GAIA - The Quiet Revolution

From: TIELLIS@DELPHI.COM (Thomas I. Ellis, Ph.D.)
Date: 26 Jun 1995 19:16:28 GMT
Organization: GAIA International

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                           --GAIA: THE QUIET REVOLUTION--

                          A Manifesto by Thomas I. Ellis, Ph.D.

1. THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

Most of us probably remember the riveting scene in George Lucas's 
*STAR WARS* where the huge and menacing Death Star draws a 
bead on a shimmering blue Earth-like planet--Princess Leia's home--
and blows it to smithereens.

This is an apt image for what is happening to our Earth these days. 
The Empire has struck back for real, by using sneering demagogues 
of denial like Rush Limbaugh to stir up an antiregulatory, anti-
government backlash that elected the "Newt" Congress, whose 
"Contract with America", could also be called a contract on the Earth.

The legislation they currently have on the docket, with misleading 
names like the "Job Creation and Regulatory Reform Act," would 
effectively eliminate 25 years of environmental protection, 
suspending all further regulatory legislation and giving industry veto 
power over all existing regulations based on their spurious "cost-
benefit analyses." Similarly the fraudulently named "Forest Health 
Act" (SB 391) will open up large areas of public land to "emergency" 
salvage logging and road building, dispensing with Environmental 
Impact Statements and debarring citizen appeals, with no limit on 
the number, maximum size, and duration of "emergency areas." 
These devastating proposals to emasculate environmental regulation 
are coming so thick and fast, and the legislative juggernaut is moving 
so rapidly, that environmentalists have little or no time to mobilize 
public opposition to them.

Meanwhile, the right-wing "new majority", with ample corporate 
funding, has seized the rhetorical initiative in condemning, by 
association, any and all proposals for maintaining or strengthening 
regulatory legislation. In the public eye, "regulation" has become a 
bad word, and "the environment" as a political concern has dropped 
off the mass media radar screen altogether, except as an object of 
ridicule and distortion by Rush Limbaugh and his cronies, who 
dominate the airwaves.  

We see a massive and far-reaching public relations offensive by the 
corporate oligarchy and their surrogates, the Republican Party, the 
Christian Coalition, and the "Wise Use" fanatics. They have unlimited 
funds at their disposal; they're well organized, and they have a vast 
network of grassroots support in the fundamentalist churches across 
the country, to say nothing of the millions of others who are duped 
by incessant right-wing talk-show propaganda on radio and 
television. And these folks are constantly hearing and repeating the 
message that "liberals" (now a sneer word) are responsible for all 
their economic hardships, that environmentalists are a key part of a 
"liberal" big-government conspiracy to strangle free enterprise and 
to regulate every aspect of their lives, and that the environmental 
crisis is a fabrication by hysterical doomsayers to browbeat good 
decent God-fearing Americans into supporting the "liberals" and their 
insidious big-government, big-brother agenda.

Confronted by this formidable web of amply funded propaganda, 
distortion, and hate-mongering, what can we do? The environmental 
movement is in disarray, divided between those who would curtail 
their aims and soften their message in order to appease the anti-
regulatory fervor in Congress, and those who favor a more radical 
course of grassroots organizing, confrontation, and public 
demonstrations to draw public attention to the crisis. But the crisis is 
so diffuse and overwhelming, and these public demonstrations or 
acts of civil disobedience have all been seen so often before, that 
they are self-stereotyping--they quickly become fodder for Rush 
Limbaugh's ridicule--if the mass media notices them at all.  Neither 
genteel lobbying of the right-wing ideologues in Congress nor bold 
and brash fist-shaking by a handful of activists will do much to stem
the anti-environmental juggernaut in Congress, nor the right-wing PR
offensive over the airwaves. 

What do we do then?  One suggestion I have is that we use this time
of retreat and retrenchment to reassess our goals--to consider 
carefully where we've been, were we're going, and how we can
regain the rhetorical initiative.

Specifically, the time has come for the Environmental Movement to
metastasize into the Gaia Movement.

2. WHAT IS THE GAIA MOVEMENT?

The Gaia Movement is a far-reaching but subtle intellectual and
cultural trend that has made itself felt in practically every academic
discipline, as well as in more progressive churches and synagogues
such as the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and the popular culture,
especially on the West Coast. It is predicated on a radical and
fundamental critique of the dualistic premises of western industrial
civilization, for its major premise is that humanity is a part of, and
not apart from, nature, and its aim is to introduce *ideas of ecology*
into the *ecology of ideas* in every academic discipline and in every
domain of human endeavor, including (and especially) the realm
of public discourse.

The intellectual foundations of the Gaia Movement lie in the theory
of self-organizing, self-regulatory systems and specifically in the
ideas of Gregory Bateson, whose masterpiece, "Mind and Nature: A
Necessary Unity" provides the epistemological foundations for Gaian
thought. It derives its name from the Gaia Hypothesis, developed in
1970 by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, and based on the
cybernetic thinking of Bateson and others. The Gaia Hypothesis
models life on Earth as a self-organizing, self-regulatory system in
which the biota collectively mantain vital, thermal, atmospheric, and
geochemical variables in far from-equilibrium steady state
conducive to life, despite a steady increase in solar radiation. But
besides being a fruitful scientific model, the Gaia concept (named
after the ancient Greek Earth-Goddess) has also become a nodal idea 
in leading-edge thought, as a metaphor for systemic, post-Cartesian 
epistemology and the policies and perspectives that arise from such 
thought.. It is the only word we currently have for conceptualizing 
humanity and the natural world as a single system. Besides Bateson 
and Lovelock, leading Gaian thinkers include William Irwin 
Thompson, Francisco Varela, Humberto Maturana, Norman Myers, 
Fritjof Capra, Hazel Henderson, Ralph Abraham, and John and Nancy 
Todd.

The Gaia Movement includes but transcends the Environmental 
Movement. Whereas the Environmental Movement is essentially 
political and reactive, the Gaia Movement is essentially philosophical 
and transformative. Gaians seek not only to pass legislation, but to 
promote active inquiry into the very terms of the "environmental" 
debate, by questioning the Cartesian premises in which that debate is 
normally cast--the idea that the natural world is nothing more than a 
"resource" for humanity to exploit at leisure. Gaians recognize that 
nature inherently cannot be "managed" by humanity, for nature is 
the larger system of which humanity is a part, and, as Gregory 
Bateson repeatedly emphasizes, no subsystem can unilaterally 
determine the behavior of the larger system of which it is a part, and 
attempts to do so (as we have seen) always generate pathology. 
Gaians therefore call upon politicians, industrialists, and citizens--
everyone, in short--to recognize that we are *a part of nature* and 
that our stance regarding the natural world should be one of 
humility and emulation, not domination and control. By "emulation" I 
mean that we strive to model social and industrial processes on the 
processes of the larger system that sustains them. Our industrial 
policies (for example) should be geared at creating an "industrial 
ecology" in which, as in the natural world, everything is recycled and 
nothing is wasted; where the waste products of one industrial 
process become the raw materials of the next. Furthermore, the 
shibboleth of "economic growth" as a goal of public policy is, from a 
Gaian perspective, obviously "the ideology of a cancer cell." Gaian 
economics would therefore seek to evolve toward a steady-state, 
sustainable and just economy, again modeling the steady-state 
ecosystem that sustains it. There is no alternative, if we wish to 
survive.

	Such ideas, of course, are far too radical for most people, 
especially the average idiot who listens to Rush Limbaugh. So there 
must be a practical side to the Gaia movement, to correspond to our  
initiative to introduce Gaian perspectives into the academic and 
cultural mainstream. My idea in this respect is to launch an 
aggressive and far-reaching public relations campaign called "The 
Quiet Revolution" whose purpose above all is to use stratagems 
perfected by Madison Avenue to give people a vested interest in 
taking responsibility for the social and ecological consequences of the 
money they spend and invest, their livelihoods, and their attitudes 
and behavior.

3. THE QUIET REVOLUTION

The Quiet Revolution is envisioned as a systematic grass-roots 
educational campaign whose purpose is to cultivate awareness 
of the ways in which our personal decisions collectively shape 
our world. 

Each person impinges on his or her society, species, and 
biosphere in six ways: spending money, earning or investing 
money, voting, using resources, relating  to others, and paying 
taxes. Of these, five are largely or wholly a matter of personal 
choice.

The Quiet Revolution  is based on the premise that the Earth 
can be saved--our terminal global cancer can be cured--to the 
exact extent we each take personal responsibility for the Earth 
in all of our decisions. The basic maxim is this:

Make all choices on the basis of what promotes the health, 
competence, and adaptive flexibility of self, community, 
society, species, and biosphere.

Specifically, this translates into the following:

GOOD BUY: Cultivate awareness of the personal and systemic 
effects of your spending habits. Before you purchase anything, 
ask yourself two simple questions:
(1) Where is most of the money for this thing going? (i.e. to 
support the local economy and/or sustainable enterprise, or to 
enrich the polluters and exploiters)
(2) Does this purchase constitute a responsible (i.e. sustainable) 
use of the Earth's resources?

GOOD WORK: Cultivate awareness of the personal and systemic 
effects of your livelihood. Before you take a job or make a 
decision about your career, ask yourself to what degree it is 
slavery  (squandering your vital energies for someone else's 
vested interests that may be detrimental to the health of the 
planet) or work  (doing what you are best at for the best 
interests of self, community, society, species, and biosphere).

GOOD WILL: Cultivate an awareness of the personal and systemic 
effects of your interactions with others: those you love, work 
with, compete against, do business with, or involve yourself 
with in any way. "Do unto others as you would have them do 
unto you," whether the "other" is your lover, your cat, a 
homeless person, a wilderness area, or the Earth herself. This 
has never been improved upon as the central axiom of 
enlightened personal and planetary ethics.

To the exact extent that people apply these principles--acting 
on the basis of what is best for self, community, society, 
species, and biosphere simultaneously--to every nontrivial 
decision they make--what to buy, where to work, how to 
relate--the Earth will be transformed into a healthy and 
balanced planet once again.

We can propagate the Quiet Revolution by using it as a collaborative 
fundraising campaign for environmental groups, community groups, 
churches, etc. We can market buttons, posters, T-Shirts, bumper-
stickers, etc featuring (1) a photo-image of the Earth, and (2) a 
slogan-with-variations, such as "Join the Quiet Revolution: Ride a 
Bike" or "Join the Quiet Revolution: Recycle" (etc.) We can supplement 
this by organizing community events, public access television 
programs, and Internet initiatives,. all to propagate "The Quiet 
Revolution" and to drive home the message that "What is best for the 
Earth is best for you and your family."

For coherence, all materials associated with the Quiet Revolution 
should display the GAIA International Logo--a white Solar Cross 
framed by a dark-blue square, with a green "G" and "I" monogram 
superimposed on the Solar Cross.. Also, all of the posters and bumper 
stickers should feature the iconic symbol of the Gaia Movement: the 
photo-image of the living Earth.  The aim is to give average people a 
felt sense of identification with the living Earth--to make "Gaia" and 
"The Quiet Revolution" into essentially synonymous household words. 

Our purpose, in short, is nothing less than to catalyze the 
spontaneous remission of the Cancer of the Earth.

To these ends, I am starting a nonprofit organization called GAIA 
International. If you wish to get involved in planning The Quiet 
Revolution (in theory or in practice), send me a message.


Thomas I. Ellis, Ph.D.
Founder and Director,
GAIA International.
TIELLIS@DELPHI.COM

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