Act of God or Gaia’s Revenge? Thoughts on Earth Day 2010

The good news for the airlines is that European airspace is opening up again. This is also good for fruit farmers in Ghana, flower growers in Kenya and stranded travelers. There was a curious and interesting collective denial about the disruption. How could it be that suddenly it was no longer possible to jump onto a plane to the other side of the world? Modern technological humanity was momentarily in shock.

The insurers used to call this kind of thing an ‘act of God’, though someone told me that it’s now been reclassified as an ‘act of nature’.

Whether it was Mother Nature or God the Father, there was a distinct feeling of a colossal power brushing us puny humans and our tinny technology aside. It could get worse: the Icelanders say that on the three past occasions when Eyjafjallajokull blew, it was a mere curtain-raiser to a much larger eruption of the neighboring Katla volcano.

Is there perhaps a message here, a ‘sign of the times’? James Lovelock’s book, Gaia’s Revenge might help us interpret it. Emerging from a philosophy of ‘systems thinking’, the Gaia hypothesis (from the Greek Earth Goddess Gaea) views the earth as one vast, living, interconnected, self-correcting ecosystem. For Gaia theorists, natural disasters which affect humanity are the ‘corrections’ of Mother Earth. She’s responding powerfully, violently even, to the ecological damage done to her by modern industrial humanity. This is her ‘revenge’. A ‘Smack from Mother Nature’ is what Clem Sunter calls it.

One might object that a volcanic eruption is a random event, not one triggered by human climate-changing activities. Yes, but the point here is that in the past such eruptions would not have affected us so badly. Firstly, we were much fewer and therefore we could avoid settling in large numbers near volcanoes, (and on seismic faults in San Francisco or in the flood-plains of Mozambique). Secondly, back then there were far fewer sophisticated technological systems for nature to knock out and thereby affect our lives and economies. But today we and our technology are everywhere, including in some of the most ecologically sensitive regions of the planet.

And apparently we could become responsible for volcanic eruptions. Icelandic volcanologist Freysteinn Sigmundsson warns that future thawing of the world’s ice sheets - caused by climate change - may make more volcanoes erupt by removing the ice’s massive weight at present holding them in check.

The question Eyjafjallajokull may be asking us, therefore, is whether we and our technology should be everywhere. Also how we can tread more lightly on the earth in those places we already are. In other words, how much pressure can we put on Mother Earth with our omnipresence and the all-pervasive penetration of our ecologically disruptive technology?
If Gaia is somewhat too pagan a notion for some, a biblical image which suggests itself is the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in Genesis. The Garden of Eden (a symbol of our pristine world) is both beautiful and bountiful, but in it the Lord creates one special tree which he places off limits. Touching the fruit of this tree means fateful consequences for humanity and the Garden itself.

Volcanic eruptions and other natural disruptions to our modern life may therefore be cosmic and divine promptings to discern what parts of the planet should be off limits to humanity and our technology.
If we don’t make these calls ourselves, it seems that God and/or Gaia may make them for us.