Indigenous Cultures and Gaia
Indigenous cultures have not needed Gaia Theory to determine or temper their interactions with the earth. Traditionally earth-based cultures never felt they had a right to change the world around them or take on nature.
A few short centuries ago North America was the battleground for survival of the earth and indigenous societies. As North America's First People's lands were taken away, their numbers declined and they were almost destroyed, along with their traditional ways. So it is today in the rainforests of South America.
In 1500 there were between six and nine million indigenous people in the rainforests of Brazil. By 1900, they numbered one million. Today, less than 250,000 inhabitants survive. Still the destruction continues. Today a full twenty percent of the rainforest is gone, with dire predictions for the coming years.
We certainly cannot blame the local inhabitants who raze the land. Starvation is a strong driver. Besides, this destruction runs completely counter to all earth-bound cultures.
Indigenous societies have not needed Gaia Theory to determine or temper their interactions with the earth. Traditionally earth-based cultures never felt they had a right to change the world around them or take on nature. Instead the indigenous world view sees themselves, animals, rivers, oceans and plants as an inextricable and intrinsic part of nature. Harming any part would harm them.
It becomes easier to understand why indigenous cultures have many Gods and Goddesses and a rich tradition of myth and folk tales. If you believe all of life is woven of the same fabric it is easy to move to the interdependence of all beings that inhabit the earth and all the places they inhabit - earth, air, water, forest, desert and mountains.
Even the line between animate and inanimate objects become blurred because the world is alive. Knowledge and wisdom is developed not outside or above nature, but from closeness with nature, interactions and observations.
I think it only fitting that I let Mr. Lovelock have the last word:
"You may find it hard to swallow the notion that anything as large and apparently inanimate as the Earth is alive. Surely, you may say, the Earth is almost wholly rock, and nearly all incandescent with heat. The difficulty can be lessened if you let the image of a giant redwood tree enter your mind. The tree undoubtedly is alive, yet 99% of it is dead. The great tree is an ancient spire of dead wood, made of lignin and cellulose by the ancestors of the thin layer of living cells which constitute its bark. How like the Earth, and more so when we realize that many of the atoms of the rocks far down into the magma were once part of the ancestral life of which we all have come." The Ages of Gaia by James Lovelock, 1988