Featured
Following the Gaian Way
The promise and purpose of a new Earth-centric religious philosophy.
Illustration by Dadu Shin
By Erik Assadourian
Before you start reading this essay, take a deep breath and then slowly let it out. Do that again. Do it one more time. Now, hold your breath. Tell yourself, over and over, “I am separate from Gaia. I am separate from Gaia.” Keep saying that. Feel your lungs tighten. Feel the need to draw in air. Feel the gentle nudge from your brain to inhale. Feel the growing panic of breath, interrupted. And all the while, keep telling yourself, “I am separate from Gaia.”
When you can no longer sustain that myth any longer, inhale. In that breath, draw in 25 sextillion molecules of air: the nitrogen, oxygen, water vapor, and other gases that make up Gaia’s thin blue membrane.1 The oxygen—which sustains your body and is composed of the waste gases of countless phytoplankton, plants, trees, and other producers—feel it replenish your body. Exhale the carbon dioxide you produce as a byproduct of fueling your body and that feeds the world’s plant life. And recognize that you are not at all separate from the living Earth that we inhabit. Rather, you are utterly interwoven into this complex system, dependent on it for your ability to survive and thrive.
This exercise is one of many breath exercises and meditations that play a central role in the Gaian Way. The Gaian Way is a new religious philosophy—with roots in the science of Gaia Theory and Deep Ecology, as well as in many other ancient and modern influences—that attempts to help humans recover their understanding that they are very much a part of Gaia.
Like other religious philosophies, the Gaian Way has a community of practice and practitioners (Gaians) who take the practices, stories, and ethics of this philosophy and apply them to their lives. As this philosophy is likely new to nearly all readers, let me explore some highlights of the Gaian Way, or Gaianism.
First: why is this a religious philosophy rather than a secular philosophy? The definition of religion drilled into me as a student of religion at Darmouth College was: “a verbal and non-verbal system of interaction with superhuman beings.”2 Arguably, Gaia could count as such—deified as Mother Earth—though many, including me, see Gaia not as a deity but as a holobiont: a being made up of coexisting and codependent living organisms that has emerged from the geochemical and biological interactions of living and nonliving systems.3 Humans, too, are holobionts—made up of more nonhuman cells than human ones—and to live without these would cause systemic imbalances (illness or even death), as can be seen when gut microbiomes are disrupted.
Because of our lack of awareness of this complex whole, humans have—for centuries, and in some regions for millennia—lived in a way that disrupts the well-being of the holobiont Earth, and we have even lost understanding that there is a whole. Recultivating reverence for this superhuman being (in the literal sense: above/beyond human) is essential if we are to survive our rocky adolescence. If we cannot do this, then we will change the planet to such a degree that humans can no longer adapt or survive.
After majoring in religion and psychology at Dartmouth, I studied sustainability for 17 years at the Worldwatch Institute. There, I dug deep into the root causes of the sustainability crisis—understanding that at the very heart of the problem is a cultural paradigm that prioritizes growth and consumerism. Only if we transcend this paradigm and create a new one that orients us as completely on sustainability will we have a chance to prevent runaway climate change and the other dozen converging planetary crises. To name a few: plastic pollution, persistent chemical pollution, biodiversity loss, deforestation, ocean acidification, ozone depletion, nuclear war, and radicalization of political systems due to changing ecosystems and climate refugee flows—all of which can interact to cause what is sometimes called a “polycrisis,” or more colloquially, civilizational collapse.4
During my time at Worldwatch, I tried in many different ways to research and advocate culture change, starting with directing the State of the World 2010 report, Transforming Cultures: From Consumerism to Sustainability.5 From there, I found myself writing on economic degrowth; creating a scenario for the globally popular board game The Settlers of Catan that helped players understand the limits to growth, climate change, and that oil must stay in the ground.6 I even developed a (never-aired) reality TV show that encouraged Millennials to move back in with their parents to farm their own and their neighbors’ yards. This would help with degrowth, as demand for formal economy jobs and housing shrunk, while also converting the country’s third largest crop by acreage—the lawn—into new sources of food security, healthy diets and lifestyles, organic waste recycling, and biodiverse landscapes.7
But, truthfully, the scale of change needed is so vast, the window to act is so miniscule, and the obsession with profiting from the renewable energy transition is so strong that we are in all likelihood going to continue to pursue growth until this current system collapses under its own weight. That, however, is not the end of the story.8 Civilizations unravel regularly. The question is what comes next. Will human rights advances disappear faster than they were gained (over many decades of organizing and advocacy)? Will there be new militaristic empires? Will the ecological changes be so severe and so swift that civilization in the future will barely be able to be called that?
Or can future generations learn from their ancestors’ mistakes? Can our prodigal species return to Gaia’s embrace (even if her home has been heavily mortgaged to finance her children’s excesses) and help fix up her house and overrun gardens?9 Could an Earth-centric philosophy help shape a new regenerative paradigm, one that helps humans understand again that they are part of and utterly dependent on the living Earth? That is the purpose of the Gaian Way.
As I learned in my college religion courses, all religions have basic components: a cosmology, a theodicy, ethics, parables, rituals and practices, and so on. The Gaian Way is no different. Our cosmology is science-based. There is no magic other than the continuing uncertainty of the origins of the universe—and the enchantment one feels when immersed in nature. But there are no actors at the beginning of time—no God who put things in motion or who monitors or tests our progress. Even Gaia, when it comes down to it, is not unique but is just one of countless planetary beings strewn across the universe. Instead, Gaia’s uniqueness comes from the fact that we humans, along with millions of other species, are part of this being.
Gaians’ theodicy—and this is important—makes it clear that there is natural suffering: that’s just part of being a living creature that’s part of a bigger living creature. Without death, there would be no life. Living beings oftentimes live at others’ expenses. And within a body, cells are born and recycled constantly. Together, we are and continue to be a functioning whole. Coming to accept that is part of life and maturity.
Can our prodigal species return to Gaia’s embrace (even if her home has been heavily mortgaged to finance her children’s excesses) and help fix up her house and overrun gardens?
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.
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.
Notes:
- Simon Worrall, “The Air You Breathe Is Full of Surprises,” National Geographic, August 13, 2017.
- Course notes from Hans Penner, Religion 1, Dartmouth College, fall 1996.
- Ricardo Guerrero, Lynn Margulis, and Mercedes Berlanga, “Symbiogenesis: The Holobiont as a Unit of Evolution,” International Microbiology 16, no. 3 (September 2013): 133–43.
- Will Steffen et al., “Planetary Boundaries: Guiding Human Development on a Changing Planet,” Science, January 15, 2015; Michael Lawrence, Scott Janzwood, and Thomas Homer-Dixon, “What Is a Global Polycrisis?,” Cascade Institute, September 16, 2022.
- Erik Assadourian, “The Rise and Fall of Consumer Cultures,” in Worldwatch Institute, State of the World 2010: Transforming Cultures; From Consumerism to Sustainability (Norton, 2010), 3–20.
- See Catan: Oil Springs, a scenario by Erik Assadourian and Ty Hansen (2011) at www.catan.com/oil-springs.
- See “Yardfarmers” trailer (2016) at www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu-TPnUWdac.
- Note: Gaianism is not a millenarian movement. The Gaian Way does not suggest that planetary overshoot is inevitable, predetermined, or punishment and certainly doesn’t offer a date of its arrival or promise avoidance if we repent. Rather, the science strongly suggests that we have transcended many planetary tipping points and that we will cross more as temperatures rise further (which is locked in) and as we disrupt other ecological systems. For more, see David I. Armstrong McKay et al., “Exceeding 1.5°C Global Warming Could Trigger Multiple Climate Tipping Points,” Science, September 9, 2022.
- “The Lost Son Returns Home,” Gaianism.org, August 11, 2019.
- “Use It and Lose It: The Outsize Effect of U.S. Consumption on the Environment,” ScientificAmerican.com, September 14, 2012. The US EIA states US primary energy consumption was 293 million MMBtu in 2021.
- Global Footprint Network.
- “The Wrath of Gaia,” Gaianism.org, September 8, 2019.
- “Waves, Waterfalls and Our Eventual Return to Gaia,” Gaianism.org, August 25, 2019 (with special thanks to the book Tuesdays with Morrie for this story).
- “What Is the Sound of Gaia Breathing? And other Gaian Kōans,” Gaianism.org, May 3, 2020.
- Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (Oxford University Press, 1966), 262.
- Robert Engelman, “Beyond Sustainababble,” in Worldwatch Institute, State of the World 2013: Is Sustainability Still Possible? (Island Press, 2013), 3–16.
- Scott Adams, Dilbert, September 14, 2022, dilbert.com/strip/2022-09-14.
- “The Parable of the Abandoned Mattress,” Gaianism.org, August 22, 2021.
- “How Do You Persuade Your Neighbor That His Chimney Is Too Straight?,” Gaianism.org, July 24, 2021.
- “Aligning One’s Body and Mind with the Monthly Moon Cycle,” Gaianism.org, May 2, 2021.
- “Overweight & Obesity Statistics,” NIH National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases.
- “A Wild Love for the World,” interview with Joanna Macy by Krista Tippett, On Being, American Public Media, November 1, 2012.
- “Setting a Gaian Meditative Practice,” Gaianism.org, February 17, 2020.
- For more on Gaian meditation, visit gaianism.org/tag/meditation.
- For more on local Gaian Guilds, visit gaianism.org/local-offerings.
- “Forest Meditation, Sunday Forest School, and Sassafras Tea Time,” Gaianism.org, April 26, 2020.
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.
Please follow our Commentary Guidelines when engaging in discussion on this site.
Celebrations and meditations should be done for their intrinsic values if any. Gaians should homeschool their children. The purposes of homeschools are: to prove that children can acquire practical skills from birth. 2. To bypass the government in the long run.
The government is too powerful but ineffective. Gaians must oppose their tyranny.
We must also advocate the abolishment of prisons. Do they really deter crimes?