Awareness of Earth as a living being has survived in Western civilization itself in three ways. A prior book to the current one, called “Who Is the Earth?”, comes from the mystic Sufi tradition of Islam. It shows that Sufi masters have known Earth as a living being, as this vision leads to the higher levels of the Divine Feminine.

The tradition of Sophia, or the Divine Feminine, has been a flickering light in Christianity ever since Mary Magdalene became one of Jesus’ main disciples. Her work was known for a century or two, and then it was suppressed, returned, and then was suppressed again in the 16th century when she was equated with a prostitute. She was reinstated as a full disciple of Jesus by Pope Francis in 2016. She has been studied in the 20th century through recently discovered Gnostic texts, and the study of the Divine Feminine has grown alongside.

In the 12th century, German abbess Hildegard von Bingen respected the divinity of Earth and Nature. A few mystics and scholars in later centuries, like 16th century Jacob Boehme, brought the awareness into more recent times. Today there is a vibrant and growing community of Sophia scholarship, mostly women, in the Christian Church and in academia.

Marsilio Ficino, the seminal spirit of the Florentine renaissance, inherited the idea of the living Earth from classical texts, but he actually worked with it in his own spiritual practice as well.

Lastly, there has been new revelation of Earth in the New Age movement. The Findhorn community, in Scotland, grew in great abundance from a small group of non-gardeners who were guided by spirits of both nature and particular plants. They were told by these spirits that their work would become a new human compact with Nature. This community has thrived and grown in the last decades. Movements like these have a deep distrust of reductionist science, which is paralleled by a similar distrust of many scientists by the spiritual community. Study of sustainable indigenous culture teaches that the spiritual awareness of Earth arises from a deep and careful study of ecology. The two approaches are actually not divided, and for the sake of our current problems, ought not to be.

The awareness of the living Earth must be pursued by individuals, who make their own understanding. We are all explorers.

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Over at least 35,000 years in Australia, and possibly twice that long, indigenous culture created one of the greatest human monuments. Yet this monument is largely internal and invisible. Their culture values what the individual can learn, not make, and they are easily judged as primitive because of their lack of external culture. Their social structure is extremely complex. They understand the natural world in thousands of stories and songs that come from a world of Ancestors that precedes and creates the visible world: the Dreamtime. Running in lines of songs about particular mythic journeys, their landscape of Australia consists of a network of songlines that covers the continent. Understandable across different languages, these songs encode knowledge of landscape in changing rhythmic patterns. This mythic vision has been shared and developed over many thousands of years.

The Kogi of Colombia had a culture that lived all the way from the arctic climate of the high Sierra down to the tropical beaches of the Atlantic Coast. Their well-crafted cities are now covered by the jungle because when the conquistadors came in the 1600s, they fled. They took refuge in impenetrable mountains and have lived there, self-isolated, ever since. Their leaders are priests, raised in darkness to the age of nine (visited by their mothers) and taught about the levels of the Great Mother that are above our visible world. They see Mind in Nature, and it takes extraordinary training to communicate with Her.

In the 1990s, the Kogi emerged from their total isolation and asked a BBC film maker, Alan Ereira, to help them make a movie. This movie came out as a warning from the Elder Brothers, the Kogi, to the Younger Brothers, Western civilization. They tell us that we are killing the Mother, and we must learn a different way to live.

Other indigenous cultures, from Native Americans to Siberian shamans are giving us the same stark warning: “You do not realize that we all live inside a living being, and you are destroying Her with your ignorance.”

What can we learn from these cultures that will help us to respond to this urgent warning? Perhaps the most important area is in education. Aboriginal culture, and Native American culture, were stable on the level of society over very long periods of time, yet they offered intense, life-long challenge to the individual to learn and to transform their very being. The individual on this pathway of change became ever more useful to their society, and was not likely to want to rebel against it. Education of the individual in our culture does not challenge all parts of a person to growth and transformation. Built in inequalities in our culture from race to economics, continually ask for change; and the individual in our culture is often measured by the amount of change that they are able to bring. This situation is a recipe for cycles of continual violence and cultural upheaval.

Even more than the other mammals from which we come, humans need to learn about the world from previous generations. This is a powerful advantage of this fifth stage of life. Without instruction and guidance, however, an individual human cannot be expected to unlock and develop the full range of their internal abilities.

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Another deep-seated assumption in the scientific outlook is that of the objective observer. This observer is the basis of repeatability, which is the basis of all scientific research. The assumption of the objective observer becomes questioned when attempting to observe a system that is on the same level as the complexity of the observer. The objective observer is even more questionable when attempting to observe a system of which one is only a small part.

We are more than computers, having been grown by and in contact with Earth. We have capacities of heart and mind that go beyond the “objective” observer. We can change from being “objective” to “involved”. Great care is needed when allowing any subjective or emotional element into the field of science. The distinction is made between emotions like greed, pride and jealousy on one hand, and wonder awe and delight on the other. Many eminent science scientific researchers are moved by the latter set of these emotions into new areas of study and new discoveries. The former set of emotions are present in scientific research anyway, but usually well-disguised.

Another human ability is vision or inspiration. This ability has been responsible for major scientific advancements. Both of these subjective abilities –  emotional involvement and inspiration – will be needed to guide our relationship with Earth. This book is not trying to degrade or disprove the scientific method, but to point out hidden assumptions and common approaches in scientific investigation that hinder the kind of awareness pursued in this book.

One common approach toward a complex subject is to simplify the investigation by disregarding variables, or by taking the subject into the laboratory. Many ecological studies have been done this way. Ecology is a science that wishes it could be mathematically analyzed, but it is far too complex.

Another common approach to complexity is to divide a subject into many specialties and subspecialties. With different technical languages and specialized analytical tools, the situation in many parts of science is like the Tower of Babel. The danger is that no one will consider it their own domain to put all the pieces back together again. The danger to our topic is that the possibility of a larger system is never within the range of any one of the smaller and smaller specialties that compose the fields of ecology and biology and geology.

Becoming aware of a whole ecosystem, like a prairie, leads far beyond the scientific studies of it. Some practical approaches to healing ecosystems have profited from a whole system approach. Holistic management, using cattle as part of prairie ecosystems, has been successful in healing degraded rangelands. We will need to look at sustainable cultures for further clues to becoming aware of the whole. It is clear that such cultures base their awareness first, on acute and detailed observation of the ecosystems that they inhabit, and then on a larger awareness of the whole system.

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But what of the entity of all life? If it is cooperative entity then, like the most primitive bacterium, it has mind. Some ability to decide about its internal regulation and its inputs and outputs are implied as a function of its identity. Does Earth have identity?

Our ability to communicate with this entity is not guaranteed, as we ourselves would not expect to communicate with a single cell in one of our bodies. It would be very useful, in our current situation, to be able to talk to Nature, but rational approaches do not make much sense in this pursuit. Some cultures have developed awareness of Earth, but with different faculties then the rational.

Tipping points in complex systems are situations where the system either converts suddenly to a different state, or where runaway positive feedback threatens the whole system. These points can be envisioned in a complex system, but not predicted with precision with any computer working today. Several potentially catastrophic tipping points in the Earth system are being monitored today.

The northern jet stream seems to depend on a large temperature difference between the mid-latitudes and the poles. The polar regions have warmed much faster in the last few decades than the mid-latitudes, and the jet stream has become slower and much more wavy. The jet stream appears to be in transition, but we cannot predict what the next steady state of this system will be.

The North Atlantic Conveyor, that includes the Gulf Stream, shut down at the end of the last glaciation and caused an 1100 year return to the Ice Age in northern Europe. There are signs that this may be another tipping point: a similar shutdown of the North Atlantic Conveyor could happen in the near future.

Methane is much stronger as a greenhouse gas than CO2. There are large stores of methane in shallow sediments in the Arctic Ocean and in the permafrost of northern climates. Rising temperatures have begun releasing this methane, and there could be a tipping point into a positive feedback loop where massive amounts of methane could be released suddenly. Current computer models and other rational analysis are not yet powerful enough to predict any of the above situations.

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The coccolithophores, however, are a large part of the oxygen producing algae, and can form nation-sized blooms in a matter of days. Individually they are covered with intricate shields of calcite. Each shield is secreted in vesicles in the algae cell and then transported to the surface of the cell. The purpose of these circular calcite disks is still debated.

These cells both use and emit CO2, as well as O2 and dissolved acid. They also give off a gas called dimethyl sulfide. Since they occur in large numbers, they are studied for their effect on the large scale cycles of all of the above chemicals. On the geological scale of time, they deposit about half of the calcite which later becomes limestone and marble. As such, they are a major player in the temperature control system that sees lichens and bacteria on the land digesting rock to produce carbonate ion that is washed to the ocean, which is deposited by these same coccolithophores. Thus over time, CO2 leaves the atmosphere. This cycle has kept us cool for hundreds of millions of years.  (To be clear, the coccolithophores have only been active for the last 65 million years, and other algae had the same role before.) These cells are also part of shorter-term cycles of oxygen and carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and the acidity of the water. Because all these processes occur simultaneously within the same cell, scientists are not yet clear on their net effect on the larger systems. Beyond affecting the CO2 concentration, which influences the temperature, coccolithophores also produce a gas called dimethyl sulfide which encourages cloud formation. This contributes to a negative feedback cycle. More dimethyl sulfide is produced as the temperature rises, which encourages more clouds. This shields the ocean from incoming sunlight, and thus causes the temperature to fall.

The illustration of the coccolithophores is useful to show the complexity and the fine tuning that may result from interlocking feedback loops. Acknowledging that these loops are not, in fact, separate but influence each other, can lead to an almost vertiginous acknowledgement of an interlocking complexity that is far beyond logical comprehension. We saw that a similar incomprehensible complexity inside the human body does not prevent us from knowing about and relating to the emergent identity of the whole person.

Having looked at several larger scale balances and emergent properties in this book, it is proposed that the action of cooperation produces an entity at the largest level. It is also possible that, as humans, we may need to search for other ways to understand an entity on this scale.

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Examples of two early flowering plants (angiosperms), the giant water lily and the magnolia, are looked at to show the intricate relations that they developed with their pollinating beetles. The white, female flower of the giant water lily heats up and emits scent to attract beetles (carrying pollen from previous visits to other flowers), then closes them in for the night while the beetles eat and pollinate the flower. The flower changes sex overnight, and the beetles leave in the morning with pollen for another flower. The flower now turns purple to show that it is male. Though less specific in most other angiosperms, this is a good model of the way that all flowers work with pollinating insects.

This stage has its roots 2 million years ago, while both mammal and flowering plants developed.  They began working together with new insects about 100 million years ago, and just before the time of the asteroid impact 65 million years ago,  this assemblage grew on about 12% of the land surface.

The impact of the asteroid cleared the stage for the accelerated rise of stage 5. Nonetheless, stages evolve slowly, and life is really quite stable over millions of years. Most of the members of previous stages are still represented today. Some, like the conifers the stage 4, have a big role in far northern climates where the angiosperms do not thrive.

The complexity of stage five is difficult, if not impossible, to encompass. Professor Douglas Tallamy, of the University of Delaware, has been researching the ecological relations of lepidoptera for many years. He finds that, along with other predatory insects, over 90% of nearly 12,000 species of lepidoptera eat specifically one or two genuses of plants. Such close pairing implies a large, complex ecological tapestry. Most songbirds eat exclusively the caterpillar stage of these lepidoptera, and a steep decline in their numbers comes mostly from the non-native ornamental plants that are so loved in American suburbia. These non-native species are now expanding into public lands as invasive species that do not support caterpillars or other players in native ecosystems.

This intricate web of plant predation could be superimposed on another web of pollinators (butterflies and moths generally do not pollinate the same plants that they eat as caterpillars) and another web of seed dispersers. These webs could then be laid over the web of the fungal and plant connections in the soil. The superimposed result would look like the interactome that we have been seeing as the source of the intelligence of bacteria, eukaryotes and plants. There are highly connected plants, like white oaks, and highly connected insects, like generalist bees, that are similar to the hubs in cellular interactomes. The possibility is raised that there may be an interactome on the level of the whole ecosystem. Awareness and decision-making may emerge from it. Some studies have shown decreased competition and increased biodiversity in rich ecosystems. The rainforests of Africa and South America have many times more biodiversity than the northeastern United States. The ecological complexity of such a system is only beginning to be interpreted.

The life of the salmon is described and the ways that these fish bring nutrients from the ocean to the land. Bears near salmon streams show that up to 60% of their nutrients come from salmon, while 18% of the vegetation shows the same source. The systems of the ocean and the land are intimately connected.

Emergent properties of these networks seem to include the biotic pump that carries moisture from the Atlantic Ocean as multiple rainfall events across 1000 miles of the Amazon basin. Regulation of the temperature in the jungle, and the regulation of soil moisture are other cooperative effects. Further emergent properties of these systems surely await discovery.

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Even the seed, first developed by the gymnosperms of stage 4, shows a remarkable variety of ways that it measures its own environment and makes decisions about when to sprout. Plant intelligence and decision-making are generated by an interactome, similar in structure to the complex of chemical pathways in both the prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells. The large scale structure of this decision-making in plants results from undifferentiated stem cells located in three places: at the tip of each branch, at the tip of each root and in the cambium in the stem or trunk of the plant. This last layer of stem cells is where the interacting demands for nutrients from the branch tips, and sugars from the root tips are mediated. The whole plant can be seen as a brain.  A wide array of chemical, electrical and hydraulic signals transmit the conversation through which a plant makes new leaves and branches and looks for particular nutrients with its roots. Plants are also now being shown to communicate with each other and with their insect partners. They send chemical and even sonic signals through the air, and through the fungal network in the soil. Large classes of chemicals like terpenes are used for both communication and defense. Research has provided many clues, but larger questions about the degree of this connection are still unanswered.

The animals of the second, third and fourth stages on the land developed from the arthropods of the first stage, as they developed into millipedes and insects like the dragonfly. During the second stage another animal emerged from the ocean: the first footed fish, which evolved into the proto-amphibians, with predators like eryops. The true reptiles of the third stage branched into both plant eaters and carnivores.

The increasing complexity of these stages can be understood as cooperative wholes. These wholes can be seen in the trophic pyramid diagram, with carnivorous reptiles on top, going down through other reptiles, then insects and then plants, down to the soil community. Each level of predation formed negative feedback loops of control that helped to stabilize the larger entity of the ecosystem.

Successive stages can be seen as being more intelligent in the ways that they regulated themselves. The dinosaurs of stage four were different from the previous reptiles in several ways, but most important was their increased intelligence. This allowed them to hunt and to defend themselves in cooperative groups packs and herds. It also allowed mothers to rear their young. This created childhood: a time in the individual life when the parent can pass along cultural knowledge about the environment: food sources, dangers, migration routes and so on. This can be seen as a new and more responsive form of evolution, beyond the genetic and epigenetic forms that were already in process.

The major extinction episodes are looked at briefly to distinguish which of them were externally caused, like asteroid impact, and which of them were caused by life itself, like glaciation and oxygen depletion. The external extinctions are seen mostly not to have had causal impact on the development of life.

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It seems that one type of seaweed, the Charophycaea, joined the soil community to create what we call plants. This algae created leaves that gathered sunlight above the ground, while being supplied with water from symbiotic fungi below the ground. Not too long after this the predator/prey relation came onto the land with the first arthropod mites, that sucked plant juices, and millipedes, that ate the mites.

Looking at soils nowadays we see that they are at least communities, possibly even entities. Plants in a developing soil spend their first years contributing excess carbon to grow the soil community in stages, not for their own growth. The soil acts like a decision-making entity. The plants may be looked at as parts of this entity. Even the animals that live from the plants in that ecosystem might be considered as parts of the soil entity.

Fungi in the soil community act as middleman between the plants, who need at least 16 specific nutrients, from nitrogen to zinc. Using sugars created by photosynthesis, the plants barter with different bacterial “companies” that specialize in supplying each one of these nutrients. Hundreds of different kinds of bacteria may be needed for each one of these “companies”.  It becomes easier, then, to imagine how 10,000 kinds of bacteria (distinguished by metabolic niche) can be found in one cubic centimeter of soil. Plants themselves are more than genetic automata: they have behavior, make decisions and they communicate.

This first land community, based in the soil community, with simple plants and small arthropods was a stable entity. We will see it developing through several further stages.

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Whether the first residents of the land lived as communities in the soil or as communal lichens living on bare rock, the cooperative microbial community from the ocean was waiting on the land to incorporate larger, more complex forms of life when they emerged from the ocean.

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Bacteria have formed sophisticated colonies practically since the origins of life. The stromatolites are bulbous, photosynthetic colonies, while bacterial slimes are often very sophisticated, multi species colonies. Corals are sophisticated colonies that coordinate their reproduction and work together to secrete the calcium carbonate structure of the form that they all share. Corals themselves create a larger colony together called the coral reef, while each coral polyp itself lives in cooperative symbiosis with a photosynthetic algae partner.

More integrated colonies, like those of some ants and termites, may have several forms of the same species working together: soldier, worker, and queen. They form what E. O. Wilson calls a superorganism, and can even carry out underground farming of fungi.

The volvox clade of algae were studied by Lynn Margulis. Alive today, this group of species is composed of the same basic algae cell. They can be found living alone, or as a duo swimming together, or in sets of 4, 16, 32 and up to 50,000 algae cells in the same organism. These groupings classify as different species, and show the road from a single cell through a colony, to multicellular creatures. The largest of them actually engages in sexual reproduction and produces baby organisms inside of itself.

The kingdoms of life now become separated. From the single new eukaryotic cell come the plants, the animals and the fungi.

The first cooperative stage of multi cellular creatures came and went about 600 million years ago. the Ediacarans had enigmatic functions, yet it is clear that they rose and fell together as an interconnected ecological entity – the next stage of the entity of life.

About 540 million years ago came the Cambrian “explosion”, when shells, teeth and claws were made from calcium carbonate, calcium phosphate, silica and chitin. Life seems to have undergone an “arms race” and elaborated into a wide array of different, sometimes fantastic forms. All of this predation and competition still created an interconnected entity – the first of Jack Sepkoski’s great ocean fauna, which lasted about 50 million years. Then came the Paleozoic fauna, with its crinoid “sea lilies”, horn corals and the chambered nautilus. Then the modern fauna arose which is with us today. Each stage was composed of thousands of interconnected species that rose and declined as a cooperative entity (though of course, the modern fauna, is still a part of life).

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