The Church of Gaia
Author: Sam Schikowitz Issue: 2024-11-20
The Church of Gaia
by Sam Schikowitz
*Also published at: *The Church of Gaia
A treatise on the sacredness of the biosphere.
This is my attempt to describe what I value most.
1. Lives are not sacred. Live Pure Biomass is sacred.
- This biomass is the stuff of life. It is recycled continuously between plants, bacteria, fungi, and animals. Without it, no life could exist.
- For billions of years, plants have been sending down roots and selecting the minerals that are compatible with life, like magnesium, calcium, phosphorus, potassium, iron, selenium, zinc. The plants leave toxic minerals like lead, mercury, and arsenic behind.
- Plants (and some bacteria) have been using sunlight to fuel the transformation of elements in the atmosphere like carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, and hydrogen into soil biomass. As this process has continued, a layer of relatively pure biomass has developed, sometimes meters thick.
- Nature is red in tooth and claw. Lives come and go. As they do, biomass is accumulated from dead matter through the action of life.
- The quantity and quality of biomass in any location are exactly the quantity and quality of life in that location
Characteristics of biomass:
- A very specific chemical composition
- Pure. If the wrong elements get mixed into it, it becomes deadly
- Transmutable to practically any animal, vegetable, bacteria or fungus
Toxification of biomass is desecration.
2. Diversity is sacred.
- Organisms and ecosystems will evolve, adapt, and diversify to utilize any available energy sources to the fullest extent possible, as this leads to increased growth, reproduction, and overall success in an evolutionary sense.
- When the environment changes, that diversity ensures that life continues.
Monocropping is desecration
3. Biological complexity is sacred.
- Life builds up complexity as evidenced by:The complexity of chemistry,
- The complexity of cells,
- The complexity of collections of cells,
- The complexity of organisms,
- The complexity of social groups,
- The complexity of ecosystems.
Some of these systems are renewable, and others are not. For example, there are billions of human beings on the planet, but only one Amazon rainforest.
Destroying unrenewable complex systems like the Amazon Rainforest is desecration.
4. Consciousness is sacred.
- Intelligence is required, but not sufficient to produce consciousness
- Consciousness is the universe seeing itself
- Consciousness can be cultivated
Allowing consciousness to be dimmed with neurotoxins like lead is desecration.
What is the Church of Gaia?
A community that treats biomass as the sacred fountain of life that must be stewarded.
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Communities work to go closed loop on materials, especially the elements of biomassComposting and liberating food waste from landfills.
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Human waste and greywater recycling.
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Development of scalable process for local agriculture in the permaculture style (converting mono-cropped industrial farmland into multiply interacting sub-dunbar permaculture communities)
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Communities work to develop diversity and complexity, both as local biodiversity as well as diversity and complexity of thinking and perceiving.Habitat restoration
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Emphasis on personal development and learning
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Experimentation with and use of appropriate technology (possibly rocket stoves, heat pumps, climate batteries, greenhouses, etc)
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Experimentation with green economic endeavors
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Communities work to develop the consciousness of the members.Contemplative and meditative practices embedded in the fabric of the community
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Governance structures that work to develop the social intelligence of the members
Related:
- Sam Schikowitz (author)
- 2024 (year)
- Topics: Climate and Environment, Philosophy and Spirituality, Systems Thinking, Regenerative Systems and Agriculture