Gaia
BY CHRISTI LEMAN
My husband Peter and I hike a canyon in the Rocky Mountains one July. The yellow mule’s ears that blazed among the trees last month have shriveled into themselves. Scrappy purple fleabane and hyssop grow in their place, while white Jacob’s ladder mists the air with verdant, skunky perfume. Green oak, maple, and cottonwood drink deep from the stream that trips along the trail like a laughing child.
We pass two young women sitting on a blanket next to the water. One shakes out her hair, long and golden in the morning light. The other watches, enthralled. Their bodies curve and shine. I am flatter-chested, scarred, creakier than these nymphs, 45 years old this fall. It’s been three years since my cancer diagnosis, and doctors have erased all knowable disease from my body, together with all possible estrogen—the better to starve any lingering, malignant cells.
The path widens into a meadow of knee-high grasses. Butterflies rise, circle, a brainstorm of yellow-white wings. Peter and I pause at the clearing where, shortly after my diagnosis, we could go no further until we wept and held each other, until a doe appeared, watched our tears through the leaves, then headed through the white flowers and away. Hiking can be a good time for crying, but that’s for yesterday. Today is for ideas.
I’ve heard of this thing, I tell Peter, called the Gaia hypothesis, named for the Greek mythological goddess, mother of all life. It’s the notion that Earth is one great organism, all her body systems working together to form one creature. Atmosphere-lungs breathing life to the topsoil and vegetation of her skin. Water and lava rushing through her underground tunnels like blood and lymph. Animals roaming like mobile molecules or living cells, while rocks-as-bones lend structure to the whole.
On one level, I love the idea that each person could be one tiny part of an enormous creature—just one cell or molecule doing its job, whatever that job may be. Turning oxygen to carbon dioxide, maybe. Transferring nitrogen from one place to another. Skittering over Gaia’s face like the antibacterial microorganisms on human skin or the mites in our lashes that keep our eyelids tidy.
Except that humans—as a species, anyway—don’t keep Gaia especially tidy. She flies through the void, a battered, beautiful, ramshackle goddess.
If we are molecules, what if we’re poison? If cells, what if cancer?
My hands trail in the tall grass. Tickling.
Darwin taught the world that plants and animals respond and adapt to their environments. James Lovelock, credited with formulating the Gaia hypothesis, showed that the opposite is also true.
Lovelock loved hiking and thinking, ideally at the same time. While wandering in the Lake District as a brilliant but directionless young man, he fell for a female chemistry student whom he followed to Manchester University. The romantic pursuit was ultimately in vain, but Lovelock’s education in chemistry and physics was not. As an inventor, he held so many useful patents he could afford not to be tied down to one institution—intellectually, financially, or physically. He contracted with Harvard, Yale, NASA, Shell Oil, even MI5 as a designer of spy gear. He figured out how to measure air and soil pollution in minute quantities, developing devices and techniques that would someday help ban DDT and prove the existence of a hole in the ozone layer. He conducted research the world over, returning every time to walk the hills near his private lab and his quiet country home.
As a researcher for Shell, Lovelock figured out that sunny, warm temperatures encourage ocean algaes to grow, their waste chemicals rising into the atmosphere to help form clouds which, in turn, cool the atmosphere. This helps keep algaes’ habitats from getting too hot. When the atmosphere is cooler, fewer clouds form. The resulting sunshine and warmth causes more algae to grow, and the cycle starts over. Rather than simply adapting to environments—he realized—life might actually help create environments where it could flourish.
He worked through his ideas while hiking the English countryside with his wife, Sandy. He proved some of them correct on research trips with his colleague Lynn Margulis. On a walk through Bowlerchalke village one day, Lovelock told his friend William Golding (yes, that William Golding) about his developing hypothesis. Golding suggested the name Gaia: “If you intend to put forward so large an idea, you must give it a proper name.”
The science behind the hypothesis was this: Earth seems to maintain, even cultivate, a certain set of conditions favorable to plants and animals. For millions of years, and despite wild fluctuations of methane and carbon dioxide produced by animals and natural disasters—which might otherwise be toxic—plants and weathering silicate rocks reduce waste gasses and have kept oxygen levels optimal to life. Too little oxygen, and creatures would be unable to breathe; too much, and wildfires would break out quicker than forests could regrow. Low carbon dioxide in the air has historically meant lower overall temperatures, despite a sun that has grown hotter over the Earth’s lifetime. Marine creatures produce gases that help transfer essential elements like iodine to land creatures; plants regulate precipitation; trees cool the Tropics but warm higher latitudes; phytoplankton eat up much—though not nearly enough, these days—of our CO2 pollution.
It was almost as though the planet were healing itself. Almost as though it wanted to continue to live. A superorganism made up of bazillions of individual critters, plus things that aren’t technically alive at all.
Peter notices a pyramid of sawdust at the end of a log. We stop and watch a colony of black ants drop tiny crumbs of desiccated wood, one by one, from the opening of a tunnel threaded between the trunk’s rings. Somehow, the ants know exactly which grains of wood and soil to remove and how steep they can pitch their tunnels without courting collapse. This enables them to construct mazes that stretch dozens of feet underground and last for decades.
We’ve seen ants make sawdust pyramids before and find a spot farther down on the log where a twin pyramid has been winter-scattered. A discovery: we noticed this log, these same ants last year. The hive-mind is still bent on expanding their queendom, thousands of individuals making and remaking chambers for food storage and piles of waste, all to benefit their ever-increasing numbers of young. Last year’s harsh winter didn’t stop them, cozy in their angles of repose; next year’s milder one will only help them flourish.
The wood itself might not last, though, as their numbers increase. Could the log become so riddled with tunnels that it crumbles into a pile of sweet-smelling dust? The colony’s eggs and queen exposed, bird-eaten, those that remain split into colonies and forced to find new logs to conquer? This particular colony would continue in some form, I’m sure. But sometimes a species outgrows what its home can offer. After that, what happens when there’s nowhere left to go?
I stop to snap a photo of wildflowers and step aside for an older man and woman coming down the mountain. The woman offers to take our picture. Her hands shake a little as she holds the phone. She looks older than her husband; many Utah women of her generation do, having borne and cared for six or eight or ten children and helped with all those children’s babies. I imagine the couple’s family photos at home, she and her husband sitting among dozens of their descendants. Her children could be living all over the country with large families of their own, or maybe they’re still in Utah, building homes in new developments spreading over the foothills like whitetop flowers in spring.
I take a picture of the couple in return. The woman apologizes for the way she looks, having “just rolled out of bed.” Her smile is easy and generous, her teeth straight and white. She is beautiful. Selfless, too, and kind. I imagine her offering to help others she meets on the way to the parking lot, offering water to thirsty hikers, snacks to weary toddlers and their parents.
To us, she gifts trail advice: go at least as far as the spring. “It’s not a big deal,” she says. “It’s just pretty there right now.”
She doesn’t know we’ve been there dozens of times, that we came when my rogue cells spread out of control, colonizing and invading my body systems. The spring is as pretty this year as three years ago, bluebells and columbine everywhere, waters clear as storm-scrubbed skies. We cross the rotting footbridge through a patch of cow parsnips that grow taller than both of us. Stinging nettle bursts from the understory. Wide, pointed leaves and branching stems of white blossoms hedge the sides of the trail next to coneflowers tall enough to stare us down. Bumblebees and flies hum through this forest primeval.
The overgrowth reminds me of my favorite display in a nearby dinosaur museum: a glass enclosure containing a diorama of colossal prehistoric plants and insects. Its towering grasses and six-foot-long centipedes make me feel as though I’ve shrunk to the size of a beetle. Three-hundred-seventy-five million years ago, tall ferns and horsetails feasted on a surplus of carbon dioxide in the air. The plants grew into giants that scraped the sky, making the planet a tropical dinosaur and bug paradise for millions of years. The horsetails and ferns ate so much CO2 they helped start an ice age, which, in turn, killed them, turning them to gas, coal and oil. But life went on after that particular mass extinction event. Such things happen, and Gaia can be forgiving in that way. But every time, she edits the list of those species who get to stay.
Birdsong and conversation stop as two men on growling motorbikes pause at a trail junction. They nod to Peter and me politely, their faces masked with chunky helmets. After pointing and shouting to one another over their engines’ noise, they spin their tires and depart, using the same trail Peter and I had come up on. It isn’t designated for motorbikes. To be fair, the forest service sign is obscured by grass, but I hope the men are careful as they hurtle down the trail not to collide with the older couple.
The bikers leave behind fumes that drift through the flowers and into our lungs: I breathe the exhaust of oil manufactured from the remnants of gigantic carboniferous plants a bit like the ones that surround me now. After enjoying spring’s wild aromas for the last hour or so, the gas smell is repulsive. At the same time, it reminds me of my dad’s motorboat puttering back to the lake dock at sunset, me sunburned and happy and twelve years old. Often—waterskiing, learning to drive—I have enjoyed the speed and independence that burning fuel gave me. As someone growing up in the western US, getting places on my own timeline was something I took as my due, like unlimited electricity and all-you-can-eat barbecue. I didn’t think much about what I was burning at all.
We all burn those ancient plants and animals. We send their smoke skyward, as though praying for a world as filled with CO2, as steamy-tropical as the one that gave rise to huge club mosses and tree ferns higher than houses. But these are extinct, and most modern trees and flowers and bodies are too delicate to adapt to a world gone suddenly so toasty. What plants and animals will make the cut next time?
James Lovelock liked the name Gaia and took his idea to the world—with mixed reception. Colleagues outside his immediate circle hated the hypothesis at first. The name itself sounded like superstition, not science. Worse, deplorables like hippies and ecofeminists wholeheartedly adopted the idea of a benevolent Mother Earth watching over her children, ignoring Lovelock’s clarification that he never said Gaia was a being with intention or consciousness.
“[The new-agers] all look to me for guidance on saving the world, but I’m not sure I can help,” he told an interviewer. “I can’t be responsible for the entire planet. I do my best.” His best was science—the art of essaying through research in pursuit of truth. But some people assumed science meant truth was a done deal, particularly when it helped their bottom line.
During congressional hearings in 1975 about the ozone layer, Lovelock testified on behalf of Dupont. He had discovered that many of the same chemicals people consider bad for the air (like methane) also occur naturally in the atmosphere, being made by algae or animals or the decomposition process. He’d discovered that Gaia’s systems could absorb these “pollutants,” even needed them to keep nature in balance. Maybe, he said, pollution was part of a natural process. Maybe Gaia could deal with whatever we threw at her.
Oil companies loved this line of reasoning. It validated selling and burning harmful petrochemicals because Lovelock (their crack scientist!) had said that our resilient Earth might pick up their slack. The companies often helpfully reminded the public just how resilient Earth was. Most people have heard the lines of their well-documented whisper campaign: The science isn’t settled yet. The climate is naturally always changing. We’re so small, humans can’t do any real damage. Even my scientist dad—a wildlife biologist—repeated these words to me through the 90s.
So Lovelock had said: maybe Gaia could deal. The key word that nobody seemed to hear was maybe.
Roots stretch across the trail like veins on the back of a hand, and Peter and I shrink the Gaia idea down to ourselves. Some people, we say, believe that human bodies are systems of symbiotic relationships. Guts are biomes full of billions of coexisting individual bacteria. Lungs have vessels like tree roots and branches, inspiring and expiring. Skin is a landscape, home to critters too small to see. Each heart and brain could be an animal or an ecosystem, each cell its own creature maybe, all systems working together in order to survive, moving the collective through space and time. Each person a whole world.
It reminds me of a Thomas Carlyle quotation up for months on our kitchen letter board three years ago, helping us weather the one-two punch of Covid quarantine and cancer: “Be no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin.”
Worlds within worlds: each of us, a miniature Gaia spinning over the planet.
Words within words: in the same chapter of Sartor Resartus as the “worldkin” quotation, Carlyle writes, “[…]what is Nature? Ha! why do I not name thee GOD?”
We reach my favorite spot, a grove of aspen trees. Aspens, like worlds, are one body made up of many individuals. Leafy worldkins.
Hikers in my part of the world love to “post” on aspen trees, carving messages into the thin white bark with pocket knives. As the tree grows, the fissures turn as black as typeface on paper, letting in fungus and bacteria, causing drought-weakened trees to use precious energy on sap—their lymph fluid—to kill the germs. Today, I spot a message that reads “Booga.” Another says, “Shade.” I can only imagine these forest influencers wrote the very first thing that came to mind.
Still, the grove looks better in the dense greenery of summer than it did in wintertime, when after years of drought and insect rot, blankets of heavy snow cracked trunks and avalanched over the weak. My favorite tree used to arch over the trail like a portal, the survivor of some winter past. It’s gone now, probably a casualty of weather with increasingly dangerous mood swings, a casualty of disease, pollution, us.
I’ve known human casualties, too: cancer tragedies caused by the intersection of genes and, maybe, similar pollution to what hurts the aspens. Shan, a redheaded, volleyball-playing mom with three little kids, taken by breast cancer that spread to her lungs. Ashley the beach lover, a passionate activist with the same genetic mutation I have, whose cancer colonized her brain and stole her language, word by word.
There are eight billion humans now, four times more than when my grandmother was born. Ten thousand years ago, we and our domesticated animals made up only .01 percent of mammal mass on Earth, and there were five times more “non-us” mammals than there are today. Now, ninety-six percent of mammal mass worldwide either belongs to us as livestock or pets, or is us. Wild mammals are down to just four percent of the whole. Seventy percent of bird mass worldwide is chickens.
We’ve transformed or have in use 30-50% of all land and fresh water. We’ve added methane and CO2 to all the air on the planet and increased ocean acidity worldwide. Microplastics pepper our air, virtually all our water, even our internal organs and those of animals—both those that roam wild and those we eat.
The glyphs on the aspens make me want to write my question out loud again: Are humans cancer in the body of Gaia?
In order for people to take Lovelock’s hypothesis seriously, there needed to be more research, more replication of experiments. This happened through the 1980s and 1990s. Lovelock’s colleagues came around to parts of the Gaia hypothesis eventually, though they insisted it go by the stodgier name, “earth systems science.”
Lovelock and others continued to study chemicals in the air. While the oil companies ran with the “maybes” of Gaia, other proofs mounted like sawdust: Gaia couldn’t absorb all our pollution. There was just too much—she couldn’t keep up.
Some years before my dad died in 2020, he changed his mind, admitting sheepishly, “I know climate change is human-caused. It’s happening too fast to be anything else.” From 1990 to now, while scientists were proving this beyond doubt, we burned half the sum total of oil and gas and coal as had been burned in all of human history. This, as the world made excuses borne, in part, of Lovelock and spread by oil companies.
He would not testify on their behalf again. “If we fail to take care of the Earth, it will surely take care of itself by making us no longer welcome,” he wrote in 2006. As his and others’ research progressed, Lovelock became a voice of warning, even a climate alarmist. He penned possible solutions to save Gaia, many of them inventions (he was an inventor, after all): giant sunshades in space, nuclear energy, AI that would take over and preserve the climate at temperatures optimum to working electronics. He speculated that the Covid pandemic was a feedback loop from Gaia, an effort to reduce human numbers and thus save life on Earth as a whole. I wonder if he thought cancer was a similar feedback loop. (Maybe Gaia doesn’t want me alive at all.)
As he lived to experience the pains of old age, Lovelock was heard to sympathize with the planet: “I can understand you, old lady. We’re both in similar trouble.” He died on his own birthday at age 103, having been complicit in spreading both misinformation and truth.
Once more from Carlyle: “Fool! the Ideal is in thyself, the impediment too is in thyself.”
Peter and I walk through the grove dappled with quivering, green-gold shade. Aspen eyes blink as we pass. Dew anoints our palms. We’ve suffered and prayed in this lively cloister, each white trunk a scarred but upright soul. Its incense is old wood, new red stems, and white flowers, and it doesn’t need fire to smell so sweetly. I’ve told Peter that if I die first, he can always find me here.
I think again of the woman who took our picture on the trail. Of her kindness and light. Of the women by the stream, their love for each other and the clear, young air. Of the medical priestesses who took away my impediment and so saved my life. Of my two long-legged children at home, growing tall in a world so wide.
James Lovelock wrote, “As individual animals we are not so special, and in some ways the human species is like a planetary disease, but through civilization we redeem ourselves and have become a precious asset for the Earth.” I hope he’s right. Maybe that hope is self-serving blindness; maybe cancer really is a human-culling feedback loop, and Gaia would be healthier without people like me. Maybe humans are Gaian cells grown out of control.
But I still can’t see we-all-of-us as one-dimensional as I see cancer, as only invasive, only destructive. Cancer could never have tried to save me from itself. Humans, on the other hand, might be a destructive force on Gaia, but they can also work for her, create with her, clean her, love her. They possess the ability to save, as human scientists and doctors saved me.
So maybe humans are both Gaia’s cancer and her doctors. Maybe, if we’re paying attention, we can choose which one we’ll be more often. I wonder which impulse will be stronger for humanity in the extra years I get to stay?
Of his many accomplishments, one of Lovelock’s favorites was to have walked all 630 miles of England’s south-west coastal path while in his 80s. Wandering and wondering. Peter reminds me that Immanuel Kant, too, used to walk every day to stimulate his creativity, his ideas borne from movement, breeze, and greenery.
Yesterday, after working all day in a basement office, I felt like I’d never have another idea in my life. Today, though some of my thoughts have been dark, I’m buzzing like the bees. Three years after sidling up to death, I’m here among the tree shadows and the flowers and the smell of mint and pine. I’m glad to feel my feet move under me, sure in their dusty boots. I’m glad for the white clouds, their heavenly hills and canyons. I’m glad for my children at home and my love at my side, listening to my speculations and prevarications, up mountain and down.
Peter and I talk about a computer-animated video we saw once on social media depicting a protein pulling another molecule within the body. The protein appears to be marching along a filament, one “foot” after another, not unlike the way I’m strolling down the trail now. The video purports to be an animation of dopamine being transported through the brain. “You’re looking at happiness,” it says.
When I try to verify this later, I see this isn’t quite the case. It’s actually an animation of a “motor” protein called kinesin pulling a molecule inside a white blood cell. Scientists don’t know what kinesin does in the brain, if anything, but it really does march like that, each step about eight nanometers long.
In this moment, the image of marching happiness feels true. I feel like a molecule moving along one of Gaia’s neurons, pulling happiness along with me. Not a cancer cell, not today, but joy stepping one foot after another along a track in a forest on a mountain stuck to a lithospheric plate, in the northern hemisphere of what—some might say—is the mind of God.
