climate change at present. We know that we are extinguishing a host of species. But we have not quite clocked the possibility that the earth could die. It is unlikely, of course, that human beings will achieve this terrible end. Our destruction, like earlier extinctions, is likely to limit itself to various multicellular creatures and it may include ourselves, but, at least, it will leave the bacteria and they can work to recover the system.
So, can we find a way to respond to what we are doing? Our experience of the Covid 19 pandemic is instructive. This little virus has regularly made fools of our politicians. This was one situation that they could not spin their way out of. Their bold tales looked risible in the face of viral realities. The virus did not listen to their arguments. It just took its toll and we learnt to submit. The same will prove true of the Earth. This living system is a material reality. The effects of climate change are not negotiable, nor are they as easy to mitigate as some would imply. We will experience them. There will be no vaccine against climate change. Carbon capture has never been proved at scale and the visions of geoengineering are potentially disastrous. Similarly, the poverty of a nature-depleted earth is not something that will be easily countered by our human systems. When a species goes extinct, it is lost for ever. All the financial wizards in the world will not find a remedy. The way to deal with these massive issues facing humanity begins with submitting to them and acknowledging that the earth is one great and powerful living system on which all life depends. The Earth is a higher power.
This is the first of three short essays by Chris Sunderland designed to introduce his new book
which can be purchased here