Thinking about the Earth
“And the earth, a complex orchestra of sounds, and out-of-tune band practice of sounds and woodwind, a spacey full-throttle distortion of engines, a speed-of-light battle between galactic tribes, a ricochet of trills from a damp rainforest morning, the opening bars of an electronic trance, and behind it all a ringing sound, a sound gathered in a hollow throat.”
I recently read the 2024 Booker Prize winning story Orbital by Samantha Harvey and was struck by the astronauts’ descriptions of seeing Earth from a distance – a dazzling experience which allows them to see the Earth from a distance and as a whole. Humanity has had a remarkable history in terms of how it has ‘viewed’ the Earth and this can reveal a lot in terms of how we think about the Earth and also how we think.
Plato and the Ancient Greeks often viewed the Earth in terms of a single organism. Plato also likened it to a leather ball made up of a ‘patchwork of colours.’ Interestingly its central position in Plato’s cosmology was not a sign of importance, but rather the bottom or where things fall. The Earth as something dark and low and the sky and beyond as something high and light.
Aristotle also envisioned the Earth as the centre of circles carrying heavenly bodies around it. He did also crucially seek to understand those things on the Earth. The Earth sadly has been something of a degraded space (often in a religious sense and also within the sciences) and it is interesting that just this week we have seen this drive for space travel continue to be pushed as something more aspirational to anything we can possibly explore below.
Lovelock in 2005
The emergence of geology in the 18th century as scientific discipline was a painful one, and the debt we owe the likes of James Hutton, Charles Lyell, and Charlotte Murchison cannot be underestimated. The painstaking work they undertook to piece together the Earth’s history was a part of a process that also taught us to see the Earth in terms of something we could understand and far more than just a backdrop. With Darwinian insights and the influence of the ethologists many have come to understand ourselves as very much part of, and amongst, what eco-feminist and philosopher Val Plumwood calls ‘earth others.’
James Lovelock, whose life could be viewed as a symbol of twentieth century science, brought us the Gaia Hypothesis in the 1970s. Gaia, after the ancient Greek earth goddess, and the hypothesis - the scientific vision that views the earth and life on it as a living and self-sustaining whole, where organisms interact with their environments to sustain a habitable ecosystem. Gaian thinking, supported by large swathes of the public as well as Rachel Carson, Mary Midgley, and Bruno Latour, but also ridiculed by so many in the scientific community (most notably the evolutionary biologists, who often referred to it as a pseudo-science).
Why such a distancing and disdain? If we return to Plato, and his Timaeus, we find the argument that the whole cosmos is alive, and the Earth is a living organism, and in trying to think about the Earth’s nature, Plato is focussing on the question: What is the point of the Earth?
This sort of why question, opposed to the how question, has been under attack since the time of Francis Bacon who claimed trying to explain natural phenomena in terms of final causes (why?) makes scientists lazy. Dawkins famously stated in The God Delusion that how questions are the only meaningful questions to ask about the explanations of natural phenomena. Earth was not produced by natural selection and as such is not a living thing. Here we get to the crux of the issue as we find some assumptions about explanations, and the sorts of explanations we will accept as ‘proper science’ and what might be seen as ‘proper’ ways to think about the Earth. The Gaia hypothesis was scientifically sound, but was not able to integrate with existing scientific frameworks, most notably evolutionary theory.
Humanity has always told stories about the Earth and viewed the Earth as something to be feared and something to be revered, something beneath them, or a kind of backdrop and something that makes and sustains them. We have many stories and many colliding stories about the Earth, but one story is the Gaian hypothesis and as Gaian proponent Bruno Latour argued, some systems become good at learning to persist, and he claimed that the Earth is such a system. If so, we will have to not only learn about the Earth, but we will have to learn to be like the Earth. If we were to live by this story, what lessons would we learn and how would we live differently?
