Gaia’s Secret
Gaia is Mother Nature
The world is an huge holistic ecosystem where every single life-form has some dependancy and consequences on every other. Each life-form consumes energy and creates emissions. The climate is just as much a part of the ecosystem as the lifeforms. The system self-regulates: I.e. if a predators kills too much of their prey, the predator numbers drop and the prey numbers recover. Thats a very simplistic example, the truth is that some relationships are invisible to us and the consequences of a minor change can be an extinction event for some lifeforms along the dependency chain. Every change carries a cascade of consequences.
Evolution is based on a random gene change to a life-form that creates an advantage, which in turn has a cascading impact throughout the ecosystem. The law of self-regulation can mean that an advantage to one may lead to extinction for another.
Humans broke the rules (or did we?). We are the only life-form to develop record keeping which allows the next generation to pick up where the previous left off. Without this we would still be sat around camp fires telling personal stories and lessons to our children who in turn would do the same. We would live is villages only consuming the local resources necessary to survive. We would live shorter lives that would be filled with danger but also adventure. Technologies would never have developed. Medicine would be based on foraging local plants and science would not exist. Humans would still be part of the self regulating ecosystem.
Science is brilliant but also arrogant and myopic. It holds itself up as definitive, factual and inarguable, yet it continues to attempt to solve an holistic vast dependancy problems with isolated point focus.
Scientists believe that humans are special and that all things will be understood in time if we continue to pick up where the previous generation left off. They look to space and indulge themself in fantasies of living in space or on other planets.
We evolved to live own this planet along with all the other life-forms. Our bodies can only stand this temperate, this pressure and we can only breath this atmosphere. We struggle to ward off the pathogens from this world never mind some unknown alien strain. Science will never understand everything because there is no evolutionary need to understand more than surviving on this planet.
The media is flooded with “we must save the planet”. What this really means is: can science do something about it, my cappuccino is getting cold.
The planet is not in any danger, we are!
Gaia represents Nature, the Ecosystem that is the Earth.
Gaia is not angry with us. Gaia is simply continuing to do what she’s always done. Self regulation is happening and the consequences of every action are cascading. If we fail to change, Gaia will shed humans as easy as shedding a layer of dead skin and the removal of such a resource hungry predator will signal the reemergence forests and new biodiversity evolved to live and thrive in the conditions we leave behind.
My sculpture is called “Gaia’s Secret:. She represents mother nature, but she carries a secret that can only be unraveled by close examination in person.
