What if every human on the planet woke up tomorrow to believe that the earth is alive? That we inhabit the surface of a living entity that self-regulates and is just bigger and older than other living beings.
This is not a new idea. For indigenous people around the world this underpins their belief systems. The Iroquois for instance refer to the earth as Turtle Island, a living entity that supports all life in their creation stories. And the Sungai Utik people in Indonesia view the forest as their "father" and the land as their "mother," believing that natural resources like water are their very blood.
From a dimensional viewpoint humans on the planet are no different from the billions of bacteria that exist on our skin. The video shows a Staphylococcus bacteria magnified x 1.7 million, also people magnified x 1.7 million standing on planet earth.
The insight that the planet acts like a living entity was formulated by the chemist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. It was his friend, the novelist William Golding who suggested naming the hypothesis after Gaia, the Greek earth goddess.
Gaia went down very well with the deep green section of society who were open to alternative ideas. But it didn't make an impression on the general public and certainly didn’t impress the scientific community of the time. It took another twenty years for climate scientists to accept much of Lovelock’s thinking, now renamed ‘ear systems science’. This sees earth as an interconnected system where the atmosphere, oceans, land, ice and life interact to regulate the planet's climate and environment.
But amongst scientists there is still a fear of going so far as to say the Earth is alive. My late friend Stephan Harding, who worked with James Lovelock, and taught deep ecology at Schumacher College was an exception. In his book Animate Earth he noted that the planet had all the attributes of “a living thing, which we do not realise to be such because it is too big, and its life processes too slow.”
Tim Lenton, who heads up the Global Systems Institute at Exeter University is renowned for his work in identifying the tipping points which can trigger accelerated climate disruption. His new book - Positive Tipping Points - articulates hopeful signs of change in a positive direction, whilst also reiterating that “..our impacts on nature are coming back to bite us globally, and occasionally in its history, the Earth’s atmosphere and climate have radically destabilised. This reinforced the scientific realisation that we are operating within, and dependent upon, a remarkable somehow ‘living’ system.”
The writer who has wholeheartedly promoted the idea of a living planet is journalist and author Ferris Jabr whose inspiring book Becoming Earth pulls no punches. He states that “the earth is not a single organism, not a product of standard Darwinian evolution. But is it nonetheless a genuine living entity, a vast interconnected living system. Earth is as alive as we are.”
The reality is that this thinking has still not entered the mainstream. Which is the reason that, together with colleagues, I have launched The Real Planet Earth as a Community Interest Company (CIC), a website and LinkedIn profile. Our mission is simple - wake up humans (all of them) using humour and sarcasm to engage with the climate crisis and underlying complex earth system issues. We start by asking a simple question - what if planet Earth could speak for itself?
Our plan is firstly to use LinkedIn to raise the profile and provoke comment. We are starting to work with researchers, climate scientists, sustainability geeks and activists who have important stories that aren’t getting mainstream attention. See our Case Study on forever chemicals. Then we will expand into all social media channels, education programmes, games, whatever works. We want to reach every generation — kids, teens, tired adults. Everyone.
In the epilogue of Tim Lenton’s Positive Tipping Points he suggests the need for a new human, cultural tipping point. Could this tipping point be reached if we humans began to realise that the Earth was not just alive, but starting to retaliate against an out-of-control bacteria-sized life form on its surface?