"Images of a Whole Earth "

The two seminal images of the 20th century were, to my mind: first, the mushroom cloud; and, second, the image of the whole earth seen on the cover of this morning’s bulletin. One image of apocalypse and a second image that may prevent it.

Of the planets, only Earth does not derive its English name from Greek/Roman mythology; it comes, rather, from Old English and German. There are, of course, hundreds of other names for our planet in other languages. In Roman mythology, the goddess of the Earth was Tellus - the fertile soil. In Greek she was Gaia, terra mater or Mother Earth.

The first photographic image of the whole earth from outer space was taken forty-two years ago by Apollo astronauts. Up until then our only images of a whole earth were poems, not photographs. Also up until then the very subject “ecology” was virtually unknown. As a student in the late sixties I enrolled in the first such class offered at my college. Wendell Berry, himself a poet (and farmer and professor of English at the University of Kentucky) was one of the early writers on the subject. For him, the growing ecological crisis is a crisis of character, of culture and—being a farmer he’s very sensitive to this—of agriculture.

The crisis of character aspect comes from affirming values of exploitation over those of nurture. The first casualties of the exploitive mind, Berry believes, are character and community. But character and community—that is, culture in the broadest, richest sense—constitute, just as much as nature, the source of our food. Neither nature nor people alone can produce human sustenance, but only the two together, culturally entwined and wedded. The poet Edwin Muir makes this point in verse:

We are made of what is made,
The meat, the drink, the life, the corn,
Laid up by us, in us reborn.
And self-begotten cycles close
About our way; indigenous art
And simple spells make unafraid
The haunted labyrinths of the heart
And with our wild succession braid
The resurrection of the rose.

Having forsaken the simple dignity of tilling the soil, Wendell Berry—and plenty of others—believes we’re in deep trouble. Whether we’re headed for an apocalypse or not, a closer connection to the earth and the cycles of nature are critical for securing our future. The poet Thomas Hardy, writing at the beginning of World War I (and the ninety-four years of war that were to follow), touted the importance of simple earth stewardship if we are to survive:

Only a man harrowing clods
In a slow silent walk
With an old horse that stumbles and nods
Half asleep as they stalk.

Only this smoke without flame
From the heaps of couch-grass;
Yet this will go onward the same
Though Dynasties pass.

* * *

Images of a whole earth, all her people living contentedly and at peace with one another, are as old as humanity. The biblical image is lush:

The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom;
Like crocus it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing. [Isaiah 35:1-2]

“The tree bears its fruit, the fig trees and vine give their full yield…. Rejoice in the Lord, for he has given early rain…. The threshing floors shall be full of grain, the vats shall overflow with wine and oil.” [Joel 2:22-24]

“Behold the days are coming,” says the Lord, “when the plowman will overtake the reaper and the treader of grapes him who sows the seed: the mountains shall drip sweet wine, and all the hills shall flow with it.” [Amos 9:13]

Here in America, the Unitarian Henry David Thoreau had a vision of the whole earth in keeping the Native American imagery he held dear: “Even the solid globe is permeated by the living law. It is the most living of creatures. No doubt all creatures that live on its surface are but parasites.” Thoreau was one of the first Euro-Americans to take Native American ideas seriously, ideas that always included the understanding that we belong to the earth more than it (i.e., She) belongs to us.

For Westerners—i.e., those schooled in the Judeo-Christian-Islamic tradition—the whole impetus of religion is to free oneself from the burden of time. (As James Joyce put it: “History is the nightmare from which I’m trying to awake.”) But for indigenous people, it’s not about being redeemed in time; it’s about redeeming oneself in the place where you are; making it holy (or rather, recognizing the redemptive power and feelings of connectedness that can be discovered (or is it revealed?) through making the place where you are a sacred circle, always. In the 1999 film, Primal Mind, Native American narrator Jamake Highwater explains:

"Indian America is a holy land and everything; mountains, humans, animals, everything is sacred."

"...the world is a church..."

"...for Indians the power is in the land itself and no one can own it."

Poets and Indians notwithstanding, for most of us—inculcated with Enlightenment ideas and those of its foremost scientific and mathematical spokesman, Sir Isaac Newton—such words were little more than opaque abstractions—until pictures taken by our astronauts woke us up; woke everybody up the world over.

* * *

In 1972 Stewart Brand published the Whole Earth Catalogue and won the National Book Award. He tells the story of sitting on the rooftop terrace of his San Francisco home six years earlier—1966—and becoming aware of what he thought was the curvature of the earth. This gave him the idea that from a further elevated point the whole earth might be visible. In an instant he realized that such an image would have an incredible impact on peoples’ perception of the world. Space travel had been around for about ten years by 1966, but there was still no image of the whole earth. So Brand started producing buttons asking the question “Why haven’t we seen a photograph of the whole earth yet?!” He sent them to government officials in America and Soviet Union and also sold them at universities.

Actually, Stewart Brand was not the first person to think about these matters. Twenty years earlier the astronomer Fred Hoyle had also speculated that a picture of the earth as a whole would have a huge impact on people’s psyches. Once a photograph of earth from outer space is seen, Hoyle reportedly stated, humanity will never be the same.

Brand may have read Hoyle. He certainly read R. Buckminster Fuller. As early as 1923 Fuller had made the observation that people living on islands had a sense of its limited resources and the singularity of its ecosystem. Having lived on both Oahu and Martha’s Vineyard I can attest to this. Fuller predicted that once the image of the earth as a limited island entered people’s minds their attitudes about resources would change. So it was that Stewart Brand became active in one of the first attempts to create a global consciousness with a holistic worldview.

There have been many since—and their number is growing—as the image of our little blue, green, and white jewel-like island floating in a featureless black vacuum takes root in people’s minds the world over. Photographs of the whole earth revealed that the world is definitely not flat—and also that it’s clearly alive, in a desert of infinite space.

No one has been more affected by this image than the astronauts themselves. Science writer Frank White interviewed them about their experiences and coined the term “overview effect.” All of the astronauts—male and female, American and foreign—reported that they were deeply affected by looking “down” upon the earth and seeing her without boundaries; and as a small, vulnerable sphere surrounded by a thin and delicate atmosphere. Every astronaut has had this experience and many have become active in the environmental and spiritual movements, seeing themselves as ambassadors of global understanding.

Photographs of the whole earth with the moon in the foreground, such as we’ve all seen, emotionally dramatize the difference between a dead planet and a living planet. It’s not hard to imagine a living planet becoming dead unless steps are taken—and this imagining has occurred to millions of people the moment after then they see one of those photographs of the earth rising over a barren chalky moon.

The first photographs of the whole earth were taken in the spring of 1969. A year later in the spring of 1970 we had the first Earth Day, and the real beginnings of the ecology movement, which did not exist as a movement beforehand.

Within ten years the British atmospheric chemist James Lovelock had proposed the Gaia Hypothesis. Simply stated, the Gaia idea is that we may have discovered a living being larger, more ancient, and more complex than anything from our wildest dreams. That being, called Gaia, is the Earth: a single organism that maintains conditions necessary for its survival. While by no means substantiated, the Gaia Hypothesis provides many useful lessons about the interaction of physical, chemical, geological, and biological processes on Earth.

The most startling component of the Gaia hypothesis is the idea that the Earth is a single living entity. This idea is not actually new. James Hutton [1726-1797], the so-called “father of geology,” once described the Earth as a kind of superorganism . And shortly before Lovelock, medical doctor Lewis Thomas penned these words in his famous collection, Lives of a Cell:

I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go. I cannot think of it this way. It is too big, too complex, with too many working parts lacking visible connections. The other night, driving through a hilly, wooded part of southern New England, I wondered about this. If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then…it came to me: it is most like a single cell.

Whether the Earth is a cell, an organism, or a superorganism is largely a matter of semantics. The key point here is the hypothesis that the Earth acts as a single system - it is a coherent, self-regulated, assemblage of physical, chemical, geological, and biological forces that interact to maintain a unified whole balanced between the input of energy from the sun and the thermal sink of energy into space.

The idea of the Earth acting as a single system has stimulated a new awareness of the connectedness of all things on our planet and the impact of people on global processes. No longer can we think of separate components or parts of our planet as distinct. No longer can we think of human actions in one part of the planet as independent of actions—and consequences—elsewhere. Everything that happens on earth—the deforestation/reforestation of trees, the increase/decrease of emissions of carbon dioxide, the removal or planting of croplands—all have an effect on earth. If the Earth is indeed self-regulating, then it will adjust to humanity’s destructive impacts. However, these adjustments may act to exclude human beings, much as the introduction of oxygen into the atmosphere by photosynthetic bacteria acted to exclude anaerobic bacteria. This is the crux of the Gaia hypothesis: that we’re an epiphenomenon of earth. And that Gaia could—and will—do away with us at any time if it serves her self-regulatory purposes.

Neo-pagan ecofeminist theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether has written extensively—and passionately—on Gaia. Growing numbers of people, Ruether holds, have begun to see the traditional Jewish/Christian/Islamic male monotheistic God as a destructive concept that rationalizes alienation from, and neglect of, the earth. Gaia, on the other hand, as an immanent deity, is seen as the all-nurturing earth mother goddess. “A healed relation to each other and to the earth,” Ruether believes, “calls for a new consciousness, a new symbolic culture and spirituality.” But to rise to this challenge “we need to transform our inner psyches and the way we symbolize the interrelations of men and women, humans and the divine, the divine and the earth.”

Poet and gay/lesbian rights activist Barbara Deming’s beautiful responsive reading “Prayer for the Earth” that we read together moments ago [SLT #570] is written in this spirit; UU minister John Ruskin Clark echoed it throughout his 21 year ministry at the First Unitarian Church of San Diego. Planetary theologian Sallie McFague asks us to rethink both our theology and our economics if we want to save our planet from peril. All are united in the need to sound an alarm. So it is not at all surprising that the Unitarian Universalist Association has instituted “Ministry of the Earth,” a program designed to help UUs change their habits, cleaning materials, light bulbs, and recycling procedures, in addition to the more systemic changes necessary to protect our environment and restore the planet.
* * *

My favorite image of a whole earth—one that sort of wraps all these poets and thinkers and space travelers together for me—is that proposed by Alan Watts, as later polished up—and amplified—by Joseph Campbell. The old image of people, explained Watts, is that of heaven-sent strangers in this world, who, when the mortal coil of their bodies will have been cast away in death, are to soar in spirit to their proper source and home with God in heaven. But that image is no longer tenable; no longer tenable because the truth of the matter is that we don’t come into this world at all. We come out of it, in just the same way that a leaf comes out of a tree or a baby out of a womb. Just as Jesus said that one doesn’t gather figs from thistles or grapes from thorns, so also you don’t gather people from a world that isn’t peopling. Our world is peopling, just as the apple tree apples and just as the vine grapes. We are a natural product of this earth; that is to say, if we are intelligent beings, it must be that we the fruits of an intelligent earth, symptomatic of an intelligent energy system; for “one doesn’t gather grapes from thorns.”

Images of the whole earth—photographic, poetic, and theological—all help us think systemically and holistically about our place in the world and about our purpose in life. Such that we begin seeing ourselves as the functioning ears and eyes and mind of this planet, exactly as our own ears and eyes and mind are of our own bodies. Our bodies are one with this earth, this wonderful oasis in the desert of infinite space. And our minds—including the poetry and mathematics therein—are one with the creative and imaginative source behind it all; our mind, Newton’s mind, the earth’s mind, the universe’s mind: all one; all come to flower and fruit in this beautiful oasis through ourselves .

What an image!

So may it be. Shalom.

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