Gaia as an Incipient Terrestrial Imaginary

THE LOSS OF a providential imaginary is not, then, as it is so often portrayed, an inevitable outcome of historical and epistemic “progress” (reified as a transcendent teleological process that replaces superstitious ignorance with knowledge) so much as it is a by-product of a geographically and historically specific imaginary sold on (the basis of) this historicist story. It is not, of course, just a story—as an imaginary, it has a key constitutive role in the materio-semiotic production of modern spaces; it is expressed in concrete, plastics asphalt, nanoparticles, microelectronics, and so on.

Yet even as climate change materially deconstructs “history as progress,” we might consider how the imaginary of a provident earth has not been entirely lost, nor has nature as such actually been confined, as Lefebvre suggests, to history’s dustbin. Both survive despite capitalism, technology, and humanism having “conspired” to continuously erode, reduce, and restrict the materio-semiotic breathing space required for these modes of expression to inspire alternative imaginaries—declaring them regressive, off-limits, vacuous, and void. Indeed, if progress was itself a deferred providentialism, where human ingenuity and labor were supposed eventually to provide everything we could possibly need, then now, here in the so-called Anthropocene, it is this progressive imaginary itself, once so inspirational, that is rapidly running out of oxygen. Its last gasps continue to invoke a world purposefully organized by and for humanity, and yet any sense of humans constituting a “final end” in anything like Kant’s sense appears increasingly illusory. The emergence of speculative forms of hyperhumanism, whether of the right (e.g., the Breakthough Institute) or “left” (e.g., accelerationism), are just further extrapolations of an anthropocentric ecological indifference in denial of the failure at modernity’s heart (see Danowski and Viveiros de Castro 2017). To adapt Joe Hill’s words, they offer more pie in the sky as things die. To recall Herzen (Ward and Goodway 2003, 86), “an end that is infinitely remote is not an end, but a trap.”

These issues, of providence lost (Lloyd 2008) and the lack (the existential hollowness) of progress, are actually central to recent critiques of anthropocentrism associated with the advent of climate change. For example, the (often vitriolic) arguments around Gaia, Lovelock’s (1979, ix) “shorthand for the hypothesis . . . that the biosphere is a self-regulating entity [a system] with the capacity to keep our planet healthy,” are vitally important precisely because they implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) appear to offer the prospect of new ecological imaginaries, of potential breaks with, or evolution from, regimes of human progress and theological providence (Latour 2017a, 2017b).

Gaia theory offers a vitally important opportunity to reflect upon the prospects of an imaginary where different, relatively nonanthropocentric understandings of earthly indifference proliferate. James Lovelock, who, along with Lynn Margulis, developed the Gaia hypothesis, has long argued that the inflated estimation of humanity’s own central importance is about to suffer a potentially fatal blow with climate change, one that will put us in our “proper place” not as “owners, managers, commissars, or people in charge” but just as “part [and, it seems, an entirely expendable part] of the Earth system” (Lovelock 2009, 6). In Gaian imagery, the earth is a homeostatic whole, a “vast being who in her entirety has the power to maintain our planet as a fit and comfortable habitat for life” (Lovelock 1979, 1). Humans are explicitly not the final end of this planetary entity; we are just a recent addition in its evolutionary history and one now seriously compromising its capacity to maintain life in its current forms. These activities may not threaten Gaia herself, to whom Margulis (in)famously refers as “a tough bitch” (as cited in Lovelock 2006, xii), but certainly have dire consequences for many species and most, if not all, humans. In Margulis’s words,

the pandemic we call progress (e.g. deforestation, desertification) are for Gaia, only petty activities. . . . Gaia continues to smile: Homo sapiens, she shrugs, soon will either change its wayward ways, or, like other plague species, will terminate with a whimper in the current scourge, in this same accelerated Holocene extinction it initiated. (Margulis, as cited in Harding 2006, 12, emphasis added)

These Gaian critiques of progress are often conjoined with arguments against the anthropocentrism underlying the instrumentalist reduction of nature to “standing reserve.” As Lovelock (2006, 135) notes,

the concept of Gaia, a living planet, is for me the essential basis of a coherent and practical environmentalism; it counters the persistent belief that the Earth is a property, an estate, there to be exploited for the benefit of humankind.1

Contra Kant, then, Gaian earth is not a chaotic wilderness but an autopoietic (self-creating) entity that currently includes, but is not governed by or for, humanity. Kant’s concerns about humanity losing the “dignity of being a purpose” are made manifest in Gaia, which is agential, is nonanthropocentric, and undermines overarching narratives of progress.2 In this sense, it might indeed seem an inspiration for new imaginaries that could veer away from the impassive acceptance of the “Anthropocene” as a planetary telos, and this is surely Latour’s (2017b) hope, as his recent paean to Gaia demonstrates. Here Latour speaks of the need to explore an ecological crisis that is engendering a “profound mutation of our relation to the world” (8) and also to rethink “the idea of progress” (13)—not so much as the linear forward movement modernization promotes as its self-image but as running away from and destroying the “so-called ‘shackles of the past’” (Stengers 2018, 100; Latour 2018).

Gaia theory also appears to offer a break with notions of final purpose and providence. Lovelock (2000, 11) claims that Gaia

is an evolving system . . . [where] the self-regulation of climate and chemical composition are entirely automatic. Self-regulation emerges as the system evolves. No foresight, planning or teleology . . . are involved. (emphasis added)

Latour (2017a, 133), quoting this passage, says it “would be hard to be clearer about the absence of Providence.” Indeed, Latour (2017b, 69) is very explicit in declaring that Lovelock is

offering us what I take to be the first totally non-providential and non-holistic version of what it is to compose a whole. Gaia, in spite of her godly name, inherits none of the political theology that has paralyzed nature as well as evolution. (emphasis added)

Whether this break with progress, providence, and purpose is as final as Lovelock and Latour sometimes suggest is doubtful.3 Lovelock (2000), for example, though not uncritical of scientific priorities and science’s resistance to new ideas, retains a positivistic faith in value-free science as epistemic progress. (This leads him, for example, to castigate Rachel Carson for having been too political [Lovelock 1979, ix], while later advocating the ceding of political power to a scientific elite to cope with a state of climate emergency [Lovelock 2006, 153].) Latour (2018, 81), while rejecting the ideology of progressive modernization and its continually receding horizon, explicitly reintroduces a notion of progress toward his own version of a more Down to Earth third way:

Celebrating the forward march of progress cannot have the same meaning when one is heading towards the Global as it does when one is heading toward “decisive advances” in taking the Earth’s reactions to our actions into account.

Similarly, despite his blunt rejection of any teleological associations, Lovelock’s (1979, 11) early iterations of the Gaia hypothesis certainly did employ a language of purpose, making claims like that Gaia “seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life.” This language of purpose (and even providence, where maintaining an environment for life, and not just humanity, is concerned) was a target for many of his early scientific critics (see Ruse 2013). In later writings, as climate change becomes less speculative and Gaian ideas are taken up in Earth systems science, the language of purpose and of providence is more qualified. Its use is explicitly justified as a metaphorical aid to visualizing and reconceptualizing the world, a communicative gloss that overlies the science and not something implying an explanation dependent on a planetary telos.

This appeal to communicative efficacy is also how Lovelock (2000, 12) justifies his references to the earth as a “living organism” and the earth’s anthropomorphic portrayal in the figure Gaia herself, that conjunction between mythic mother and cybernetic planet—lending itself to poetic metaphor and being “hard science.” Gaia’s association with an ancient earth goddess has, Lovelock recognizes, been central to its popular appeal and to surrounding controversies. And, although he has no intention of relinquishing her, when pressed, Lovelock often suggests that these metaphors are scientifically indefensible and, so far as he is concerned, ultimately unnecessary:

When I talk of Gaia as a superorganism I do not for a moment have in mind a goddess or some sentient being. I am expressing my intuition that the Earth behaves as a self-regulating system. (Lovelock 2000, 57)

Gaia’s anthropic figure is, paradoxically, also at the heart of his attempts to rhetorically undercut the idea of humanity as the ultimate telos for life on earth. Gaia is not only Margulis’s “tough bitch” smiling down at anthropogenic devastation but, as Lovelock (2006, 147) similarly declares,

we now see that the great Earth system, Gaia, behaves like the other mythic goddesses, Kali and Nemesis; she acts as a mother who is nurturing but ruthlessly cruel towards transgressors, even when they are her own progeny.

The gendered portrayal of the earth as nurturing mother/goddess turned vengeful harpy is obviously troubling for any feminist analysis (see Roach 2003; Sands 2015), but The Revenge of Gaia is a trope not confined to Lovelock (2006) and Margulis (see, e.g., Liotta and Shearer 2007) and is widely echoed in recent responses to events like Covid-19, although ridiculed by Latour (2020). Lovelock may just be exploiting anthropomorphic tendencies to communicate his ideas, but to portray Gaia switching between care and ruthless cruelty, to refer to “her” impending revenge, now served climatically hot, hardly fits with the cybernetic science that Lovelock claims underlies his image, a science that, as he frequently points out, actually regards the earth as systemically indifferent to humanity’s fate. In this sense, the earth can never have been either nurturing or vengeful; rather, it simply lacks any capacity to allow us to describe it in any such way. This certainly reflects the assumptions underlying scientific objectivism. Should we then just dismiss these anthropomorphic attributions as purely rhetorical? In what sense, if any, is Gaia actually caring, heartless, or indifferent?

As we have seen, for Lovelock, the answer seems to be that there is indeed a gap between scientifically described reality and communicative rhetoric, Gaian science and Gaian metaphor:

You will recognize, I am continuing to use the metaphor of “the living Earth” for Gaia; but do not assume that I am thinking of the Earth as alive in a sentient way, or even like an animal or a bacterium. . . . It has never been more than an aide pensée. (Lovelock 2006, 16, emphasis added)

However, only a few lines later, we are told that to understand that,

global climate change requires us to know the true nature of the Earth and imagine it as the largest living thing in the solar system, not something inanimate like that disreputable contraption “spaceship Earth.” Until this change of heart and mind happens we will not instinctively sense that we live on a planet that can respond to the changes we make, either by cancelling the changes or cancelling us. (17, emphasis added)

This passage is both fascinating and dramatically ironic. In direct contradiction to his previous statement, it elides gaps between ontology, knowledge, emotion, and imagination, between truth and metaphor. Lovelock (2000, 17) is surely right to assert that “metaphor is important,” that it plays an important role in science (18), and that there are important semio-material differences between imagining the earth as a mechanical spaceship, a “contraption,” and as a living organism. But why this difference unless this metaphor draws on a residual understanding of nature as opposed to human artifice?

[Gaia] is an alternative to that pessimistic view which sees nature as a primitive force to be subdued and conquered. It is also an alternative to that equally depressing picture of our planet as a demented spaceship, forever travelling, driverless and purposeless, around an inner circle of the sun. (Lovelock 1979, 12, emphasis added)

The strength of Lovelock’s rejection of this “inanimate” and “disreputable” metaphor “spaceship Earth” certainly suggests that Lovelock finds this mechanistic analogy demeaning. In Latour’s (2017b, 77) words,

Gaia, for Lovelock, could be called No Machine and that’s why, of all the metaphors he criticizes, none is damned more relentlessly than Spaceship Earth.

However, if this is so, then it is doubly ironic that Lovelock’s own preferred solutions to climate change all involve upping the ante in terms of massive technological interventions like nuclear power and geospatial engineering, that is, actively diminishing any gap between “spaceship Earth” and “living Earth.” His earlier separation between Gaian image and science also ensures that he often remains captured by the same objectivizing frameworks that deny Gaia existence in anything but its most reductive, mechanistic form, as Earth systems science. This inevitably finds expression in Lovelock’s own language. For example, his claim above that the earth might respond to our activities by “canceling us” seems strangely detached and calculating, more like the actions of that spaceship computer HAL in Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey than the earth we actually inhabit, and still less the actions of a “goddess.”

More importantly, the systems theory underlying Lovelock’s thinking about Gaia (initiated through his work with NASA!) is itself the very form of technologically derived paradigm that has dominated attempts to connect (and “manage”) social, mechanical, informational, and natural “systems” over recent decades. In its dominant forms, cybernetics epitomizes the image and imaginary of progress in proclaiming that these “systems” work according to the same fundamental principles, all expressing the same underlying systemic “truth” of the world—earth as planetary system. From its inception cybernetics has, quite self-consciously, regarded itself as a way of eradicating ontological difference between nature and artifice. Weiner’s massively influential book originally defining the field was, after all, entitled Cybernetics; or, Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (1948). Adopting this perspective obviously makes it all the more difficult to distinguish between spaceship Earth and living Earth,4 a distinction now further blurred in Lovelock’s (2019) prediction of an imminent age of “hyperintelligent” cyborgs he names the Novacene.

Now Latour rightly warns against thinking of cybernetics as a scientific truth underlying Gaian images. To “speak of the earth as a ‘system’ is just as confusing, because . . . its political and philosophical pedigree is much harder to render explicit” (Latour 2017b, 62); that is to say, systems theory is often objectifying but is in no sense a neutral way of describing the earth. Yet this is just what Lovelock does when he attempts to parse the politically and emotionally engaging image of Gaia and what he regards as the objective scientific reality of the earth. Latour (2017b) himself ridicules one of Lovelock’s scientific critics, Tyrrell, for ascribing to Lovelock the idea of “Earth as thermostat,” but that “metaphor” is, after all, Lovelock’s, and Lovelock does think that thermostats, humans, and the earth are all examples of self-regulating systems—he says so! We surely have to ask whether this is really any less “disreputable” (Lovelock 2006, 17) or “depressing” (Lovelock 1979, 12) than speaking of the earth as a spaceship?

Such tensions and inconsistencies are palpable in Lovelock’s work. They are, in part, what makes it so controversial and also arise, as Lovelock and Latour recognize, from the need for a more-than-just-scientific account of the earth to gain political traction and overcome our systemic indifference to climate change, to effectively engage both “heart and mind.” To this end, Lovelock seems willing to employ the figure of Gaia as a kind of ventriloquized voice for the earth, a rhetorical tool with popular appeal, useful in drawing attention to the unfamiliar underlying science.

Latour, however, takes a rather different approach. He is clearly captivated by the very way that Gaia as a figure entangles and conjoins science, politics, and a certain vague religiosity. Gaia, for Latour, is a theoretical and earthly incarnation of “nature/culture” that exemplifies his famous claim that “we have never been [and can never be] modern” (Latour 1993). That is to say, we have never actually succeeded in severing politics or religion from science, culture from nature, metaphor from fact. In this sense, while both agree that Gaia is not actually a goddess, Latour regards her as far from being just an aide pensée, because this kind of admixture characterizes his advocacy of a current requirement to ecologize rather than modernize (Latour 1998). Latour (2017b, 76) agrees that Lovelock “remains a totally naive believer in mechanical philosophy and his politics is equally naive and often counterproductive” but often excuses what Lovelock (Latour 2017a, 94–98) has actually said, because he considers that Lovelock is genuinely experimenting with trying to communicate Gaia theory against ingrained modernist biases.5 Indeed, Latour (2017b) even goes so far as to suggest that Lovelock’s switching between radically different metaphors is a deliberate tactic to resist reductive interpretations. As our discussions suggest, this seems extremely unlikely. However, it seems fair to say that Latour finds Gaia so conducive precisely because it begins to enunciate an incipient terrestrial imaginary, a different way of coming to address the earth.