I have been waiting a long time for this article! I first encountered Lovelock’s Gaia theory in 1980, when it was featured in Stewart Brand’s sequel to “The Last Whole Earth Catalog” (1970), ironically entitled “The Next Whole Earth Catalog.” I was thrilled — I knew in my bones that Lovelock had given us the central metaphor for our time — GAIA — as a myth, a model, a metaphor, and a movement simultaneously. It was the only concept available that accurately posited humanity-within-nature as a single self-organizing complex adaptive system, and thereby put to rest the false dichotomy of “Man vs. Nature” upon which our agro-industrial civilization had been predicated. And at the time — at the tender age of 30 — I was convinced that Gaia, as a nodal idea, would transform our civilization in a manner that past nodal ideas — such as monotheism — had transformed Judaic, Christian, and Islamic cultures alike.

What I did not anticipate was how much resistance Lovelock’s radical convergence of science and myth would encounter among the four populations whom I assumed would embrace it: scientists and theologians,

Mainstream scientists considered it heretical in the extreme to mix science and myth in one concept, and even though they embraced the concept, they renamed it “Earth Systems Science.” Christians — especially fundamentalists, saw the Gaia myth as heretical, and denounced it vehemently. At the same time, it was embraced uncritically by hippies and new agers in California, who were drawn to the ancient idea of the Earth as a Great Mother. And at the same time, a few top-notch intellectuals, such as William Irwin Thompson and Fritjof Capra, celebrated it as a fertile and inspiring metaphor for holistic or systems thinking. But by and large, the concept was either forgotten altogether, or infantilized, by the dominant discourse of mass media. Today, “Gaia” as a concept is used to sell cosmetics or massage tables, but any sense of its original, profound significance is lost on the general public.

But for me, its original resonance remains, and has shaped my thinking ever since. But to gain cultural traction, I feel that Gaian theory needs to be coupled with Gaian praxis, and I know of no better guide to the latter than the Permaculture movement, initiated in 1978 by Bill Mollison and now worldwide. Mollison himself cited Gaia Theory as his original inspiration for the Permaculture (regenerative) design system he created and passed on to posterity.