Foreword

The Gaia hypothesis, now accorded the status of Gaia theory, is maturing with experience and the tests of time, not unlike the humans of this book. It is spurring a great deal of scientific research into the geophysiology of our living planet. It is also spurring philosophic conceptions of what it means to our species to be part of a living planet. Some of these conceptions stay carefully within the accepted limits of science; others have a religious bent. Most, especially environmentalist conceptions, advocate for humanity, being primarily concerned with human survival. A few, taking a clue from my partner Lynn Margulis and myself, advocate for the planet and the much maligned microbes with which the Gaian system originated and which continue to do its basic work.

Elisabet Sahtouris' conception integrates scientific Gaian evolution with the human search to connect with our roots, inspiring us to learn from billions of years of Gaian experience in the self-organization of workable living systems. It is well balanced between advocacy for the planet and advocacy for humans, placing the onus on humans to recognize the lack of maturity involved in believing we can manage the planet, and to learn instead to follow its lead in organizing ourselves.

Elisabet gives us valuable insights as she draws parallels between the evolution of cells and the evolution of human society, pointing out the contrast between the healthy organization of cells, bodies, and biosystems on the one hand and the unhealthy organization of economics and politics in human society on the other. While she argues that our social evolution is not as much under our control as we like to think, she warns us that our survival depends on our meeting the evolutionary demand to transform competitive exploitation into cooperative synergy.

On the whole, her advice makes sense because she herself has taken the trouble to learn directly from nature as well as from the growing store of scientific knowledge about nature. I began the preface to my own book The Ages of Gaia by saying that the place in which it was written was relevant to its understanding. Living and working in the Devonshire countryside, far from universities and large research organizations, makes me an eccentric as a scientist, but, as I said, it is the only way to work on an unconventional topic such as Gaia. When I met Elisabet, having accepted her invitation to trace Gaia's roots in Greece, I recognized her as a kindred spirit. She had abandoned academia for a simple lifestyle in the kind of natural setting that brings one closer to understanding what our planet and our species are all about; she was free to develop her own conception of Gaia through a synthesis of scientific knowledge and personal experience of nature. To my surprise, she expressed some concern, some guilt, at having abandoned her profession of science for a pleasant existence in a forest overlooking the sea, the kind of forest that had been home to her in childhood, where she could work out the meaning of things for herself.

As I read her work in progress, I was able to assure her she could never have done anything comparable in a constrained academic setting.

In the intervening years, even in the short time since I wrote my own words about Gaia being an unconventional topic, less eccentric scientists than I have declared Gaia more conventional, meaning that Gaia theory is now recognized as a legitimate and fruitful basis for scientific investigation and is thus being brought into the scientific fold. In our first account of Gaia as a system neither Lynn Margulis nor I fully understood what it was we were describing. Our language tended to be anthropomorphic and, especially in my first book, Gaia, poetic. Not surprisingly, some scientists misunderstood our intentions, but over time we developed a clearer version, which became Gaia theory. This theory sees the evolution of the material environment and the evolution of organisms as tightly coupled into a single and indivisible process or domain. Gaia, with its capacity for homeostasis, is an emergent property of this domain.

As the title of one article in Science put it, "No Longer Willful, Gaia Becomes Respectable." This means that Gaia scientists are constrained by bureaucratic forces, by the pressures of tenure, and by the tribal divisions and rules of scientific disciplines. That, in turn, means we need some antidote to the inevitable separations and constraints. We need independent synthesizers and visionaries who can make sense of the data produced by the scientific establishment and present it to us in ways that make our living planet real to us within the Gaian context and thus give meaning to our own lives and those of our children and grandchildren.

This is what Elisabet Sahtouris' work means to me, for she comfortably integrates the traditionally separated domains of biology, geology, and atmospheric science to show us the evolution of our living planet and our own roots within it. She then inspires us on ethical grounds to learn from this planetary organism of which we are part, showing us how we can mature as a species well integrated into the larger dance of life.

Elisabet uses the metaphor of dance effectively for its concepts of improvisation and evolution, the creation of order from chaos, the myriad patterns that can be created from a few basic steps. I am myself an inventor of scientific instruments, and so it is second nature to me to think in terms of mechanical and mathematical models. Cybernetic models have proved especially useful in my work of demonstrating how Gaian homeostasis, such as maintaining the Earth's temperature, might work. Yet I quite agree with Elisabet that any model we make of nature is at heart metaphorical in that it begins with some image or formula familiar to us humans and used to represent the complexities of nature in simple, understandable, and useful ways. No metaphor should be mistaken for reality, and perhaps a variety of metaphors is insurance against the temptation to do so. I am increasingly impressed by scientists and philosophers who find non-mechanical metaphors for natural systems useful in interpreting Gaia theory.

Elisabet's analysis of science reflects a trend that may well make science in the near future as unrecognizable as today's science would be to the ancients. She does well to remind us that science is a human activity that evolves, a living system in which conservatism should be balanced by healthy controversy. After all, as she so well describes, all Gaian systems are forever busy working out their cooperation through conflicting interests, their unities through diversity.

The optimistic view this book radiates, that despite our errors and immaturities we can still become a healthy species within a healthy planet, is much needed in this age of doomsday predictions. Though time is growing short in our continued destruction of forests, atmospheres, and other critical Gaian systems, nothing would make me happier personally than to see Gaia theory useful in bringing about a better world for Gaia and her people.

-James E. Lovelock

A Note From The Author

This book is a work of philosophy in the original sense of a search for wisdom, for practical guidance in human affairs through understanding the natural order of the cosmos to which we belong. It bears little resemblance to what we have come to call philosophy since that effort was separated from natural science and became more an intellectual exercise in understanding than a practical guide for living.
To find meaning and guidance in nature, I integrated my personal experience of it with those scientific accounts that seemed to best fit it. From this synthesis, meaning and lessons for humanity emerged freely. I wrote the original version in the peaceful, natural setting of a tiny old village on a small pine-forested Greek island, where I could consider the research and debates of scientists, historians, and philosophers, then test them against the natural world I was trying to understand.

Putting into simple words the specialized technical language of scientists and winding my way through labyrinths of philosophic prose, I gradually simplified the story of the origins and nature of our planet within the larger cosmos, and of our human origins, nature, and history within the larger being of this planet.

The Gaia hypothesis, now Gaia theory, of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis - the theory that our planet and its creatures constitute a single self-regulating system that is in fact a great living being - is the conception of physical reality in which my philosophy is rooted. Quite simply, it makes more sense on all levels - intuitive, experiential, scientific, philosophical, spiritual and even aesthetic and ethical -- than any other conception I know. And I have come to believe, in the course of this work, that this conception contains profound and pressing implications for all humanity.

To ensure that my vision of evolution and history would stay simple and in clear focus, I kept telling its essence and more than a few of its particulars in something of the style of an ancient storyteller during many social evenings among my Greek village friends. I also wrote the story for children before I set about an adult version. To my surprise, these deliberate exercises in simplicity proved more difficult than writing for professional audiences, for in stripping our intellectual language to the essence of what is being said, we must be very sure that essence is really there, really coherent. Science has been a process of differentiating our knowledge into an incredible wealth of precise details, but these details become ever more disconnected from one another and cry out for integration into coherent wholes. I have no doubt I will be accused of oversimplification, and perhaps rightly so, as one pays for scope in lack of detail and precision.

Friends and colleagues have asked me now and then why I insist on dealing with all evolution, even all the cosmos, to discuss human matters; why I don't narrow my scope to workable proportions. My answer is that context is what gives meaning, and a serious search of context is an ever-expanding process leading inevitably to the grandest context of all: the whole cosmos. As the nested contexts for the human story - especially the context of evolution - became clearer to me, they revealed a simple but elegant biological vision of just why our human condition has become so critical and what we might do to improve it.

Other people ask why I'm so eager to save humanity when it is proving such a social and ecological disaster. To this I can only answer that, as far as I can see, every healthy living being or system in nature has evolved survival oriented behavior, and I do not exclude myself from this natural health scheme. Of course my purpose is to show how we are straying from this course, so that we may correct the deviations.

I can no more proclaim the worldview arising from my work "reality" than can any particular philosopher working at creating a meaningful worldview in any particular place and time, drawing on the scientific and historical knowledge of that place and time. Philosophy is an intensely personal search that one hopes will have relevance to others, will be validated by their experience, will offer them some insight and guidance, or will at least stimulate them in their disagreement to search further on their own.

Yet a work of philosophy also reflects the broader context and search of a culture at a particular stage, and the biological evolutionary viewpoint of this book reflects a broadly emerging pattern of search for our origins and direction in nature - a reawakening of that search begun by the original pre-Socratic philosophers, indeed that goes further back to the roots of religion - the search for re-ligio, for "reconnection" with our origins in the nature or cosmos that gave rise to us and within which we continue our co-creation.

Paradoxically, our self-imposed separation from nature by way of an `objective' mechanical worldview during the past few millennia has led to the scientific knowledge that makes it possible to understand and reintegrate ourselves into nature's self-organization patterns. It has also brought us to a stage of technology that permits us to share our discoveries and our understanding planet-wide in no time at all, to work together as a body of humanity with hope of transcending our present crisis in a far healthier and happier future for ourselves and all the rest of Earthlife.

Although the original version of this book was done in relative isolation and without funding, I am indebted and profoundly grateful to many teachers and friends, from the forest creatures with whom I spent my earliest years to Jim Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, who have not only informed and inspired me in this work, but who gave me invaluable encouragement, confidence, and opportunities in seeing the work through.

As this edition goes to press, scientists have recognized that we are well into the sixth great extinction of species - the first caused by a single species, and proceeding more rapidly even than the last one, which eliminated the great dinosaurs sixty million years ago because Earth's climate changed dramatically under the impact of a huge meteor in the Caribbean basin.

There is no doubt that we humans continue creating the chaos of ongoing disaster and denial. As I say in Chapter 19, Onondaga Chief Oren Lyons, at the Earth Summit known as Rio '92, reminded us that the passengers of the Titanic refused to believe that marvel of modern technology could go down on its maiden voyage. It did, of course, go down, as its extremely popular and timely Hollywood version reminded us. We may be a true biological marvel as a hi-tech human species, but we have truly gotten ourselves into serious trouble.

A healthy world for all cannot easily rise from total destruction; rather it must be formed now, in the midst of the chaos we create. Such a "new world order," I am again and again reminded by the indigenous elders I have listened to intently for their deep understanding of sustainability, must be based on a very old world order - on the laws of nature as indigenous people understand them, on laws they have been trying to teach us for a very long time: laws of balance, harmony, of giving back in full measure for all you take; laws designed to insure survival at least seven generations into the future.

The conclusion reached in this book, that we humans as a species must learn quickly to fit our lifestyles harmoniously into the rest of nature, is what led me to seek out indigenous knowledge between editions. Indigenous peoples never saw themselves as anything but an integral part of nature, and so they tend to know much more about that than do industrial peoples. Once, I listened to Jeannette Armstrong, a wise woman of the Okinakan nation, which still lives traditionally, speaking in detail about her peoples' understanding of nature. It was precisely the understanding I had gained in the course of writing this book far off on a Greek island - confirmation to me that I had gotten it right, for her people had the credibility of thousands of years of careful and scientific observation.

The immense knowledge of nature, the coherent philosophies and the non-technological achievements of indigenous people impressed me deeply. They have observed us far more carefully than we them. Their conscious choice not to develop technological consumer societies gave me a more balanced view of human life and some valuable insights I have shared in several new chapters. One of these insights - that there can no more be one true science than one true religion - was difficult to share with fellow scientists of my industrial culture. Almost invariably, they responded, "You mean indigenous knowledge; they don't have science, there is only one science." I have therefore taken some care to show that indigenous people do indeed have science, by our own definitions, as a deep aspect of their cultures (see Chapter 19).

The great effort of industrial culture to fragment our world, to separate science, religion, art, economics, politics and other social practices, has long seemed to me very costly in blinding us to their interrelations. Today this is expressed in such problems as the difficulty of integrating the economy with ecology, two words meaning, in their original Greek, the organizational design and the operating principles of a household. Clearly they should never have been separated! How could it have happened? As Janine Benyus pointed out in a speech at a Bioneers conference, we assigned one group of people - biologists - to study how other species make a living, and another unrelated group of people - economists - to determine how humans make a living. Only now do we see interest in living systems enter the world of business.

Indigenous people have also taught me that good science can be done without tearing it out of the seamless and sacred fabric of life. They have always known this is a participatory universe, which Western scientists only now acknowledge. We simply cannot observe it without changing it. Indigenous people understand science and spirituality as aspects of the same reality - an intelligent, conscious continuum with physical and non-physical aspects. They are aware that all parts and aspects of nature are in constant non-physical communication. In Western science, physicists only now discover the deep connectedness and dialogue of everything through concepts of non-locality and zero-point energy.

One crisp cool day in a cornfield on the barren Hopi reservation in Arizona, I watched Martin Gashweseoma - now almost the only traditional Hopi elder still alive - kneeling in the dry earth beneath a brilliant blue sky, picking dried ears of blue corn from the stubby plants rustling in a cold late fall wind. Martin continues to live in the sacred way, with only the digging stick given by the Great Spirit, Maasau, along with instructions for living in peace and simplicity. He stood up to greet me and began speaking of the eviction of the faithful Hopi from Old Oraibi in 1906 with only what they could carry, of his uncle Yukiuma who led his people like Gandhi on this exodus, even going to the White House to plead their cause, of the sacred stone tablets his uncle later entrusted to him, of the way they were taken away, of the Day of Purification the white man, Bahanna, is bringing on, with all its suffering as the world becomes desert....

What he said was familiar, as I had been working with the Hopi and other Indians for years by this time, but it took on new significance as it burned into my heart on that crisp, clear fall day, the azure sky blazing behind him as we talked. Three men who had brought me to the field stood behind me and never interrupted; Martin did not take his eyes from mine during our long interchange. It was an experience of total undivided attention I, as a woman, had never experienced from men. The intense energy flowing between Martin and myself created a dense whirlpool tangible even to me, a person normally insensitive to such things. A whirlpool, as I say in this book, is a living entity, and Martin wove such an entity.

Anguish flowed through me at his despair. He spoke of his and other elders' failure to reach the White Brother - our dominant culture - with the Hopi Prophecy, and of how even the Hopi were abandoning their traditions, their cornfields. The Hopi prophecy, discussed at the beginning of Chapter 19, says the world as we know it will end if the White Brother does not heed the Sacred Way of the Red Brother and share his mission to develop technology in that spirit.

His truth - the need for cooperation between the ways of indigenous and industrial peoples to build a sustainable world - is vital to our survival. I found this same truth over and over again in many teachings I have gained from indigenous peoples in many places. I explored this truth in many contexts, from presidential commission dialogues on a sustainable human future in Washington D.C. to traditional villages in the Peruvian Andes, where I spent a whole year studying the cosmology and science of ancient Andean cultures, and now in the corporate world of multinationals, the most powerful organizations humanity has yet devised.

This corporate world, which, along with science and technology, is often blamed for current crises, is suddenly in crisis itself because of a dramatic new development on the human scene: the Internet. From my perspective as an evolution biologist, this World Wide Web of information exchange is a kind of fractal biology repeat pattern of the first version, built by bacteria billions of years ago, as we see in Chapter 4. And just like its ancient counterpart - still in existence among bacteria worldwide today - it is a self-organizing living system.

Chapter 20 describes the inherent organizational design and operating principles of this new Web as those of living systems, and that is why it has the power to force corporations with organizational designs and operating principles based on command and control mechanics to change their ways - to become more like living systems themselves. As corporations, which play such a powerful determining role in our species' behavior as a whole, understand and abide by the sustainable survival principles of living systems, their goals will come into harmony with our personal and community goals. We can then mature like other species from competition to cooperation and build a human society in which the goals of individual and community, of local and global economy, of economy and ecology are met. This will shift us out of crises and into the happier, healthier world of which we all dream. Let it be so!

Elisabet Sahtouris, September, 1999

A Note From The Author A Twice-Told Tale

Everyone knows that humanity is in crisis, politically, economically, spiritually, ecologically, any way you look at it. Many see humanity as close to suicide by way of our own technology; many others see humans as deserving God's or nature's wrath in retribution for our sins. However we see it, we are deeply afraid that we may not survive much longer. Yet our urge to survival is the strongest urge we have, and we do not cease our search for solutions in the midst of crisis.

The proposal made in this book is that we see ourselves in the context of our planet's biological evolution, as a still new, experimental species with developmental stages that parallel the stages of our individual development. From this perspective, humanity is now in adolescent crisis and, just because of that, stands on the brink of maturity in a position to achieve true humanity in the full meaning of that word. Like an adolescent in trouble, we have tended to let our focus on the crisis itself or on our frantic search for particular political, economic, scientific, or spiritual solutions depress us and blind us to the larger picture, to avenues of real assistance. If we humbly seek help instead from the nature that spawned us, we will find biological clues to solving all our biggest problems at once. We will see how to make the healthy transition into maturity.

Some of these biological clues are with us daily, all our lives, in our own bodies; others can be found in various ages and stages of the larger living entity of which we are part - our planet Earth. Once we see these clues, we will wonder how we could have failed to find them for so long.

The reason we have missed them is that we have not understood ourselves as living beings within a larger being, in the same sense that our cells are part of each of us.

Our intellectual heritage for thousands of years, most strongly developed in the past few hundred years of science, has been to see ourselves as separate from the rest of nature, to convince ourselves we see it objectively - at a distance from ourselves - and to perceive, or at least model it, as a vast mechanism.

This objective mechanical worldview was founded in ancient Greece when philosophers divided into two schools of thought about the world. One school held that all nature, including humans, was alive and self-creative, ever making order from disorder. The other held that the `real' world could be known only through pure reason, not through direct experience, and was God's geometric creation, permanently mechanical and perfect behind our illusion of its disorder.

This mechanical/religious worldview superseded the older one of living nature to become the foundation of the whole Western worldview up to the present.

Philosophers such as Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Plato were thus the founding fathers of our mechanical worldview, though Galileo, Descartes, and other men of the Renaissance translated it into the scientific and technological enterprise that has dominated human experience ever since.

What if things had gone the other way? What if Thales, Anaximander, and Heraclitus, the organic philosophers who saw all the cosmos as alive, had won the day back in that ancient Greek debate?

What if Galileo, as he experimented with both telescope and microscope, had used the latter to seek evidence for Anaximander's theory of biological evolution here on Earth, rather than looking to the skies for confirmation of Aristarchus's celestial mechanics? In other words, what if modern science and our view of human society had evolved from organic biology rather than from mechanical physics?

We will never know how the course of human events would have differed had they taken this path, had physics developed in the shadow of biology rather than the other way around.

Yet it seems we were destined to find the biological path eventually, as the mechanical worldview we have lived with so long is now giving way to an organic view - in all fairness, an organic view made possible by the very technology born of our mechanical view.

The same technology that permits us to reach out into space has permitted us to begin seeing the real nature of our own planet to discover that it is alive and that it is the only live planet circling our Sun.

The implications of this discovery are enormous, and we have hardly even begun to pursue them. We were awed by astronauts' reports that the Earth looked from space like a living being, and were ourselves struck by its apparently live beauty when the visual images were before our eyes. But it has taken time to accumulate scientific evidence that the Earth is a live planet rather than a planet with life upon it, and many scientists continue to resist the new conception because of its profound implications for change in all branches of science, not to mention all society.

The difference between a planet with life on it and a living planet is hard at first to understand. Take for example the word, the concept, the practice of ecology, which has become familiar to us all within just the few short decades that we have been aware of our pollution and destruction of the environment on which our own lives depend.

Our ecological understanding and practice has been a big, important step in understanding our relationship to our environment and to other species. Yet, even in our serious environmental concern, we still fall short of recognizing ourselves as part of a much larger living entity. It is one thing to be careful with our environment so it will last and remain benign; it is quite another to know deeply that our environment, like ourselves, is part of a living planet.

The earliest microbes into which the materials of the Earth's crust transformed themselves created their own environments, and these environments in turn shaped the fate of later species, much as cells create their surround and are created by it in our own embryological development.

As for physiology, we already know that the Earth regulates its temperature as well as any of its warm-blooded creatures, such that it stays within bounds that are healthy for life despite the Sun's steadily increasing heat. And just as our bodies continually renew and adjust the balance of chemicals in our skin and blood, our bones and other tissues, so does the Earth continually renew and adjust the balance of chemicals in its atmosphere, seas, and soils. How these physiological systems work is now partly known, partly still to be discovered, as is also still the case with our bodies' physiological systems.

Certainly it is ever more obvious that we are not studying the mechanical nature of Spaceship Earth but the self-creative, self-maintaining physiology of a live planet.

Many still take the live Earth concept, named Gaia after the Earth goddess of early Greek myth, more as a poetic or spiritual metaphor than as a scientific reality. However, the name Gaia was never intended to suggest that the Earth is a female being, the reincarnation of the Great Goddess or Mother Nature herself, nor to start a new religion (though it would hardly hurt us to worship our planet as the greater Being whose existence we have intuited from time immemorial). It was intended simply to designate the concept of a live Earth, in contrast to an Earth with life upon it.

Actually, Gaia, or the Roman form, Gea, was an earlier name for our planet than Earth. It was lost in the wandering of words from ancient Greek through other languages to English. In Greek, our planet has always been called Gaia in its alternate spelling Ge, which we see in English words taken directly from Greek, such as geology, the formation of the Earth; geometry, the measurement of the Earth; and geography, the mapping of the Earth. In accord with our own practice of calling planets by the names of Greek deities in their Roman versions, we really should call the Earth Gea. Greek, like English, has always used the same word for Earth-as-world and Earth-as-ground - the ancient Ge that became the modern Gi, pronounced Yee. The English word Earth came from an ancient Greek root meaning working the ground, or earth-ergaze - which evolved into the name of the Nordic Earth goddess, Erda and then into the German Erde and the English Earth. Thus even the word Earth implies a female deity.

With that digression intended to make the name Gaia more acceptable to those who still consider the name and image somehow inappropriate for a scientific concept, let us look also at the myth itself -- the creation myth of Gaia's dance.

The story of Gaia's dance begins with an image of swirling mist in the black nothingness called Chaos by the ancient Greeks - an image reminding us of modern photos of galaxies swirling in space. 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 - still the Greek word for sky - which she wraps around herself as protector and mate.

Though she later banishes Ouranos - Uranus, in Latin - to her depths for claiming credit for creation, their fertile union as Earth and Heaven brings forth forests and creatures including the giant Titans in human form, who in turn give rise to the gods and goddesses and finally to mortal humans.

From the start, says the myth - true to human psychology - people were curious to know how all this had happened and what the future would bring. To satisfy their curiosity, Gaia let her knowledge and wisdom leak from cracks in the Earth at places such as Delphi where her priestesses interpreted it for people.
Our curiosity is still with us thousands of years after this myth served as explanation of the world's creation. And in a sense, Gaia's knowledge and wisdom are still leaking from her body - not just at Delphi, but everywhere we care to look in a scientific study of our living planet.

The new scientific story of Gaian creation has other parallels to the ancient myth. We now recognize the Earth as a single self-creating being that came alive in its whirling dance through space, its crust transforming itself into mountains and valleys, the hot moisture pouring from its body to form seas. As its crust became ever more lively with bacteria, it created its own atmosphere, and the advent of sexual partnership finally did produce the larger life forms - the trees and animals and people.

The tale of Gaia's dance is thus being retold as we piece together the scientific details of our planet's dance of life. And in its context, the evolution of our own species takes on new meaning in relation to the whole. Once we truly grasp the scientific reality of our living planet and its physiology, our entire worldview and practice are bound to change profoundly, revealing the way to solving what now appear to be our greatest and most insoluble problems.

From a Gaian point of view, we humans are an experiment - a young trial species still at odds with ourselves and other species, still not having learned to balance our own dance within that of our whole planet. Unlike most other species, we are not biologically programmed to know what to do; rather, we are an experiment in free choice.

This leaves us with enormous potential, powerful egotism, and tremendous anxiety - a syndrome that is recognizably adolescent.

Human history may seem very long to us as we study all that has happened in it, but we know only a few thousand years of it and have existed as humans for only a few million years, while Earth has been self-creating and evolving for billions of years. We have scarcely had time to come out of species childhood, yet our social evolution has changed us so fast that we have leaped into our adolescence.

Humans are not the first creatures to make problems for themselves and for the whole Gaian system, as we will see. We are, however - unless whales and dolphins beat us to it in past ages - the first Gaian creatures who can understand such problems, think about them, and solve them by free choice. In fact, the argument of this book is that our maturity as a species depends on our accepting the responsibility for our natural heritage of behavioral freedom by working consciously and cooperatively toward our own health along with that of our planet.

Our ability to be objective, to see ourselves as the I or eye of our cosmos, as beings independent of nature, has inflated our egos - ego being the Greek word for I. We came to separate the I from the it and to believe that `it' - the world apart from us, out there - was ours to do with as we pleased. We told ourselves we were either God's favored children or the smartest and most powerful naturally-evolved creatures on Earth. This egotistic attitude has been very much a factor in bringing us to adolescent crisis.
And so an attitude of greater humility and willingness to accept some guidance from our parent planet will be an important factor in reaching our species maturity.

The tremendous problems confronting us now - the inequality of hunger on one side and overconsumption on the other, the possibly irreversible damage to the natural world we depend on, just as our cells depend on the wholeness of our bodies for their life - are all of our own making. These problems have become so enormous that many of us believe we will not be able to solve them in time. Yet just at this time in our troubled world we stand on the brink of maturity, in a position to recognize that we are neither perfect nor omnipotent, but that we can learn a great deal from a parent planet that is also not perfect or omnipotent but has the experience of billions of years of overcoming an endless array of difficulties, small and great.

When we look anew at evolution, we see not only that other species have been as troublesome as ours, but that many a fiercely competitive situation resolved itself in a cooperative scheme. The kind of cells our bodies are made of, for example, began with the same kind of exploitation among bacteria that characterizes our historic human imperialism, as we will see.

In fact, those ancient bacteria invented technologies of energy production, transportation and communications, including a WorldWideWeb still in existence today, during their competitive phase and then used those very technologies to bind themselves into the cooperative ventures that made our own existence possible. In the same way, we are now using essentially the same technologies, in our own invented versions, to unite ourselves into a single body of humanity that may make yet another new step in Earth's evolution possible. If we look to the lessons of evolution, we will gain hope that the newly forming worldwide body of humanity may also learn to adopt cooperation in favor of competition. The necessary systems have already been invented and developed; we lack only the understanding, motive, and will to use them consciously in achieving a cooperative species maturity.

It may come as a surprise that nature has something to teach us about cooperative economics and politics. Sociobiologists, who have told us much in recent decades about humanity's animal heritage, have tended to paint us a bleak picture. Calling on our evolutionary heritage as evidence that we will never cure ourselves of territorial lust and aggression toward one another, they continue to predict there will be no end to economic greed and political warfare. But it is the aim of this book to show that these sociobiologists have presented a misleading picture - as misleading as earlier scientists' one-sided view of all natural evolution as "red in tooth and claw," the hard and competitive struggle among individuals on which we have modeled our modern societies.

The new view of our Gaian Earth in evolution shows, on the contrary, an intricate web of cooperative mutual dependency, the evolution of one scheme after another that harmonizes conflicting interests.
The patterns of evolution show us the creative maintenance of life in all its complexity. Indeed nature is more suggestive of a mother juggling resources to ensure each family member's welfare as she works out differences of interest to make the whole family a cooperative venture, than of a rational engineer designing perfect machinery that obeys unchangeable laws.

For scientists who shudder at such anthropomorphism - defined as reading human attributes into nature - let us not forget that mechanomorphism - reading mechanical attributes into nature -- is really no better than second-hand anthropomorphism, since mechanisms are human products. Is it not more likely that nature in essence resembles one of its own creatures than that it resembles in essence the nonliving product of one of its creatures?

The leading philosophers of our day recognize that the very foundations of our knowledge are quaking - that our understanding of nature as machinery can no longer be upheld. But those who cling to the old understanding seriously fear that all human life will break down without a firm foundation for our knowledge of nature in mathematical reference points and laws of physics. They fail to see what every child can see - that hummingbirds and flowers work, that nature does very well in ignorance of human conceptions of how it must work.

Machinery is in fact the very antithesis of life. One must always hope a machine, between its times of use, will not change, for only if it does not change will it continue to be of use. Left to its own devices, so to speak, it will eventually be destroyed by its environment. Living organisms, on the other hand, cannot stay the same without changing constantly, and they use their environment to their advantage. To be sure, our machinery is getting better and better at imitating life; if this were not so, a mechanical science could not have advanced in understanding. But mechanical models of life continue to miss its essential self-creativity. Fortunately, our survival struggle is leading to intuitive grasps of nature's principles that are shifting our technologies into serving cooperative life purposes, especially clearly in the phenomenon of the global Internet.

We are learning that there is more than one way to organize functional systems, to produce order and balance; that the imperfect and flexible principles of nature lead to greater stability and resilience in natural systems than we have produced in ours - both technological and social - by following the mechanical laws we assumed were natural.

We designed our societies as though they were machinery; we made a Cold War on one another over who had the perfect social design. Our greatest recent conflict was over whether individuals should sacrifice their individual interest to the welfare of the whole or whether individual interest should reign supreme in the hope that the interests of the whole would thus take care of themselves.

No being in nature, outside our own species, is ever confronted with such a choice, and if we consult nature, the reason is obvious. The choice makes no sense, for neither alternative can work. No being in nature can ever be completely independent, although independence calls to every living being, whether it is a cell, a creature, a society, a species, or a whole ecosystem.

Every being is part of some larger being, and as such its self-interest must be tempered by the interests of the larger being to which it belongs. Thus mutual consistency works itself out everywhere in nature, as we will see again and again in this book.

For clues on organizing a workable economics and politics, we need not even look beyond our own bodies, with their cooperative diversity of cells and organs as a splendid example to us in working out our social future.

Diversity is crucial to nature, yet we humans seem desperately eager to eliminate it, in nature and in one another. This is one of the greatest mistakes we are making. We reduce complex ecosystems to one-crop monocultures, and we do everything in our power to persuade or force others to adopt our languages, our customs, our social structures, instead of respecting their diversity and recognizing its validity. Both practices impoverish and weaken us within the Gaian system.

We are right to worry about our survival, for we foolishly jeopardize it.
We are wrong to devote our attention to saving or managing nature. Gaia will save herself with or without us and hardly needs advice or help in managing her affairs. To look out for ourselves, we would be wise to interfere as little as possible in her ways, and to learn as much as possible of them.

Our technology has ravaged nature and continues to do so, but the ravages of technology are rooted in our youthful species' greed, our single bottom-line quest for profits motive. There is no intrinsic reason that we humans cannot develop a benign technology once we agree that our desire to maximize profits is completely at odds with nature's dynamic balance - that greed prevents health and welfare for all. As Janine Benyus has pointed out, we assigned one group of people called biologists to study how other species make their living, and a completely separate group of people called economists to determine how our species makes its living.

No other creatures take more than they need, and this must be our first lesson. Our second lesson is to learn and emulate nature's fine-tuned recycling economics, largely powered by free solar energy. This does not mean going back to log cabins or tipis, but to eliminate waste and junk as we creatively develop diverse human lifestyles of elegant and sustainable simplicity.

The purpose of this book is to help pave the way to a happier and healthier future through an understanding of our relationship to the Gaian Earth system that spawned us and of which we are part -- a great being that, however it may annoy us, is not ours to dominate and control. We can damage it, but we cannot run it; we had better try to find out what it is all about and what we are doing, and may do, to survive happily within it.

The aggressive and destructive motives of domination, conquest, control, and profit have been presented to us as unchangeable human nature by historians as well as by sociologists. But mounting evidence from archaeology strongly suggests that human societies were, for the greater part of civilized history, based more on cooperation and reverence for life and nature than on competition and obsession with death and technology. It seems our human childhood, which lasted far longer than has our recent adolescence, was guided by religious images of a near and nurturing Mother Goddess before a cruel and distant Father God replaced her in influence. As we come out of adolescence we often recognize the value of what we were taught in childhood, and this new historical view of ourselves supports the general thesis of this book.

Like Gaian creation itself, human understanding or knowledge ever evolves.

Parts of the story you are about to read will already have changed by the time you read it. Others will change in the years to come as new things about Earth-Gaia and about human history are discovered. Any of us is free to help find new pieces of the story, bring those we know up to date, and then reinterpret the evidence as a whole, for in the last analysis, every interpretation has its personal color and flavor.

The next chapter is concerned with cosmic beginnings as a living context for our living planet; succeeding chapters, up to half of this book, tell of Gaian evolution over billions of years before we humans become part of it. Those interested in the story of human society may be tempted to skip this part of the story, but the scientific account of evolution in this book is not separable from our human social history. The details of our biological heritage from ancient bacteria on are given because therein lie the clues to a better human future. It is only within this context that we can appreciate our newness and our differences from the rest of nature, to see at the same time how we can benefit from its vast experience to fit ourselves in more harmoniously.

It is on this that everything now depends; species suicide is our only alternative, and there is really no reason to make a dramatic adolescent exit instead of growing up, taking on adult responsibility, and reaping the pleasures of productive maturity. Let us then follow the evolution of Gaian creation and of our own history as social and technological creatures within this great dance of life. Let's see what meaning and guidance all this may give in our present crisis, to speed us on our way into full maturity, to a happier future in which we promote our own health and that of our planet within the greater cosmic dance.

Elisabet Sahtouris
Dr. Elisabet Sahtouris is an Evolution Biologist, Futurist and Commissioner for the World Commission on Global Consciousness and Spirituality.