Science and the Gaian Hypothesis

We all want our children to honour the earth. Many pagans today include in their pantheon at least one Mother Goddess who personifies Nature. As home educators, we seek to marry our beliefs with how we teach. Science is an integral part of any modern education, so it is doubly fascinating to learn that the most prestigious universities are teaching something they call the Gaia Hypothesis.

Gaia, the Mother Earth goddess, honoured the world over in her many guises, but essentially the same, has become recognised in the hallowed realms of science in a most interesting way. On a document that can be found on the internet, Yale University discusses this part of modern earth science curriculum this way, "...James Lovelock in his Gaia Hypothesis suggests that the entire earth is one large ecosystem, homeostatically controlled. Furthermore, he shows that the environment was both created to meet life's needs as much as it has adapted to the conditions of the environment. Indeed life and the non-living are inseparable entities rather as the mind is to the body (1). It was more correct to say that the earth as a whole is self sustaining, self-renewing and self-creating. The earth is a living planet. Since life is sacred and encompasses both the biotic and the abiotic, the term Gaia seemed appropriate for the living earth."

They do shy away from saying that the earth, or Gaia, is self-aware in the truest sense of the word, and avoid giving her a personification. Rather, scientists take this idea and examine how this concept should be applied to conservation and political social policy. Traditionally, the study of social policies has been entirely seperate, but with the coming of the Gaian Hypothesis, humans and their activities become an integral part of the whole. This is not a new concept to pagans. Indeed, many such as the Wiccans already include human social behaviour within this scope. Many already awknowledge the knock-on effect of one person's actions to another, in a karmic chain of effects. It is interesting to see science catching up to what just may be a universal truth.

The next time someone questions the validty of how you teach your beliefs, point them this direction. Seems pagans aren't fruitcakes after all, and we have a bit of science on our side. The document I quoted from can be found at http://www.yale.edu/ynhti/curriculum/uni... and was written by Stephen Beasley-Murray. Other pages dealing with this can be found at http://webscribe.net/greens/amberwaves/g... (The Gaia Theory: a new organizing principle by Peter Schermerhorn), http://ess.geology.ufl.edu/ess/Introduct... (The Gaia Hypothesis and Earth System Science), and for a peek at what how this has affected Christians, see THE GAIA HYPOTHESIS: IMPLICATIONS FOR A CHRISTIAN POLITICAL ... at http://www.crosscurrents.org/Gaia.htm

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