• An early Gaian IxD inspira-tion: the first image of earth taken by a human.

of these relations is what distin-guishes a particular ecosystem. While an ecosystem (such as a swamp) may survive without some of its usual constituents (frogs), there is a tipping point at which an ecosystem ceases to exist as an entity because a critical level of loss or change is reached, destroying the pattern of relations that make up the dynamic whole.

From a Gaian perspective, ecosystems are entities with nested and interrelated PRA loops. Interestingly, this view includes nonentities like minerals, not because they have their own PRA loops, but because they may be necessary elements in the collective of relations that form the ecosystem itself. Lovelock had the same view in terms of the non-living elements of Gaia. Like Russian dolls, ecosystems themselves are entities nested within one another, all the way up to the scale of Gaia itself, and probably beyond.

 

September + October 2011

interactions

an entity, and a particular group of water striders inhabiting a specific territory can be seen as an entity as well. Conversely, a plastic bottle floating down the same stream does not qualify as an entity, even though it can be made to perform actions, because it has no PRA loop.

In humans, of course, PRA loops are infinitely more complex, elaborate, and interrelated. In conscious or intentional behaviors, the representation may involve processes of logic, analogy, and so on. As in the classic Eames film Powers of Ten [ 11], we may move up the scale to aggregates of humans. The PRA loop helps to elucidate how groups and organizations can constitute entities: human ecosystems.

Ecosystems as entities. The science of ecology is a field within the larger purview of biology. Ecologists study the relations among heterogeneous entities (and nonentities) that constitute systems that are distinct and reliant on a particular set of (dynamic) relations among their elements. The overall pattern

Reframing Gaian Relations

Ecology suggests that biologically living creatures cannot easily be separated from non-living materials at the level of an ecosystem. Similarly, technology cannot easily be separated from the living beings that extrude it. At least since that first proto-hominid picked up a rock and bashed somebody with it, all bets have been off for strictly biological models of evolution. Our tool-making ability—an extrusion of our particular intelligence—has made humans as a species able to act with increasing magnitude through extensions of human perception and agency.

Technology is not the other.

Discourse and literature typically
default to a colloquial positioning
of technology as an “other.” Yet,
remembering that photo of Earth
from space, one can see there is
nothing on this shining blue ball
that is non-Gaian; even the aster-
oids that have embedded deposits
of nickel deep into Earth’s crust are
now part of the grand ecosystem.
Technology has been invented by
entities as diverse as crows, rac-
coons, and marine mammals.
Like Vernadsky’s and de Chardin’s
“noösphere” [ 12], our technologies
are extrusions of ourselves, and
thus also of Gaia. Joseph Campbell
described our first view of the Earth
from space as “the first time the
Earth was able to look back on itself
through the eyes it had grown in
human beings” [ 13].