Category: Gaia Hypothesis

Ester Prayer , 2020, from Humankind to Gaia

As Easter is with us, a prayer of resurrection is jelling in my heart. It’s a prayer of ecosexual love from humankind to Gaia.

Gaia, hostess of all life, sovereign of the only hospitable symbiotic planet we’ve found so far, partner we already always share with all other forms of life, may this day of resurrection be the one when you feel heard by us.

Your voice scours our world thru the passage of this virus which keeps us apart from many of our loved ones.

It s like the scream of a partner whose warnings have been ignored long enough.

It s your voice, Gaia, expressing your infinite ecosexual love for all life.

May this scream be loud enough to shake us into alignment with the forces that inspire you.

May it bring our awareness on how we have suffocated, imprisoned, maimed, desecrated our fellow travelers, be it animals, plants, soil, fellow humans, underworld, skies, rocks, waters, microbial life.

May this awareness pinch our numbness to the pain, grief, desperation we ve created around us, and on which we ve installed our world.

The planet s happiness is before our eyes, when dolphins swim in the lagoon of Venice, when the skies are clear is Los Angeles, when hares walk in Milan s parks, when trees rejoice as logging is paused in the forests they inhabit, when spring visits war fields paused by a ceasefire, when ducks take their brood for a walk on city’s riverbank.

This happiness now depends on the timeline of the virus.

Life is calling upon non-life to save itself from us.

How did we let that happen?

Can we be more considerate of how we treat our partners?

Do we need a virus to behave as if our world depended on the health of this planet?

From this scream, a new awareness has come to us.

May this awareness guide us as we reinvent the world to align with the happiness of the entire planet.

Happy Easter from Dr SerenaGaia, aka Serena Anderlini, happy Easter to all of us!

Mini Encyclopedia of EcoSexuality – The Gaia Hypothesis (3 of 3)

Entry: The Gaia Hypothesis

Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, PhD

3. Conclusion: Gay Nature

Lovelock’s macroscopic perspective emphasizes the risk of taking for granted that Gaia, the Earth, will always be hospitable to human life, or even life in general. As an animated

entity, Gaia has a biography: and if we don’t pay attention, Lovelock admonishes, the biota could dry up and Earth become just as barren as its neighbors Mars and Venus. Margulis’s microscopic perspective compounds this awareness from an evolutionary viewpoint. The process of autopoiesis has evolved complex organisms like us humans out of those simple, loving, resource-sharing bacteria. We, the new kids on the block in evolutionary terms, have some lessons to learn. The global ecology that sustains life as we know it is symbiotic: it is the expression of love that results in the infinite acts of sharing resources and collaborating within and across species and biological realms. To put it more simply: love is the ecology of life. Take love out of the equation, and you turn Gaia, with her beautiful blues, greens, yellows, whites, reds, and blacks into a brownish rock like its dead neighbors. So the Gaia Hypothesis is also an axiomatic statement that life is essentially “gay”: capable of loving for fun and across conventional gender lines. If love is the ecology of life, if health, pleasure, joy have been the purpose of lovemaking since our first ancestors bacteria populated the Earth, then we may as well hypothesize that Gaia, our hostess planet, is gay! And we better keep her gay, happy, cheerful. How? It’s simple: by practicing love in symbiotic, fluid, fun, erotic, ecosexy, gay, imaginative, and inclusive ways.

Or else.

List of Sources

Anderlini-D’Onofrio, Serena. Gaia and the New Politics of Love: Notes for a Poly Planet. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 2009.

Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future. New York: harper Collins, 2011.Gimbutas, Marija. The Language of the Goddess. New York: Thames and Hudson, 2001.

Lovelock, James. The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth. New York: Norton 1995.

______ . Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Oxford University Press, 1979.

______ . The Revenge of Gaia: Earth’s Climate Crisis and the Fate of Humanity. New York: Basic Books, 2006.

Margulis, Lynn. Symbiotic Planet: A New Look at Evolution. New York: Basic Books, 1998.

Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan. Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origin of Species. New York: Basic Books, 2003.

______ . Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution. University of California Press, 1997.

______ . Mystery Dance: On the Evolution of Human Sexuality. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1991.

Margulis, Lynn and Dorion Sagan eds. Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis, and Evolution. New York: Copernicus, 1997.

Golding, William. Wikipedia Entry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Golding, November 23, 2013.

Lovelock, James. Wikipedia Entry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lovelock, November 23, 2013.

Margulis, Lynn. Wikipedia Entry. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynn_Margulis, November 23, 2013.

Ryan, Christopher and Cacilda Jetha. Sex at Dawn: How We Mate, Why We Stray, and What It Means for Modern Relationships. New York: Harper Perennial. 2011.

To be continued . . . . next entry: EcoSexuality. Come back next week, same time.

Sending much love and all good wishes to all of you and your loved ones. Thanks you for listening and opening up. Stay tuned for more coming. With all good wishes for a happy end of winter, spring, and summer. Thank you!

Namaste,

SerenaGaia

Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, PhD

Author of Gaia, Eros, and many other books about love
Professor of Humanities, University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez

Poly Planet GAIA Blog: http://polyplanet.blogspot.com/ Website: www.serenagaia.com

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Mini Encyclopedia of EcoSexuality – The Gaia Hypothesis (2 of 3)

Entry: The Gaia Hypothesis

Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, PhD

2. The Name: Origins, Implications, Connotations

The Gaia Hypothesis takes its name from Gaia, also known as Gea, a Greek deity symbolizing the ancient notion of the Earth. From Gea we get the word geography: the art and science of mapping out the ecosystemic elements, designs, and forces that make up the surface of the Earth and affect its dynamic balance. Gaia was the Hellenic version of an embodied feminine deity whose representations are observed in archeological findings of the Neolithic Age around the Mediterranean. Gea represented the sovereign power of the feminine among the forager groups of the Neolithic. She was also present among those who transitioned to agriculture while still maintaining matrifocal values and egalitarian, symbiotic organizations, including Crete, Lydia, Lesbos, Catal Huyuk, and Asia Minor in general. This deity was imagined as connected with the Chthonic powers of terrestrial energies: sources of ecstasy, magic, fertility, and love.

In classical Greek mythology Gaia was considered part of the first generation of Greek deities. The Titans included Aeolus for the winds, Uranus for the sky, Cronus for time, Eros for the force of love, and others. They represented the sovereign powers of nature and were not as personified as the subsequent generation of deities known as the Olympian Gods. A later version of Gaia is Demeter, who is more personified as was typical of Olympian deities. According to classical Greek legend, Demeter was the goddess of harvest and Earth. When losing her daughter Persephone, Demeter became sterile for six months of the year. This ended the golden age of eternal spring and marked the beginning of the age of seasons. The Roman versions for Demeter and Persephone are Ceres and Proserpina respectively. From Ceres we get the word cereals: as in staple foods like wheat and other grains that wean us from mother’s milk and get our bodies to grow into adulthood.

In a gender and sexuality perspective, the Gaia Hypothesis corresponds to a semantic reconfiguration of what is commonly known as “nature” as an entity capable of what is known in French as jouissance, or erotic enjoyment beyond genders. The idea of using Gaia as a name for this paradigmatic scientific hypothesis came to James Lovelock from the novelist William Golding, a Nobel Laureate in Literature familiar with the Classical world. Golding most probably knew the connotations of the name better than Lovelock. In Latin, Gaia is a female personal name correlative to the male Gaius (as in Gaius Julius Caesar). In both grammatical genders, the name means s/he who is cheerful, happy, joyful, and capable of enjoyment. The name is related to the Latin noun gaudio which refers to the act of enjoying, including sexual enjoyment and orgasm. In Italian the connectedness between these ancient meanings has been conserved, with Gaia used as a female name meaning gay (in the original sense): joyful, cheerful; and with godere as the verb most commonly used to refer to the act of sexual climax, or jouissance, as it is called in French. In English the continuity between Gaia and enjoyment is represented by the overlap between the current and conventional meanings of the word gay. As the scientific hypothesis was named, these sexualized connotations were probably part of the discursive awareness of those involved in the process. While they were not intended as primary connotations, they still bring an entirely new twist to the interpretation of nature the Gaia Hypothesis involves.

To be continued . . . . come back next week, same time.

Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, PhD

Author of Gaia, Eros, and many other books about love
Professor of Humanities, University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez

Poly Planet GAIA Blog: http://polyplanet.blogspot.com/ Website: www.serenagaia.com

http://polyplanet.blogspot.com

Mini Encyclopedia of EcoSexuality – The Gaia Hypothesis (1 of 3)

Entry: The Gaia Hypothesis

Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, PhD

1. Introduction: The Epistemic Axiom

The Gaia Hypothesis is a term currently used in scientific discourse to denote a major axiom in post-modern epistemologies. The biota, or sum of atmosphere and biosphere, marks the difference between third planet Earth and its neighbors Mars and Venus. This web of interconnected ecosystem constitutes a sovereign entity that is over four billion years old and has the power to perpetuate itself at the expense of any species that might constitute a threat to its balance and homeostasis. To the woeful surprise of many humans, this sovereign power also applies to our species.

The Gaia Hypothesis is a scientific theory of the pardigmatic order: it shifts the foundation of knowledge that characterizes an age. In this, it can be compared to the cosmological theory that came to be known as the Copernican revolution: a theory that marked the modern era with the interpretation of the Earth as a revolving sphere also in motion around a center outside of itself, rather than a immobile sphere around which everything else revolves. Just like Copernicus’s paradigm accentuates dynamism over stability, so the Gaia Hypothesis accentuates interconnectedness over individuality. Just like modernity is marked by a focus on humankind as a species with a special potential and destiny, so post-modernity is marked by a focus on global ecology and planetary consciousness: sovereign entities with whom human consciousness is free to align or not, at its own risk.

As a scientific theory, the Gaia Hypothesis is associated with two main scientists of the second half of the 20^th Century: the independent scientist, ecologist, and futurologist James Lovelock, based in Devon, England; and the late geoscientist, biologist, and university professor at U Mass, Amherst, Lynn Margulis.

Lovelock is responsible for the macrocosmic aspects of the theory: the observation that planetary homeostasis has been maintained overtime at the expense of species or varieties within a species that constituted a threat to the overarching balance of life as a whole; and the diagnosis of Earth as an ailing patient in need of immediate medical attention, due to persistent human abuse. In Lovelock’s perspective, this attention could come in the form of replacing fossil-fuel energy with nuclear energy, which would be exclusively devoted to civil use.

Margulis focuses on the microcosmic aspects of the theory and extrapolates significant global conclusions. Margulis articulates a Gaian perspective on evolution that involves a critique of Darwinian emphasis on selection and competition. The main force that sustains life across time and space is symbiosis and collaboration. Further, Margulis interprets symbiosis as a form of sexual expression that helps to sustain the life of a species that engages in it, much beyond the reproductive intent of any of its individuals. From this perspective, life, consciousness, sex, love started with bacteria about four billion years ago. These prokaryotic unicellular organisms are our first ancestors and our symbionts: namely the smaller organisms that aggregate to form larger and more complex ones like ours. So, based on this axiom, our ancestors bacteria are symbiotic and accustomed to sharing resources of love. They have recreational sex with their neighbors to stay in good health. Since they’ve been around for so long, one might infer that we would probably do well to learn something from them.

To be continuded . . . . come back next week, same time.

Namaste,

SerenaGaia

Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, PhD

Author of Gaia, Eros, and many other books about love
Professor of Humanities, University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez

Poly Planet GAIA Blog: http://polyplanet.blogspot.com/ Website: www.serenagaia.com

http://polyplanet.blogspot.com

Polyamory and the Gaia Hypothesis – Book Review by Deborah Taj Anapol

A Review of

Gaia & the New Politics of Love

by Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio

by Deborah Taj Anapol

Feminist humanities professor Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio has woven together fact and theory from widely disparate fields to present a strong case for the value of polyamory and other non-normative sexualoving expressions to save humanity from extinction. She views polyamory as a school for love which teaches a way of feeling and thinking which is crucial for our survival as we enter the 21^st Century. I’m so glad she wrote this book because now I don’t have to! People have been asking me for years to elaborate more on what I meant when I said in my 1992 book, Love Without Limits, that polyamory is good for the planet. Serena has done a masterful job of fully explaining exactly what this statement means.

One of the central themes of her Gaia and the New Politics of Love, is the utility of the hypothesis originally put forth in scientific terms by James Lovelock and widely adopted by eco-feminist philosophers, neo-pagans and others, that Planet Earth or Gaia is not mere inert matter but has a consciousness like an animated, self-regulating organism. This point of view has been pervasive among indigenous people the world over for millennia and is the basis for all nature based spirituality. Anderlini-D’Onofrio traces the development of modern religious and scientific thought which view Earth as an inert object. This world view happens to correlate with both the rise of monogamous marriage as the only legitimate sexual expression, and as many observers have noted, with the increasingly life threatening destruction of our environment.

The value of accepting the Gaia hypothesis, she asserts, is that it moves us away from a course of irreversible environmental destruction and human suffering and toward greater justice and eco-social sustainability. In her words, “Hypothesizing Gaia in our era is like hypothesizing heliocentrism in Galileo’s. It helps the world shed needless fears from current dogmas, like the idea that love is a crime or a disease, or that we need to fight preventative wars against terrifying enemies, and it gets us to look reality in the face.”

Another major theme for Anderlini-D’Onofrio is the concept of symbiotic reason. She defines symbiosis as a way of sharing bodies in which both host and guest benefit. In biology this refers to phenomenon such as beneficial bacteria found in the digestive tract of many species. We might also apply the term to the presence of humans and other species living in the body of Gaia. Symbiosis classically describes the relationship between a pregnant woman and her fetus. In Freudian psychoanalytic thought, the term symbiotic refers to pathologically dependent maternal relationships carried beyond the appropriate developmental stage. Instead, Anderlini-D’Onofrio argues for a new understanding of symbiosis as “the wellspring of a mode of reasoning that appreciates the sharing of bodies as resources for fun and pleasure and does not diagnose it as unhealthy or perverse.” Symbiotic reason is not only crucial to sustainability, she says, it’s closely related to the practice of polyamorous love.

Patriarchal values have placed independence and logic above symbiosis or interdependence and direct bodily awareness with disastrous results. Rational science has been revealed as lacking the objectivity on which its alleged superiority is based. Symbiotic reason, which leads us to think in terms of the whole, rather than isolated parts, is the cure according to Anderlini-D’Onofrio and countless other contemporary thinkers. As she expresses it:

“I believe that the political problem of today is a problem of love because only hatred and fear can cause people to construct enemies that do not exist while they ignore the most serious and impending issues. I propose holism as an ecologically sound approach to biopolitical issues that heals the thought system that causes anxiety, rather than attacking the enemies this system constructs. Love is therefore the problem that is also the solution of modernity’s diseases and the absurd position these diseases put us humans in. In homeopathic terms, love is the disease that is the cure. Indeed, if as humans aware of being mere cells in Gaia’s organism we could love as selflessly as the two unicellular organisms who die to merge into one larger symbiotic being, we could perhaps cure ourselves of modernity’s diseases.”

Anderlini-D’Onofrio takes this line of thought a step further by emphasizing the mutual sharing of oxytocin mediated bonding in symbiotic styles of love, which, by her definition, include polyamory. Oxytocin is a hormone well known for its role in bonding a breastfeeding mother to her newborn infant. More recently, the action of oxytocin in promoting bonding of sexual partners, at least temporarily, has been highlighted. Oxytocin produces feelings of calm, love, and connection. Could it be the antidote to the anxieties of modern life still driven by the adrenaline driven fight or flight syndrome? At the risk of over-simplifying, this is the famous slogan of the 1960’s peace movement, “Make love, not war” in terms of neurotransmitters.

Polyamorous people, Anderlini-D’Onofrio asserts, have developed practices that allow the establishment of gradual levels of intimacy, including playful touch, cuddling, snuggling, spooning, and inclusive sexual play. “Because of their heavy reliance on touch, connectedness, nonviolence, and a subtle knowledge and practice of intimacy, the styles of love invented by bi and poly people promote the activation of the hormonal cycle of oxytocin.” Of course, these practices are not limited to the polyamorous, but they are often avoided, particularly in group settings, by those who are fearful of temptations to stray from their monogamous vows.

Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, PhD will be presenting workshops based on Gaia and the New Politics of Love in Puerto Rico and other locations. Her book will be presented at the University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, on February 11^th, 2010. Contact her at serena.anderlini@gmail.com for further information.

Deborah Taj Anapol, Ph.D. is the author of Polyamory: The New Love without Limits and The Seven Natural Laws of Love. Her new book, Polyamory in the 21st Century, will be published in 2010. Dr. Anapol coaches singles and partners on sex and relationship issues by phone and has led relationship and sacred sexuality seminars all over the world – next one is March 11-14, 2010 in Bermuda. Email her at taj@lovewithoutlimits.com or visit her in cyberspace at www.lovewithoutlimits.com

http://polyplanet.blogspot.com