Gaia as Educator

Gaia has been educating her children all along, with an imperative to heed what she has taught. An imperative might seem to be the nature of information passed genetically and chemically, and the term ‘education’ might seem to construe the mere passage of information. It is true that in ‘education’ by humans refers to enabling students to grasp information. Thus, mere education does not impress the student with a single, or even a range, of imperatives. It is also true that human education is a kind of general frame within which a particular human being can proceed to experience and act in the world. It is not a code, in that it is neither specific nor directive. To different degrees in different places today the human freedom from coded directives has been the forte of human life. There is a degree of freedom of choice in human education that is illusive to the codes of genetics and chemistry.

However, this is not the same education as that which has been perennially provided by Gaia. We have been given a breadth of choices in our actions. However, this does not mean that she has been freeing us from imperatives. She has been teaching us to listen to her, and we erred in our imperious naiveté that we had a choice to listen, or not. She will always, unfailingly, respond kindly to our willingness to listen to her, and with increasing sharpness if we fail.

Now she is demanding our attention. There is no difference between the education that she has been giving her humans and that which, for instance, she has been passing down through biochemistry. For millennia, she has taken the adult position: patient, warning but forgiving, trying to correct us in subtle and consistent ways. It is not that her voice has not been immediate, but we have been slow to understand the nature of her authority.

Gaia is the perfect teacher. We humans will always face, by degree, the natural consequences of our actions.