We Are Our Own Metaphor

Whole Earth, Fall, 1999 by Mary Catherine Bateson

MARY CATHERINE BATESON REFLECTS ON MOTHER METAPHORS FOR THE EARTH

The Gaia hypothesis, developed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, asserts that this planet is alive. This integrates a vast amount of information in a single image: What we are talking about is life. It wiggles. It may bite. The Gaian metaphor provides a bridge from high technical specificity to all the experiences that go with direct contact with a living being.

Above all, the Gaia hypothesis evokes the powerful ancient metaphor of Mother Earth. In the early seventies, there was a poster of the Earth as seen from space, the picture that has become so familiar and beloved, and underneath was written, "Your Mother--Love Her or Leave Her!" That was a brilliant but confusing poster, because every young American male knows what he is supposed to do with his mother: grow up and leave her. After all, his entire socialization is geared to achieving independence. The poster fed right into the fantasy that if we messed up this planet we could climb into spaceships and zoom to another one or perhaps to a space platform. That poster was an invitation to believe in the possibility of leaving, in the self as separate and separable.

Since the early years of the space program, the fantasy of solving environmental problems by leaving this planet behind has faded, as has the metaphor of Earth as a spaceship, but we still may not have found the metaphor that leads to effective attention. A metaphor can obscure as well as reveal. In contemporary culture, I doubt that the best way to elicit caring and responsible behavior from adults is to remind them of childhood, the retrospective dumping ground of problems and resentments. I may feel that having the Earth thought of as female enhances me or allows me to empathize a little more deeply, but I hate to expose the planet further to the danger of rape or evoke the ambivalence that people feel about mothers.

The use of a personal name, Gala, suggests that the planet can evoke the attitudes we reserve for identified human individuals. Do we love Gala? Does she love or trust in return? What does it add to understanding or confusion that Gala is the name of a deity from an ancient and polytheistic system no longer widely worshiped, the most primitive layer of Greek religion? The original Gaia was inclined to devour her own offspring, many of whom were monsters.

Perhaps we could empathize more if the metaphor were differently conceived. Because the life span of a planet is potentially so long, we might learn to think of the planet as a young child that requires care and attention but has an unknown future. Such a metaphor would underline the need to protect future possibilities, not only for our human descendants but for all life on Earth, and might make accepting the limitations on knowledge and control less painful.

When we use a metaphor that is drawn from human relations, it is well to look carefully for all its hidden implications, for we run the risk of evoking human conflicts. If we are going to think of the Earth as female, it behooves us to take a good look at gender relations, because gender relations of dominance and exploitation will infect, have already infected, the relationship with the planet. Images of children often do evoke protectiveness and caring, yet we have been willing to incur massive debts our children will have to pay, and all too many parents exploit or abuse children and even more feel they have a right to determine a child's future. If we are going to use family images, let us take some responsibility for constructing human families that offer metaphors of mutuality and hope.

To me, the most important thing that the Gaia hypothesis proposes that was absent from earlier metaphors like "spaceship Earth" is that we are immersed in, brought into being by, a living reality, not a mechanical one. We are completely dependent, as we would be in a spaceship, but we do not have full blueprints and we cannot expect to be in complete control.

The Gaia hypothesis demands that we are totally contained in and sustained by a single living system, in which all the parts are interconnected and everything we do resonates with the whole. Nothing is fully localized. The destruction of an ecosystem or a species is an amputation and, like the amputation of a limb, can trigger fatal shock or, at the least, require learning new ways to function. One extraneous item introduced in the wrong place in a living body can trigger pathology. The Gala hypothesis becomes, at every level of its metaphorical evocation, a reminder that the world we live in is a biological, or if you like a biologized world, a sacred process in which we share, a community to participate in, not an object to be used.

The Gaia hypothesis pulls the data together, but it goes further by offering a metaphor for organizing awareness of the interconnections. It proposes empathy as a way of knowing and imagining connections about which we cannot yet be explicit. It cannot, however, guarantee love or respect any more than centuries of religion and philosophy have been able to end the exploitation by human beings of one another. We continue to be unable to provide adequate care either for the old, our parents, or for the young, our children, to whom we will entrust the future, so it is no wonder we mistake the planet that represents both source and destiny for a shopping mall. What would it be like to walk through the woods or the city in the presence of--aware of--Gala? Part of that awareness can be built up by letting children look through microscopes, germinate seeds, learn about soil chemistry, but part of it comes into being through the experiences of loving and being loved, resolving quarrels, learning new ways of family life, attending patiently to things we do not understand.