Gaïa’s call : “habeas corpus!”
What if you’d discover that the Earth climate is a ‘body’ ?
Does life need a body?
It is commonly accepted in the West, that the spiritual mind is of a higher constitution than the material body, and that a human being defines himself through its thinking abilities. Cogito ergo sum. On the contrary, the body would boil down to the limited flesh we are given to sense and interact with our surroundings.
But interestingly, some anthropologists happened to be astounded while discovering that, for some human populations living elsewhere on our planet, things may go a little bit differenlty. For instance, Maurice Leenhardt, a Catholic missionary who had spent many long years teaching the Gospel in New Caledonia, including to the Canaques tribe, experienced such a moment in the 1920s, when he asked one of his students, an aged sculptor named Boesoou, how he felt about having been introduced to spiritual ideas:
Once, waiting to assess the mental progress of the Canaques I had taught for many years, I risked the following suggestion: “In short, we introduced the notion of the spirit to your way of thinking?” He objected, “Spirit? Bah! You didn’t bring us the spirit. We already knew the spirit existed.We have always acted in accord with the spirit. What you’ve brought us is the body.”
Reading Leenhardt’s notes, I had to wander how it would feel to suddenly be revealed I had a body. What an astonishing moment it should be, to suddenly realize how much all of my perceptions remain so much confined to the invisible cultural realm I have been taught. And it is such a moment I want to share with you now.
Losing ground
The philosopher of science Bruno Latour recently published 8 conferences in a book titled Facing Gaïa. Two of the peculiar moments in science history he comments and discusses regard what we nowadays coin as the ‘Copernican revolution’ and the ‘Gaïa theory’. The first happened in 1610, when Galileo could confirm Copernic mathematical bold calculation by empirically observing the movements of planets with his brand new telescope. The later refers to the chimist and inventor James Lovelock’s work to understantd in the 1960’s the patterns in Earth system’s jolts and convulsions.
In the XVIIth, Galileo revealed to Western christians that our planet wasn’t located at the center of the universe, but that it was rather revolving around the sun. Apart from the socio-political changes his discovery triggered by shifting the center of the universe from ‘Man’ to ‘somewhere else’, Bruno Latour writes that Galileo’s work did also set up our understanding of planet Earth as an inert object moving around a star in the void. And during the following 400 years in the Western world, nature and all God’s creatures have slowly be left with no more sacred nor divine essence.
The reason why Bruno Latour brings James Lovelock’s conclusions closer to Galileo’s discovery is that, while the later has shaken anthropocentrism view that was taken for granted during the previous millenaries, it has also led us to picture Earth as an inert rock for centuries, and Lovelock’s theory happens to detail why our planet is everything but inert, and why its ‘aliveness’ makes it so damned precious and unique.
Gaia hypothesis
Lovelock theory started to take shape in the 60’s, when he was working at the NASA on developing sensitive instruments to analyze extraterrestrial atmospheres and planetary surfaces. When looking at the composition of the Martian atmosphere, one would reason that many life forms on Mars would be obliged to make use of it and, thus, alter it. However, as the Martian atmosphere was found to be in a stable condition close to its chemical equilibrium, it appeared to Lovelock that the stark contrast between the Martian atmosphere and chemically dynamic mixture of that of the Earth’s biosphere was strongly indicative of the absence of life on the planet.
From this understanding, he just told NASA that for future planetary observations, instead of sending probe and instruments on every planet to analyse their soil and air, we’d better look at these planets’ atmosphere to see whether they act as a dynamic systems or not. Meaning whether they might probably host some forms of life or most probably not.
From his research with Lynn Margulis, he proposed that here on Earth, “organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings to form a self-regulating, complex system that contributes to helping to maintaining the conditions for life on the planet”. By following the novelist William Golding’s suggestion, they coined this complex system ‘Gaïa’ and it led their work to be sometimes misanderstood as trying to give Earth a divine entity and holy intentions. Of course, it is not.
What Margulis and Lovelock stated is what most science do state as well, which is that living agents and the elements their environment is made of co-evolve together at all time. What they precise though, is that these co-evolution interactions of living and non-living elements lead the system to oscillate through its history around a point of equilibrium, this dynamic equilibrium being favorable for the forms of life evolving within it. What Bruno Latour nicely pulls from this theory is that, unlike the view Galileo’s work led us to have upon the object Earth, the singularity of our planet is to be everything but ‘inert’. It is to be animated.
Feedback loops & emergent properties
Margulis and Lovelock’s work states what complex systems science nowadays acknowledges : there are not such things as ‘parts’ and ‘whole’, each element being a ‘holon’ (i.e. a system of parts that is nested as a part of a larger system). Complex systems science then studies the interactions between elements (i.e. let’s say, in-between cells for instance), interactions from which may appear emergent properties (i.e. life for instance). Such an emergent property is a pattern, revealing that at that particular scale, all the elements morph into a system behaviour (i.e. a body), that in return, affects and limits the parts themselves (i.e. each cell of a body cannot survive outside of its body). These effects are commonly named the ‘feedback loops’ (A causes B that causes A’), and it breaks the linear causal chain (A causes B and please don’t mention ‘externalities’).
In our daily life, we all have heard about such feedback loops. One of them is the well-known ‘somatisation’ process that happens in so called ‘psychosomatic diseases’, when the body (‘soma’) and the mind (‘psyche’) interact with each other to reinforce the trauma. Common psychosomatic diseases are for instance depression, when stress and anxiety affect the body, that becomes weaker and, thus, reinforce the reasons to be stressed and anxious.
In other words, psychosomatic medicine acknowledges the fact that the mind doesn’t operate alone, apart from the body, and that the body does play a positive or negative role in the state of mind through time.
Climate stands for condition
Back to here and now, at the age of Anthropocene — when due to their activities, humans would have become the major geological force at work on our planet— what we name ‘climate’ provides us with feedbacks growing in scale and intensity. Not that the ‘climate’ didn’t exist before we started to talk about it, but it didn’t matter as much as today and the coming decades for our political debates and economical decisions. In his time, Gengis Kahn conquered his empire spurred by local climate evolution. Since millenaries our ancestors aimed at forcasting the weather by reading into the course of planets and stars ; this is what we now call ‘meteor-ology’ and it was extremely useful in agrarian societies to predict when seasons would start.
According to me, what ‘climate’ now stands for today, is less about the ‘meteorological forecast’, the ‘environmental questions’ nor the ‘ecological issues’, but rather about the fact that ‘it’ is closed. The holon we are part of (i.e. planet Earth biosphere) is part of a larger system (i.e. galaxies), but is a finished world for living species (i.e. from our point of observance). Climate is our limit. It stands for the limited system among which living agents co-evolve in time. And apart from this climate, there is only the ISS for us to live in. As Bruno Latour happily reminds us, at the end of the movie Gravity, the only surviving astronaut Ryan Stone finally comes back to Earth and concludes the movie by “I hate space”.
Climate is life’s body
Finally, my point is that, just like our ‘body’ may exist without us being able to truely acknowledge it, or just like our ‘psyche’ may create effects without us being able to account for its overall activity, it looks like contemporary Westerners may be facing an amazing truth : the collective activities arising from little agents interactions may have reach such a scale (1.6 Earth equivalent in ressources and energy) that when our circumscribed holon (which is 1 Earth in size) reacts accordingly, we realize ‘it’ has limits beyond which it cannot extend without dismantling nor losing its balance existing living species we know of fiercely need. To make it short, Gaïa habeat corpus.
From this statement, I may end up with two conclusions :
- The habeas corpus writ claims that any-body shall be offered a fair judgement and being heard by the court before being sentenced to what ever. As soon as we may acknowledge the ‘body’ of the systems we are part of — be it the biosphere, the ocean, the petro-chimical lobby — these ‘body’ are given the opportunity to be represented, by themselves or their advocates. In a way, when Bruno Latour runs the ‘Make It Work’ experiment with SciencePo students to simulate a COP21 where entities such as the oceans, the petro-chiminal lobby, the internet or the global youth would be represented, he allows these corpus to claim their rights and stand for their immunity.
- Knowing the Earth climate for its limit, an encompassing body, we may read from these body reactions —rising concentration of greehouse gaz concentration, acidification of the oceans, rising number of extreme events, … — that our current mind set is perhaps unbalanced. Not to say ‘sick’. Just like we would reasonably prevent psychotic or depressive preople to harm themselves by not only treating them with reasoning and logic, I wander if by following this path of ‘somatization’ we may realize that politicizing nature entities is pointless when being done on its own. Together with politicizing these non-human bodies, somatizing ‘climate’ (i.e. limits) within our bodies (i.e. institutions for instance) might be an interesting way not to be led on the path of hubris.
