Peripheral Visions

belief in dryads may complement what is learned in botany classes, making our knowledge of trees more complete and more accurate. In the same way, the belief that patients are whole persons is not easily acquired in medical classes that emphasize the mechanical characteristics of bodies, so physicians must find other ways to maintain it. Although the belief in an immortal soul brings a lot of baggage that may be troublesome, it probably helps some physicians to remember. The anthropomorphic dimension of the Gaia hypothesis proposes empathy as a way of knowing—and caring.
    Above all, the Gaia hypothesis evokes the powerful ancient metaphor of Mother Earth. In the early seventies, there was a poster of the earth as seen from space, the picture that has become so familiar and beloved, and underneath was written, “Your Mother—Love Her or Leave Her!” That was a brilliant but confusing poster, because every young American male knows what he is supposed to do with his mother: Grow up and leave her. After all, his entire socialization is geared to achieving independence. The poster fed right into the fantasy that if we messed up this planet we could climb into spaceships and zoom to another one or perhaps to a space platform. No one had done the arithmetic on how many people were going to fit into the spaceships. That poster was an invitation to believe in the possibility of leaving, in the self as separate and separable.
    Since the early years of the space program, the fantasy of solving environmental problems by leaving this planet behind has faded, as has the metaphor of earth as a spaceship, but we still may not have found the metaphor that leads to effective attention. A metaphor can obscure as well as reveal. In contemporary American culture, I doubt that the best way to elicit caring and responsible behavior from adults is to remind them of childhood, the retrospective dumping ground of problems and resentments. I may feel that having the earth thought of as female enhances me or allows me to empathize a little more deeply, but I hate to expose the planet further to the danger of rape or evoke the ambivalence that people feel about mothers.
    The use of a personal name, Gaia, suggests that the planet can evoke the attitudes we reserve for identified human individuals. Do we love Gaia? Does she love or trust in return? What does it add to understanding or confusion that Gaia is the name of a deity from an ancient and polytheistic system no longer widely worshiped, the most primitive layer of Greek religion? The original Gaia was inclined to devour her own offspring, many of whom were monsters.
    Perhaps we could empathize more constructively if the metaphor were differently conceived. Because the life span of a planet is potentially so long, we might learn to think of the planet as a young child that requires care and attention but has an unknown future. Such a metaphor would underline the need to protect future possibilities, not only for our human descendants but for all life on earth, and might make accepting the limitations on knowledge and control less painful.
    When we use a metaphor that is drawn from human relations, it is well to look carefully for all its hidden implications, for we run the risk of evoking human conflicts. If we are going to think of the earth as female, it behooves us to take a good look at gender relations, because gender relations of dominance and exploitation will infect, have already infected the relationship with the planet. Images of children often do evoke protectiveness and caring, yet we have been willing to incur massive debts our children will have to pay and all too many parents exploit or abuse children and even more feel they have a right to determine a child’s future. If we are going to use family images, let us take some responsibility for constructing human families that offer metaphors of mutuality and hope.
    To me, the most important thing that the Gaia hypothesis proposes that was absent from earlier metaphors like space-ship earth is that we are immersed in, brought into being by, a living reality, not a mechanical one. We are completely dependent, as we would be in a spaceship, but we do not have full blueprints and we cannot expect to be in complete control. The atmosphere, that mixture of gases we study in high school chemistry, could occur only as the product of a living system, for the free oxygen that makes animal life possible would not continue except for