ABSTRACT
In 1966 the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)
delivered to the world the first photographic images of our planet from
outer space, and for the first time in human history we experienced Earth
as a holistic and self-supporting organism peacefully suspended in the
dark silence of space. We witnessed with our own eyes Earth’s protective
atmosphere, and were jolted by the evident fragility of this blue gaseous
membrane proportionally similar in depth to ‘a coat of paint around a
football’.1 The social shockwave that resulted from this uncomplicated
revelation gave birth to a new and socially accessible appreciation of
the natural environment. The world’s largest environmental organization
– Friends of the Earth – was founded three years later closely followed by
Greenpeace in 1971. From the early 1970s, the output of legislation and
transnational environmental policies also grew, placing increasing pressure
on designers and manufacturers to improve their standards. Today, public
consciousness of the human destruction on the natural world is almost
tacit, and few would negate that a dramatic reappraisal of developed
world production and consumption methods is imperative: ‘proving that
the Earth’s climate is changing from human actions … is like statistically
“proving” the pavement exists after you have jumped out of a 30-storey
building. After each floor your analysis would say “so far – so good” and
Some might refer to the space mission in 1966 as having provided
the greatest ecological awakening in modern history. Undoubtedly, it
assisted significantly in the societal comprehension of new ecological
models and theories, one of these being the Gaia hypothesis – so named
after the Greek goddess of Earth, Gaia – which provides an inclusive glance
at life on Earth. In Gaia, environmental scientist James Lovelock puts forward
the theory that the Earth is a ‘tightly coupled process from which the self-
regulation of the environment emerges’.3 His theory, made public in 1968 at
a conference regarding the origins of life on Earth, might well be viewed as
a logical continuation of Charles Darwin’s theories of evolution by natural
selection, except that Lovelock classifies animals and inanimate entities
within a single category. It also appears to make perfect sense to even the
least informed ecologist, making it the popular choice for many. Gaia theory
embeds itself within the correlations between all matter on Earth, and in
this respect resembles ancient Celtic and other holistic, animistic depictions
of human situatedness within nature, quite unlike contemporary ecology
with its somewhat anthropocentric tendency to focus chiefly on human-
centred endeavours and their environmental impact(s).
