By Jeremy D. Wells
On Sunday, we celebrate our mothers – the women who gave us life, kept us safe, and guided us as we grew. But mothers don’t just have to be the women who shared their chromosomes with us. There are mothers who adopt. Stepmothers. Godmothers.
And then there is Mother Earth.
It may be an idea that some associate with the hippie counter-culture, or ardent environmentalism, but the idea of the Earth as a Mother is much older. The Greeks personified the Earth as Gaia. In their mythology she was the ancestral mother of all life. The Titans, the Cyclopes, and the Giants all descend from her directly while the Olympian gods, other supernatural beings, and even humans who descended from or were created by the gods could consider her as a grandmother.
She also lends her name to an idea, the Gaia Principle (sometimes called the Gaia Hypothesis, Gaia Theory or Gaia Paradigm) that suggests the Earth actually is something akin to a complex, self-regulating, “living” organism. In this model plants, animals, fungi, and the elements that their life is built upon function as organs or cells within the body, maintaining a balance necessary for the Earth to sustain life.
While the idea – first conceived by chemist James Lovelock and co-developed with microbiologist Lynn Margulis – doesn’t suggest the Earth is literally a sentient, living being, they used the Gaia concept as a metaphor for the structure of Earth’s intricate and interrelated systems of evolution that helped make our world a stable place for life to thrive.
So, this Sunday, give the moms in your life a hug. Bring them some flowers. Take them out for a nice dinner. And give a little thanks to Mother Earth too.