Behind the Catastrophes: A Gaian Perspective
Father
Father Father help us. Send some guidance from above. Cause people got me
questioning. Where is the love?
-“Where
is the love?” Song lyrics By The Black
Eyed Pea-
Introduction
As we gather in the discussion room
talking about religions, ethics, disasters, and its hidden connection, many
people out there live in a stressful conditions due to catastrophes and other
calamities. I remember the song from The Black Eyed Pea, “What’s wrong with the world mama? People living like aint got no mamas
… Nations dropping bombs, chemical gases filling lungs of little ones, with
ongoing suffers, the wars going on but the reasons undercover, … where’s the
love y’all?” It is kind of questions we questioning many times in many
places in this wide world. Let us say the nearest disasters such as the 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake and tsunami, the
2006 Yogyakarta earthquake, flooding in Sumatra, the ongoing mud flows in
Sidoarjo, East Java, and many conflicts in Indonesia nowadays. Not just in Indonesia, but
many places in the world. The ecological crises we are facing now are
happening global – if not universal. Moreover, the crises are so huge and
not only science or technology but no single government/community would be able
to solve them alone. Furthermore, there
is a fact that religion has close relationship with environment, and it has their
own language with difference system of theology, beliefs, ritual, and ethics. These
are premises which had been agreed.
In his new book, Menuai
Bencana, Agus Mustafa questioned why disaster happened upon mankind? And as
the list of disasters forced us to interpret the meaning of its coming, it
never stops its running. People tend to question the just of God, the problem
of evil, and the connection between.
“Kenapa
bencana datang beruntun kepada kita? Apa salah kita? Apa dosa kita? Bukankah
bangsa ini berpenduduk mayoritas umat Islam? Bukankah dasar Negara kita adalah
Ketuhanan Yang Maha Esa? Bukankah di sini banyak orang pergi haji, yang setiap
tahunnya tidak kurang dari 200 ribu orang?”
Human started to think that God was behind the tsunami, or they blame
themselves as a destructor of the Earth, or they think that it’s the way of how
the nature works. John Campbell Nelson in his article, Religion and Disaster, emphasized as a matter to human misery
whether disaster came from natural causes, human error or political intrigue.
Hinduism and Buddhism had karma to
explain unpleasant events, while monotheistic religions see things as blessing,
punishment, vengeance, or call for repentance. Basically, both myth and
religion had similarity in describing wrath and blessing as a form of an
angered ancestors, gods, and spirits.
Furthermore, step by step such stories
replaced by science and modernity and many events interpreted
scientifically. In his book, Magic,
Science, and Religion, Malinowski stated that myth and magic has been used
as a way to knowing science and religion. For example in the case of
earthquake, some myth will explain by the moving of giant animals beneath the
earth which shaking the ground and earthquake happened. And for quite sometime
after, it replaced by plate tectonics and the idea of judgment day.
By the end of his article, John Campbell Nelson gives comment, “May God bless the millions of survivors of
disaster in Indonesia
who may well feel they have been cursed”; and this may seem that there are
no hidden connection between God, human and nature. In this paper, I will try
to describe what catastrophes from Gaian perspective are. This writing has
purpose: to interpret disaster, catastrophes, providing a Gaian framework
within mankind – the survivors of disasters can seek meaning of unfortunate
events they had. But at first, I will give a short explanation about the
meaning of Gaia Hypothesis.
What is Gaia?
In popular culture, Gaia is known better in New Age community
because this theory is sound so romantic. Many still take the live Earth
concept of Gaia as a poetic or spiritual metaphor rather than as a scientific
reality. When it was popularized in the late 1970s the response was much varied
and interesting. Gaia attracted a few scientific supporters, and many
opponents. Gaia drew quasi-religious devotion from some environmentalist and
from prophets of New Age ideas. It has been attacked not only for being
unscientific, but as antihuman polemics, green politics, industrial
apologetics, and even as non-Christian ecological Satanism, a religious cult or
a new way of knowing.
We can see the description in animation movie, Final Fantasy: the Spirit Within, where this theory has deep impact
in the world of science fiction also. And of course a little bit of world
religion, especially for indigenous religion and paganism. In this animation
movie, there was a nice conversation which described how two scientists see
this hypothesis.
+ “I mean ….”
- “Do you mean the spirit of the Earth?”
+ “Yes, spirit of the Earth.”
- “This is crazy, doctor. With respect, are you coming here
to talk about this Gaia theory? And saying that this planet is alive? It has
spirit? It’s not fairytale. I’m sorry but we have no time to …”
+ “It’s not just fairytale. This is reality …”
- “Oh …so if I pointed a gun to the Earth and shoot, then
I’m not just making hole the Earth, but I kill it also?”
* “Dr. Sid,The Gaia Theory has not proven yet”
And the movie continue with Dr.
Sid’s explanation about energy related with Gaia theory.
Gaia is both a religious and a scientific concept. Theology is also
a science, but if it is to operate by the same rules as the rest of science,
there is no place for creeds or dogma. Lovelock emphasized that theology should
not state God’s existence. Like the way he said: ‘What would the universe be
like without God?’ We
will discuss more about God and Gaia later when we discuss about more deep
about Gaian perspective over disasters and catastrophes.
Actually, Gaia or Gea (the Roman form), was an earlier
name for our planet than Earth. In Greek, our planet has always been called Gaia or Ge, which we see in English such as geology, geometry, and geography. The story of Gaia's dance
begins with an image of swirling mist in the black nothingness called Chaos by the ancient. In the myth it is
the dancing goddess Gaia, swathed in white veils as she whirls through the
darkness. As she becomes visible and her dance grows ever more lively, her body
forms itself into mountains and valleys; then sweat pours from her to pool into
seas, and finally her flying arms stir up a windy sky she calls Ouranos – stil
the Greek word for sky –which she wraps around herself as protector and mate.
This is the myth.
In ancient times, belief in a living Earth is the same with belief
in living cosmos. Heaven and Earth were close and part of the same body. The
invention of telescope and Big Bang had change mankind’s point of view in
seeing Universe since the place of God hides behind the magnificent of the
theory.
Gaia theory was created by scientist and chemist, Sir James
Lovelock, who developed his theories in the 1960s before formally publishing
them, first in the New Scientist (February 13th, 1975) and then in
the 1979 book, Quest for Gaia. He
hypothesized that the living matter of the planet functioned like a single
organism and named this self-regulating living system after the Greek goddess,
Gaia, using a suggestion of novelist William Golding.
According to Lovelock, Gaia is a complex entity involving the
Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil. He emphasized the importance
to make conditions on the planet more hospitable. Lovelock suggested that life
on Earth provides a cybernetic, homeostatic feedback system operated
automatically and unconsciously by the biota, leading to broad stabilization of
global temperature and chemical composition.
Here we can see that everything in the Earth is working automatically because
of the Earth has her own will to live.
The concept of Gaia is entirely linked with the concept of life. To
understand what Gaia is, therefore, we need to explore the concept of life. Lovelock
stated that we have lost the instinctive understanding of what life is and of
our place within Gaia. He illustrated that life are much in the stage of the
drunkard’s walk where it is more like a self-organizing Universe. Gaia is the
largest ecosystem. When Lovelock come in his reading about What is Life? By Schrodinger, he realized that planetary life was
revealed by the contrast between the near-equilibrium state of the atmosphere
of a dead planet and the exuberant disequilibrium of the Earth.
To question ‘What is life?’ is certainly needed. Gaia is the largest
manifestation of life which made up from four components:
- Living organisms that grow vigorously, exploiting any
environmental opportunities that open
- Organisms that are subject to the rules of Darwinian natural
selection: the species of organisms that leave the most progeny survive.
- Organisms that affect their physical and chemical environment. Thus
animal change the atmosphere by breathing. Plant and alga do the reverse.
- The existence of constraints or bounds that establish the limits
of life.
Lovelock stressed that Gaia theory has a planetary perspective. The
most important is the health of the planet rather than some individual species
of organisms. He stated, “The health of the earth is most threatened by major
changes in natural ecosystems. Agriculture, forestry, and to a lesser extent
fishing are seen as the most serious sources of this kind of damage with the
increase of the greenhouse gases, carbon dioxide, methane, and several others.”
In one of the chapter of this book, The Ages of Gaia, James Lovelock explained the relationship of God
and Gaia – it was merely more talking about himself rather than the subjects –
the Gaia Hypothesis.
In his book, The Ages of Gaia,
Lovelock stated:
“I
am scientist and do not have faith, but neither am I the counterpart of those
with faith, an atheist … it takes a lot of hubris to imagine that we can ever
reach the limits of our own intelligence; to think that we will ever be able to
explain everything about the universe is absurd. For these reasons I am equally
discomfort by religious faith and scientific atheism.”
Again he stated:
“I
am happy with the thought that the Universe has properties that make the
emergence of life and Gaia inevitable. But I react to the assertion that it was
created with this purpose. It might have been; but how the universe and life
began are ineffable questions.”
The concept of Earth in Gaian perspective or James Lovelock idea is
that Gaia is manageable. He stated that there is no other life in this Solar
System, and the nearest star is utterly remote. And to know about the concept
is to know about the maker of the concept. Lovelock stated again that in his
belief, God rests at the stage of a positive agnosticism.
Gaia can be both spiritual and scientific and deeply satisfying.
Gaia is a sentient being, a surrogate God. As a scientist, Lovelock believes
that Nature is objective and not predetermined.
Here we can see how scientific Gaia is, though some scientist still doubt about
it.
Gaian Perspective
seeing Catastrophes
Ruether asked such question in her ‘Introduction’ page of her book, God and Gaia: “Are Gaia – the living and
sacred earth, and God – the monotheistic deity of the biblical traditions, on speaking
terms with each other?”
The term Gaia has caught on among those seeking a new ecological spirituality
as a religious vision. Gaia is seen as a personified being, an immanent
divinity.
If we consider Earth as living organism, it means that we consider Earth as
God’s creation and she has their own destiny, fate and wills; and of course she
‘worships’ God the Creator also. Then how come mankind – in the name of
religion, myth and technology rape her
for the sake of their own. If it is the situation, then it has already
described in the animation movie, Final Fantasy: the Spirit Within, if a person
shoot the Earth with deadly weapon, it will not only making holes, but it also
kill it. This illustration can be use to describe the reason why many
catastrophes happened.
The catastrophes consist of: population and poverty, food producing
for human population, the problem of energy, climate and pollution, forest
destructions extinction, and war. From here we see evil things happened to the
Earth. The myth has seen world destruction as divine judgment on human evil.
Here we can divide that there are two disasters: natural disaster and unnatural
one. Earthquakes consider as natural event which happen because the mountains,
the land, the Earth is moving. While
floods, global warming, dramatically climate change consider as unnatural even
which happened because of human. Mankind as the ruler of the Earth has involves
in many unnatural disasters in the Earth such as the upcoming issue: global
warming. And Gaia sees this as thing to be concerned of by giving positive
energy to the Earth and stop the Global Warming by stop doing things that can
increase the effect of the green house gases.
Not so many scientists in Indonesia ever speak about Gaia in
a scientific forum, though Gaia Hypothesis knows from Capra’s book, The Web of Life which has been
translated into Indonesian. Capra in his book speaks about the benefit of
knowing Gaia Theory related to understanding about disaster. The theory brought
us to understand about the connection between the living planet, the plants,
microorganism, animals, rocks, seas, atmosphere, and many other things. For example
as it said in Capra’s book that Volcano eruption spread many CO2 and this
is very hot. Plants and animal neutralized the air and this can be seen that
there is live from the death and lively.
Lovelock idea about pain and suffering:
Third
World, and our near-obscene obsession with death, suffering, and pain as if
these were evil in themselves – these thoughts divert the mind from our gross
and excessive domination of the natural world. Poverty and suffering are not sent;
they are the consequences of what we do. Pain and death are normal and natural;
we could not long survive without them.
Very interesting, Lovelock mention about ‘catastrophe theory’ or
‘strange attractors’ related with the interest of pathology, mathematic, and
religion. In mathematic, attractors are a stable equilibrium state, such as a
point at the bottom of a smooth bowl where a ball will always come to rest.
Attractors can be lines, planes, or solids as well as points, and are the
places where systems tend to settle down to rest. Strange attractors are
chaotic regions of fractional dimensions that act like black holes, drawing the
solutions of equations to their unknown and singular domains. Phenomena of the
natural world – such as weather, disease, and ecosystem failures – are
characterized by the presence of these strange attractors in the clockwork of
their mathematics, lurking like time bombs as harbingers of instability,
cyclical fluctuations, and just plain chaos.
Could it be that pollution is natural? If by pollution we mean the
dumping of waste matter there is indeed ample evidence that pollution is as
natural to Gaia as is breathing to ourselves and most other animals. I have
already referred to what might have been the greatest air pollution disaster to
affect our planet, which took place about two aeons ago with the emergence of
oxygen as athmospheric gas.
Ancient
Near Eastern societies faced many disasters. One particularly great flood that
destroyed everything was long remembered in the ancient Near East. The earliest
version of this flood story goes back to Sumerian times (c. 3000 B.C.E),
preserved in a fragment of a tablet from the library at the city of Nippur. After the great
flood, here come the solution. After, for seven days and seven night, the flood
had swept over the land, and the huge boat had been tossed about by the
windstorms on the great waters, Utu (the sun) came forth, who sheds light on
heaven and earth. Ziusudra opened a window on the huge boat. The hero Utu
brought his rays into the giant boat. Although the fragmentary nature of the
text doesn’t make clear what Ziusudra put in the boat, but he becomes the one
through whom human life begins after huge flood.
This kind of flood story has been known in many religions and
cultures. And as Ruether stated: “In these stories of yearly drought and death
of vegetation, destruction and new creation, death and resurrection, are two
sides of the same story. World destruction, through floods, drought, and
trampling armies, becomes punishment by God, retribution for failure to obey
the laws of one God, who controls nature and history from above.
Our Ecological Fate
In the
Gaia Hypothesis, humanity is seen as part of the total, ecological life of the
planet and the complex meta-ecological awareness organism is affected by
everything living in it. There are strong connection between the creator, the
Earth and mankind and all creatures and creation within the Earth. So, no
wonder if Gaian people feels like they become one with the Earth and felt hurts
when other people hurts the Earth. We can see green people like this in green
community such as Gaia Movement or GreenPeace.
Technology, power, economy, science, religion, all human
constructions, always wills the good but does the evil. We have so many
examples for this. For mankind nowadays, nothing is scared and everything will
be consumed. When I saw a documentary film, entitled, Jesus Camp, I was so surprise when Evangelical Christianity stated
that it is allowed to consume everything lies on Earth without being scared to
have global warming or flood because this world is created and should be
consumed until it dropped. And this is wrong because they use religion to
defend their action to ruin the Planet Earth, while some other try to prevent
the Earth from destruction.
In our social and cultural construction of ‘nature’, humans from the
outset of hunting and agriculture, have modified and changed the earth systems
themselves, reshaping plants, animals, air, water, and soil. Nature, in the
sense of the earth system apart from human influence, is in its own constant
process of adaptation and change. Human reshaping of non-human nature is itself
a phase of this process of continues adaptation.
“Why have narratives of world destruction played such a large part
in religious consciousness? What role does apocalyptic narrative play today, as
human face the destructive possibilities of their own power on an unprecedented
scale?
Scientific culture no longer has a God that is independent of nature.
It cannot expect life force unconnected with the biosphere to intervene and
renovate the earth after we have destroyed it. Nor is there another world in
the sky to which we can escape. We have no home outside the earth. And so our
destruction of this home is permanent destruction of ourselves as well.
Science, philosophy and religion can be a source of environmental
ethics. Eastern religions have frequently expressed the goal of harmony with
nature. Taoism in China portrays the world as an
organic, interconnected system. Every particular being is a manifestation of
the Tao, where to achieve a harmonious relationship to the natural world, we
must respect it and adjust to its demands.
But it is interesting when Saint Francis expressed eloquently a deep
love of the natural world and a sense if union with it. He saw nature as a
living whole and all creatures as objects of God’s love. Saint Francis has
continued to appeal to the popular imagination, and the order that he founded
has passed on both his respect for nature and his dedication to the poor.
Conclusion
Is Earth okay now? Lovelock described that now Gaia is
slowly taking revenge unless mankind changes their attitude toward her. And how
is that? By giving positive energies to her. The climate change is already
insoluble, and Earth is getting weak. The main question which lies between
nature, science, and disaster is: Who
was behind the catastrophes? God or humanity? Who was really behind this
tragedy? And the answer of the question will answer the question of was it
completely ‘natural’ disaster or the way of God tickling human’s behavior? And
now, another question: is it social construction? But this paper is not going
to answer this question, rather to see the question from Gaian perspective
which consider Earth as living organism. And Gaian sees catastrophes as both
normal and abnormal things which need mankind to understand this by doing good
deed to the Earth.
Conclusion
Barbour, Ian G.. 1993. Ethics in an Age of
Technology: The Glifford Lectures 1989-1991 Volume 2. New
York: Harper San
Francisco
Lovelock, James. 1988. The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of our living earth. New York: W.W. Norton
and Company
Lovelock, James. 2000. Gaia: A new Look at life on
Earth. (New York: Oxford University
Press)
Mustafa, Agus. 2006. Menuai Bencana. Surabaya:Padma.
Ruether, Rosemary Radgord. 1992. God and Gaia: An
Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing. New York:
Harper San Francisco
Turney, John. 2003. Lovelock and Gaia: Signs of Life.
New York: Colombia University
Press
John Turney. 2003. Lovelock and Gaia:
Signs of Life (New York: Colombia University
Press)., pp. 4.
James Lovelock. 1988. The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of our living earth. New York: W.W. Norton
and Company., pp. 194.
James Lovelock. 1988. The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of our living earth. New York: W.W. Norton
and Company., pp. 196.
James Lovelock. 1988. The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of our living earth. New York: W.W. Norton
and Company., pp. 202.
Rosemary Radgord Ruether. 1992. God and
Gaia: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing. (New York:
Harper San Francisco).,
pp. 1
James Lovelock. 1988. The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of our living earth. New York: W.W. Norton
and Company., pp. 198.
Rosemary Radgord Ruether. 1992. God and
Gaia: An Ecofeminist Theology of Earth Healing. (New York:
Harper San Francisco).,
pp. 61-62.
Ian G. Barbour. 1993. Ethics in an Age of
Technology: The Glifford Lectures 1989-1991 Volume 2 (New
York: Harper San
Francisco)., pp. 72.