(I experimented with recording an audio version of this essay, so please take a listen if you are so inclined!)
I went to the hot springs near us the other night. Atotonilco is one of my sacred spaces, a place where I can sweat and think. I started thinking about place and continuity, how this feature of the landscape, this accident of heated water bubbling up between the rocks of an old fault line, meant that countless generations of people had come here just as we had tonight, to sink into the water and stare up at the stars. The place itself seemed to have a spirit, a weight quite apart from the individual humans gathered here. I could feel its roots deep in the earth, in the opposite way of most suburbs or strip malls, spread so lightly upon the earth that they could come off on somebody’s shoe.
I was thinking about this in the context of last week’s post, in which I wrote about the cerro where I live, and my sense that in some way it has a spirit, an essence that I like to acknowledge and thank once a year. I still consider myself an atheist, so how do I reconcile a lack of belief in gods and many things people call the “supernatural” with my apparent earth animism?
Mostly because the earth is incontrovertibly alive. This might seem like a trivial point, but me writing these words and you reading them are two extremely potent examples of the fact that dirt and water can make chemistry and the earth itself can rise up and take a look around and say, “Damn, I’m pretty.”
All of life on earth is the earth itself. What we colloquially call “earth” is just the part that stays (mostly) still, while we are the part that moves around and builds things and creates conditions so that more of the earth can move around and build things. Now, you could say that the part moving on the crust of the earth is alive, but the still part isn’t. I would say that you really need to examine your priors on that one. For one, plenty of the “still” part is teeming with billions of microbes, not to mention small or microscopic multicellular organisms. Second, even if we do manage to find a ray gun to sterilize it to pure, sessile, un-alive earth, leave that shit alone for long enough with water and some stray lightning bolts and organic chemistry will find a way to start wiggling out of the soup.
My point is, life isn’t separate from earth. I think that this planet, at some point in its first billion years, came alive—by which I mean, became a perfect incubator for the precursors of life. And once a planet is alive, it’s going to make life, even if you try to stop it, even if you blast it with several nuclear armageddon’s worth of space rocks, even if one of its most fascinating creations evolved with a broken self-regulator and seems fully prepared to enact its own epoch-ending mass extinction event, of which they will most certainly be one of the casualties. I think this planet is going to keep making life, keep moving around and building and occasionally tilting its sensory organs upward and thinking, “Damn, we’re beautiful,” until Sol enters its decline, gets too hot and burns us to a crisp. The planet can’t help it. She’s alive, and her lifetime is about 7 billion years1.
So yeah, I think my hill is alive. Not the way that I am, but it’s part of the earth just as I am, and we both move on our own timescales. This cerro holds memory. It holds history. I am just one small part of that history, but I am part of it, and maybe it’s a bit of residual woo-woo clogging up my amygdala, but I feel that our connection to one another deserves acknowledgment. When I die, my body will go to her and a million other moving things will grow inside of me, inside of her, because this separation has always been temporary.
My thinking on this has been influenced by Gaia theory, which the scientific community generally seems to give a big side eye to, though, like panspermia, it isn’t so much scientifically implausible as highly speculative. The leap of Gaia theory is that the profusion of life on this planet is connected in some profound way, that we make up, in our trillions of tiny interactions, one complete organism.
This idea might sound fanciful at first, but I imagine that the individual microbes in your intestines might also find it astonishing to learn that they are actually only a small part of an organism with your name and history and thought processes. And if that skeptical microbe were to design an experiment that might disprove the theory, what would it look like? One question might be, can the microbe live apart from its intestinal home? Perhaps, for a time, but only in highly controlled conditions, a bubble that contains the essential ingredients of home. A petri dish space ship.
But, okay, that still doesn’t mean that you’re really part of a larger organism, and even less so that the organism is fucking conscious. I mean, even if the organism were conscious, it sure as hell isn’t aware of your particular lipid membrane surrounding a complex dance of organelles. So what’s the point of even postulating this great organism, this “human theory”, then, when the timescales, and physical scales, of supposed human existence are so incomprehensibly greater than your own?
Well, one test might be to see what this human does when it’s under attack. It just so happens that while you are an upstanding citizen of the lower intestine and never consume more than your fair share of resources, there is a group of rogue capitalist bacteria who have been gobbling everything they can wrap a pseudopod around, and their population is growing exponentially.
Intestineland is becoming an inhospitable place to live, and if this human theory were correct, the larger organism has to at least notice that and do something about it. What prediction might proponents of human theory make? Likely that the human, not wanting to die, will intervene directly in the intestine and murder the rogue bacteria. But what would that look like? You aren’t even sure how the human would move in the universe, let alone how it would react to changes inside its own body. Well, maybe you don’t need to know the mechanism, you just need to witness the massacre. But while Intestineland is changing in unpleasant ways, the capitalist bacteria are still munching, and the damage keeps growing.
“I told you so!” say the detractors. “Human theory is only a nihilistic fantasy that allows us to avoid responsibility for saving the intestine.”
Supporters of human theory are undeterred, however. “We don’t know enough about the human to know what its response is going to look like, or how quickly it can respond. Sure, this looks really bad to us now but we know that in the past the intestine has gone through some really gnarly shit. E-coli, cholera, fungi, never mind the great alcohol floods. Maybe this is only beginning to register as a problem.”
The detractors are pleased to find a weakness. “But then the only way to prove your theory is in the moment of our quite likely deaths as collateral damage! That sounds more like religion to me. There’s no way to prove you wrong.”
“No, there’s probably smaller things that human does to protect itself, things that we’re experiencing right now. And we can look to the past to see what responses it might have mounted to those past threats.”
[The screen flashes away from Intestineland, where the capitalist bacteria keep munching on innocent mucous membranes, back to the human world, where capitalist apes keep churning through innocent planetary surfaces. Our two interlocutors continue as if nothing happened but the loss of some quotation marks and a metaphorical framework.]
Detractor: Like an asteroid? Okay, tell me, how did Gaia defend herself against an asteroid?
Supporter: She didn’t defend herself, she healed herself.
Detractor: That’s just evolution.
Supporter: Well, yeah. Evolution is one of Gaia’s most dynamic mechanisms.
Detractor: So not only does your theory only get proven at the moment of our deaths, everything that has ever existed on earth is simply more evidence for your theory.
Supporter: That’s the idea.
Detractor: So what the hell would prove or disprove this theory of everything? Besides not seeing a massacre, since that doesn’t seem to convince you?
Supporter: You look for small things that Gaia does to defend herself. You look for those mechanisms built into evolution, ones that respond to changes in environment. You look for selection pressures that act on the largest scales possible: on ecosystems or even biomes that ripple down into the species and the individuals and the genes. Then you find the smoking gun: a large-scale selection pressure that operates against the fitness of a species or of an individual, while directly promoting the fitness of the ecosystem. That would be good evidence of Gaia theory.
Detractor: It seems you’re casting evolution in the role of Gaia’s immune system. Evolution is slow and inefficient at small time scales, though. For your theory to work, a Gaia organism would need stronger and faster mechanisms to target specific threats. Where are its T-cells? What do its colds look like?
Supporter: Unprecedented hurricane activity?
Detractor: Facile.
Supporter: Greater frequency of earthquakes2.
Detractor: Ooh, daring. Not directly part of the evolutionary or climate system. So if there isn’t a greater frequency of earthquakes, would that be enough to disprove Gaia theory?
Supporter: I think so. The issue would be getting enough historical data. But periods of Gaia fighting off colds, if you will, should correspond with increases in the seismic record.
Detractor: That would have some dramatic implications, I agree. But it’s probably not true, and anyway, what is the mechanism for maintaining this Gaia organism in one integrated system? Where is her brain?
Supporter: I’m not sure of the mechanism. As for her brain, you’ll notice that none of this requires Gaia to be conscious.
Detractor: Yeah, sure, I know you say that at conferences, but tell me the truth. Don’t you really believe that she is?
Supporter: All right, you got me.
Detractor: That’s why I hate you Gaia theory-types. The earth is awake and feeling this shit? That’s the stuff of nightmares.
What else do I think supports Gaia theory?
The hot springs of Atotonilco. A giant basin made of stones right where the hot water bubbles from the earth. A shrine to one side, the icon of a green-robed woman holding her hands in benediction. Children screaming and splashing in the shallow river. The adults wincing as they sink into the scalding pool, their oldest clothes clinging to their skin. They talk and rub one another’s backs, feet, shoulders. They detail their complaints about their joints. They marvel over the sudden youthfulness of their skin. They each, every single one of them, even the children, agree that the waters helped them in some small way. They each, every single one of them, mean to return.
Last night. Three years ago. A hundred years ago. Five hundred years ago. Three thousand years ago. All the way back until the first people come here, and find the hot spring where the animals are, and scare back into the trees the chattering monkeys, who throw leaves and fruit down on those steam-wreathed heads, these usurpers, didn’t they see the mother tree over there, telling them in monkey speech: here, here’s a place to rest.
From year 800 million when life emerged to year 7.8 billion, when all life on Earth is extinguished in extreme heat.
It seems that proponents of “geophysical Gaia” are thinking along these lines, but…uh, taken from Wikipedia, so grains of salt abound.
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