Gaia RDI University Degree Programs
 Gaia RDI Open Houses
Join us for an introduction to the Gaia RDI programs.
Bolinas:
September 26, 4–5pm in at Commonweal Garden. You are welcome to join the Commonweal Garden Tour from 1–4pm prior to the Gaia RDI Open House.
Gaia RDI : Project Based, Self Directed, Action Learning
Are you ready to embark on a challenging adventure in which un-learning is possibly as important as learning?
Are you ready to put your passion, vision, and dreams to work in an active, productive way to meet both your own goals and the needs of the Earth?
If your heart sings when you imagine a more sustainable, just, and peaceful world, if you are ready to step forward to contribute your "grain of sand" to the emergence of this vision, then Gaia RDI can offer you the support you need to manifest your dreams.
Gaia RDI offers a unique approach to higher learning by offering you access to accredited bachelor's and master's degrees and graduate diplomas while you are actively engaged in self and planetary transformation. Linking your ideals with self-directed practical experience, you act as a world changer by working for local and global sustainability and regeneration, justice and peace.
Read more...
 ... The godless do not know how to act, or how to renounce. They have neither purity nor truth. They do not understand the right principles ... They say that the universe is an accident with no purpose and no God ... that life is created by sexual union, a product of lust and nothing else. Thinking thus, these degraded souls, these enemies of mankind - whose intelligence is negligible and whose deeds are monstrous - come into the world only to destroy. -- Bhagavad Gita
It is important today that theologians and others should begin to look at the Bible afresh, and to reassess its message about humanity and our relationship with the planet. A fresh reading of biblical texts about the created world order, its conservation and restoration, and some reflections on the cultural context in which these themes occur, not only in the Bible but also in other religious texts from neighbouring cultures, can tell us much about Christianity's real ecological ethic ... When the Bible's teaching on God's Creation and our place in it is duly digested, I believe that it cries out to us: 'you are fellow-creatures of everything else in the Cosmos. You have no right to exploit or destroy, but you have duties to all, under God to whom you are responsible.' -- Father Robert Murray
Many people today are calling for modern religion, and specifically Christianity, to be re-imbedded in the cosmos, so that religion might become a real force in providing the ethical and spiritual energy for the critical task of reversing the degradation of the Earth. -- Vincent Rossi
Read more...
 If we accept the Gaia Hypothesis, then modern reductionist and mechanistic ecology, as taught in our universities, can no longer be defended. However, rather than simply returning to the 'holistic' ecology of Clements and Shelford, a more sophisticated ecology must be developed to take account of the work of such holistic thinkers as C. H. Waddington, Paul Weiss, Ludwig Von Bertalanffy and others.
This paper was presented at the Wadebridge Ecological Centre's Conference: "Gaia: Theory, practice and implications", which took place at Camelford, Cornwall in October 1987. It was published in The Ecologist Vol. 18 No. 2/3, 1988.
Ecology, as an academic discipline, was developed towards the end of the last century. It came into being largely when a few biologists came to realise that the biological organisms and populations which they studied were not arranged at random but were, on the contrary, organised to form 'communities' or 'associations' whose structure and function could not be understood by examining their parts in isolation from each other. Both Frederick Clements and Victor Shelford, two of the most distinguished of the early ecologists in the USA, defined ecology as the "science of communities". [1]
Read more...
Dr Lovelock's "Gaia Hypothesis" has attracted much interest. The concept of the earth as a self-regulating "super-organism" is especially attractive to those who see in it a justification for "green" policies: from simple environmental preservation and waste control, all the way to "animal rights" and anti-technology green radicalism. But what exactly does it entail, and what are its true consequences?
When pressed by criticism, or simply by the desire for more respectability among hide-bound reductionists, Gaians often fall back to what one might call the "Weak Gaia Hypothesis": the non-controversial ideas that living systems modify their environment, and that complex ecosystems tend to be stable.
Emboldened by success with the Weak Hypothesis, proponents then proceed to the "Strong Gaia Hypothesis", as though this followed naturally. This proposes that the Earth is a super-organism, which in some mystical way regulates life and non-life for the benefit of the whole. A kind of planetary communism. The rocks, the germs, the worms, the men, all are here to live as one, in glorious equality and noble self-sacrifice.
Once this is accepted, grimmer extensions sprout. Mankind means nothing to Gaia, and we better behave lest she spit us out. Or even more extreme, not only does Gaia not care about us, but in the final analysis it doesn't really matter if we and all other life on the planet are exterminated. Gaia doesn't care about such trivial details as individual species (let alone individual people!), and in time she will rise again like a phoenix from her own ashes. All that matters is Gaia herself. I call this the "Gaia-With-Real-Muscles Hypothesis".
However, all the above are mere shadows of the true meaning and purpose of Gaia, which I now unveil to the world as the "Gaia-on-Steroids Hypothesis". While the Strong and Real-Muscles Hypotheses are important contributions to the Gaia paradigm, they are a mere shadows of the true meaning and purpose of Gaia, now revealed: a Grand Unified Theory of Gaia as it were. Consider the following:
- Over millions of years, Gaia has laid up vast amounts of coal, oil and gas reserves: a kind of planetary fat. In addition, Gaia has arranged for the convenient distribution of supplies of various fissionable elements.
- Despite Gaia's renowned self-regulation, we are told that atmospheric greenhouse gases have been rising steadily ever since the start of the industrial revolution. Yet, it has been estimated that termites alone annually produce ten times more greenhouse gases than present world industry ("Trashing the Planet", by D.L. Ray with L. Guzzo). Gaia seems unwilling to cope with the small excess we produce.
- Ideas for terraforming lifeless planets are being developed. Why? Any results would be so far in the future that there can be no conceivable benefit for their inventors.
- Even planets don't live forever. Any moment, Gaia might be sterilized by a nearby supernova or a massive meteorite impact. If not, the sun will eventually fry us. So like all living things, Gaia must die, and Gaia must reproduce.
It all makes perfect sense, when it is realized that human beings are the spores of Gaia. The only way for Gaia to reproduce is by producing intelligent life. By means of technological and industrial development, intelligent life can spread out through the galaxy, seeding dead planets with life so that ultimately they can develop into new Gaias.
Thus are the above points simply explained. Gaia laid down energy reserves to enable the industrial/scientific revolution to grow. Gaia's breeding urge generates our urge to move into space and to terraform other planets. Gaia's apparent failure to absorb our puny industrial wastes is not failure, but her message that she wants us to leave, to take her seeds into space.
Observe nature to learn the nature of Gaia. The mushroom grows silently in the ground for most of its life, then sprouts in brief magnificence to release millions of spores, and dies. A flower blooms, sets seed, and withers: "The flower that once has bloomed forever dies" (Omar Khayyam). A mother nurtures her young while they are helpless then chases them away when they mature, that they may spread her genes.
The message is clear. We must use the energy reserves laid up by Gaia for us. We must pillage the earth in order to most rapidly spread the seeds of life to the stars. To Gaia, the present diversity of species is no more important to her ultimate purpose than the anaerobes who were banished to the fringes when oxygen-based life arose. Indeed, it is our sacred duty to do whatever we must to disperse life, however much we might love trees and small furry animals. Gaia herself demands it!
http://www.thoughtware.com.au/philosophy/science/gaia1.html
 James Lovelock is an independent atmospheric scientist who lives and works deep in the English countryside. He has a knack for making discoveries of global significance. Lovelock is the inventor of the electron capture detector, a palm-size chamber that detects man-made chemicals in minute concentrations. In the late 1950s, his detector was used to demonstrate that pesticide residues were present in virtually all species on Earth, from penguins in Antarctica to mother's milk in the United States. This provided the hard data for Rachel Carson's landmark 1962 environmental book, "The Silent Spring" which launched the international campaign to ban the pesticide DDT.
In the late 1960s, Lovelock sailed from Britain to Antarctica and with his detector discovered the ubiquitous presence of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), man-made gases now known to deplete the stratospheric ozone layer.
Today, Lovelock is best known as author of the "Gaia hypothesis," named after Gaea, Greek goddess of earth. The hypothesis states that the global ecosystem sustains and regulates itself like a biological organism rather than an inanimate entity run by the automatic and accidental processes of geology, as traditional earth science holds. In essence, Lovelock's hypothesis sees the surface of the Earth as more like a living body than a rock or a machine.
He first conceived the Gaia hypothesis while working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in the mid-1960s, where he was designing life detection instruments for NASA's Mars Viking probes.
Read more...
 The Gaia hypothesis is an ecological hypothesis proposing that the biosphere and the physical components of the Earth (atmosphere, cryosphere, hydrosphere and lithosphere) are closely integrated to form a complex interacting system that maintains the climatic and biogeochemical conditions on Earth in a preferred homeostasis. Originally proposed by James Lovelock as the earth feedback hypothesis,[1] it was named the Gaia Hypothesis after the Greek supreme goddess of Earth.[2] The hypothesis is frequently described as viewing the Earth as a single organism. Lovelock and other supporters of the idea now call it Gaia theory, regarding it as a scientific theory and not mere hypothesis, since they believe it has passed predictive tests.[3]
History
The Gaia hypothesis was first scientifically formulated in the 1960s by the independent research scientist James Lovelock, as a consequence of his work for NASA on methods of detecting life on Mars.[4][5] He initially published the Gaia Hypothesis in journal articles in the early 1970s[6][7] followed by a popularizing 1979 book Gaia: A new look at life on Earth.
The theory was initially, according to Lovelock, a way to explain the fact that combinations of chemicals including oxygen and methane persist in stable concentrations in the atmosphere of the Earth. Lovelock suggested using such combinations detected in other planets' atmospheres would be a relatively reliable and cheap way to detect life, which many biologists opposed at the time and since. Later other relationships such as the fact that sea creatures produce sulfur and iodine in approximately the quantities required by land creatures emerged and helped bolster the theory. Rather than invent many different theories to describe each such equilibrium, Lovelock dealt with them holistically, naming this self-regulating living system after the Greek goddess Gaia, using a suggestion from the novelist William Golding, who was living in the same village as Lovelock at the time (Bowerchalke, Wiltshire, UK). The Gaia Hypothesis has since been supported by a number of scientific experiments[8] and provided a number of useful predictions,[9] and hence is properly referred to as the Gaia Theory.
Since 1971, the noted microbiologist Dr. Lynn Margulis has been Lovelock's most important collaborator in developing Gaian concepts.[10]
Until 1975 the hypothesis was almost totally ignored. An article in the New Scientist of February 15, 1975, and a popular book length version of the theory, published in 1979 as The Quest for Gaia, began to attract scientific and critical attention to the hypothesis. The theory was then attacked by many mainstream biologists. Championed by certain environmentalists and climate scientists, it was vociferously rejected by many others, both within scientific circles and outside them.
Lovelock's initial hypothesis
James Lovelock defined Gaia as:
- a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.
Read more...
|
|
Gaia
This point of view is different from the default position of radical environmentalists and a common opinion that all technology necessarily degrades the environment, and that environmental restoration can therefore occur only with reduced reliance on technology. Technogaians argue that technology gets cleaner and more efficient with time. They would also point to such things as hydrogen fuel cells to demonstrate that developments do not have to come at the environment's expense. More directly, they argue that such things as nanotechnology and biotechnology can directly reverse environmental degradation. Molecular nanotechnology, for example, could convert garbage in landfills into useful materials and products, while biotechnology could lead to novel microbes that devour hazardous waste.[1]
