But there’s also unnatural suffering: that which we have created or made worse in our quest to play god, to consume at levels that today feel normal but are far beyond what most ancient kings and emperors dared even dream of, let alone experience.¹⁰ This is especially true of North Americans, who have almost seven times the ecological footprint of Indians and nearly twice the footprint even of someone living in the United Kingdom.¹¹

It is especially important to understand that Gaia’s wrath is not like God’s wrath. The hurricanes that will become more powerful and more frequent in coming years are not vengeance for our misdeeds. They are a way that Gaia redistributes heat energy. It is our greenhouse gas pollution that has worsened hurricanes and cyclones, and the way we’ve paved over wetlands, built on coastlines, and grown to eight billion people exacerbates human suffering (and nonhuman suffering, when that’s considered, but in our anthropocentric culture, rarely is).¹² The Gaian Way also offers this essential teaching: we cannot and should not blame Earth for the changes it is undergoing. My great concern is that we will, and that some, acting out of fear, profit, or political advantage, will use that to justify misguided attempts like geoengineering and other controlling practices that further destroy the living planet.

A key part of the Gaian philosophy is that it offers no fantasy of a conscious afterlife—whether through heaven, hell, or reincarnation. Instead, it offers an understanding of human life as a brief moment of consciousness, before we (and all other beings) return to the greater self of Gaia—entering the cycle of life again through decomposition and nourishing other beings. As with understanding that a wave is part of the ocean and thus we should not fear its crash against the shore, so too should humans not fear death, which is the natural end to life.¹³

Ethics can be boiled down to this Gaian kōan:

A teacher and student are walking in the woods. They reach a field just as a red-tailed hawk swoops down and snatches up a mouse, carries it to a dead tree, and starts to eat it. After silently watching for a moment, the student turns to his teacher and asks,

“Teacher, what is the purpose of a mouse? Of a hawk? Of all life?”

Without taking her eyes from the hawk, the teacher responds: “It is to serve Gaia. Or die.”¹⁴

Said another way, to quote Aldo Leopold: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”¹⁵ All our actions, our institutions, our cultural patterns, our infrastructures must be at least benign to Earth’s systems and ideally should actively improve the overall functioning of Earth. After all, do you want to be a cancer cell or a functioning cell with a purpose in Gaia’s body?

I recognize that this may seem undoable from our modern industrial perspective—where even “green” or “sustainable” is typically just code for “less unsustainable.”¹⁶ But when and where Indigenous peoples have maintained sovereignty over their territories, these communities hold unique knowledge systems and practices that include stewarding forests, grasslands, lakes, and wetlands, sequestering carbon, sustaining biodiversity, and so on, making the ecosystems that they have inhabited more healthy, not more depleted.

We could learn from these practices. We could build small homes that are carbon positive and fully cradle-to-cradle. We could design walkable, biodiverse, ecologically productive communities. We could prioritize preventive health and education so we live healthy lives with little medical intervention needed. We could live low-consumption lifestyles where goods are made 100 percent sustainably and last for generations—like the backgammon board that was passed to me by my father, or the cast iron pan that my family cooks with that may end up lasting longer than the United States republic. We could also forego certain technologies that “digitally lobotomize” us and cause massive amounts of ecological destruction through their production and contribute to the propagation and growth of hate groups.¹⁷

But the vast confluence of cultural forces tell us to do the very opposite: to overeat, to buy more stuff, to live in grandiose homes, to amuse ourselves to death, especially as the news gets worse and worse and the video-streaming options get better and better. Sin is not a category in the Gaian Way, but we have two options: we either learn to serve Gaia, individually and collectively, or we don’t—thus destroying the systems that give us life. In other words, we either serve Gaia or die.

Religious philosophies are often known for their stories. Slowly, the repertoire of Gaian parables has grown as well—whether the parable of the tree in need, the three burglars, or even the one about an abandoned mattress. (Here’s the short of it: what would you do if you found an abandoned mattress in the road: Avoid it? Profit from it? Or move it?)¹⁸

It’s through these stories that we can process our overwhelming reality: a great ecological shift is underway, with disruptions and devastations many of us have never known. Climate reports, data, and journal articles are too dense for most people to grapple with, but a story about a man trying to convince his neighbor that his woodpile is placed too near to his home may communicate the same message in a lasting way.¹⁹

I’ve saved the most relevant part of the Gaian Way for the end: that of practices. These punctuate the day, week, month, year, and lifetime of practitioners—separating sacred and profane time, marking periods of liminality, and so on. Many patterns are still new and forming, but Gaians celebrate the wheel of the year. We fast with the full and new moons—both to connect with the lunar cycle and to benefit from the ancient practice of fasting.²⁰ Fasting is challenging—but in a culture of excess, where nearly three-quarters of American adults suffer from overweight or obesity—it can be a beneficial practice, especially when the future certainly holds promises of increased scarcity for us all.²¹

In addition to these annual and monthly cycles, Gaians have daily and weekly cycles too. Most importantly we meditate three times a day—at sunrise, solar noon, and sunset (or as close to those times as one can). Considering the uncertainties already facing us, and the difficulties surely ahead, meditation is an essential practice, whether once, twice, or three times a day. Even in “normal times,” we all get sick and die; being able to sit with that is an important lesson that Buddhists discovered 2,500 years ago, and one that will be especially needed in the overshoot period ahead. And with neuroscience research revealing the many benefits of meditation, it is a practice that should be available to all.

After meditating daily for two years, I have noticed positive psychological and physiological changes. Most importantly, the practice has allowed me to sit with uncertainty. When I got Lyme disease over the summer, my mind immediately jumped to the fear of permanent disability, but meditation (and antibiotics) got me through my bout of Lyme. I am more able to accept the inevitability of decline now, at both a personal and collective level. That is not to say Gaians are meditating in order to accept Gaia’s destruction; our role is to serve Gaia even if the odds of success are low. But not bolstering that commitment with the false hope of success is essential. As Joanna Macy has said, one’s role when sitting with a friend with a terminal disease is not to declare cheerily that all will be well but to simply be with her.²² Meditation allows us to sit with the suffering, to not let it destroy us, and to strengthen ourselves to keep serving Gaia, no matter the pain this brings, no matter the likelihood of success.

There is one significant difference to the Gaian meditation practice: it is to be conducted outdoors. In nature is ideal, but even a back step where one can see a tree or potted plant is better than being inside.²³ If it’s raining, cold, snowing, hot, that’s how we experience the living world and its cycles. Every morning I sit outside and look at the same river birch. Some days I see birds singing from its branches, or leaves dancing complex patterns in the wind. Some days squirrels visit my perch. Other days rain coats my face. Some days I sit with the full moon before ending my full moon fast. Once I even watched an eclipse with my eclipse glasses. These brief meditation sessions are spent observing nature or performing Gaian meditations that more closely connect me to nature, that better ground me (such as the Gaian tree meditation and corpse meditation),²⁴ and that connect me to the cycles humans have been connected to for most of history.

A final practice I want to discuss are weekly Gaian forest services. While much of our community interaction is online—connecting Gaians across the globe—a few Gaians have started local “Gaian Guilds.”²⁵ Currently, these guild leaders organize regular meditations in natural settings, where Gaians can come and meditate and be in nature and community together. One day we hope to have many fully formed guilds, with weekly forest meditations for the adults, and where the kids in the community get time in nature (too rare these days), learn basic ecological literacy and Earth skills, make new friends, and connect with their local ecosystem.²⁶

Ideally, as with the Quakers, Gaian Guilds will also become hubs of activity—helping to fight for ecological sanity in its many forms, whether banning nuclear weapons, encouraging economic degrowth, fighting for real climate action, banning toxins, conserving land, increasing access to family planning and normalizing smaller families, or the countless other ways people could serve Gaia. We hope to model a different kind of activism—not the burn-out prone professional activist we often see today, but activists who are nourished within a Gaian community in which everyone offers mutual aid and support to one another and extends this to others in the community. As with any church, there is significant potential to help in the broader community—and in Gaians’ case, this means not just the human community, but the entire community of life.

Of course, there’s still a long way to go from the fledgling philosophy that the Gaian Way is now to what it might one day be. As with fledglings in nature, not all make it to adulthood. As Gaianism has grown, we’ve connected with other ecocentric religious communities, some much older, some newer, some long dissolved, some still in formation. What the Gaian Way offers is this: a reminder that we are part of and utterly dependent on the living Earth—and it provides ways to fully understand and embrace this, from parables and a sense of purpose, to practices across the day, week, month, year, and lifetime. And, I hope, it offers not just a way through the polycrisis ahead but a grounding philosophy that can help cultivate Earth-centric cultures from the ashes of our current consumer culture. Yes, that’s a tall order, but the crisis we face requires a new paradigm as well as the ability to dream big.

Erik Assadourian is a sustainability researcher and writer. He was a researcher with Worldwatch Institute from 2001 until 2017. There, he directed or codirected seven books, focusing on consumerism, eco-education, global security, and economic degrowth. In 2019, he created Gaianism.org and is working to grow a new Gaian religion.

The audio version is read by Michael Dowd.