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INTRODUCTION
Gaian Democracies: Redefining Globalisation & People-Power by Roy Madron & John Jopling
Summary
Roy Madron: Biography
Radio Interview with Jane Taylor, from Resonance FM
Email address: rm(at)gaiandemocracy.net
| Key propositions:
- Gaia is a system of interacting biological and material subsystems that have co-evolved together over billions of years and depend on each other.
- Human beings are a species that has evolved like any other species, with all that implies in terms of interdependence, self-organisation and the other characteristics of evolved systems.
- The Gaian system as a whole appears to be approaching one of its periodic system-shifts, a process which our industrial and agricultural activity is accelerating.
It is widely recognised outside the current Global Monetocracy, and in a fatally qualified way within it, that our industrial and economic systems must be re-configured to work with natural systems, instead of treating them as an inexhaustible resource. Our human societies must somehow reconnect with nature.
The characteristics of Gaia as a system, and of human beings and human societies as sub-systems of Gaia are deeply significant in relation to democracy. The capacity of Gaian systems to self-organise is the key to their capacity for survival and adaptation. Our democratic systems need to be configured so as to aim towards achieving ordered relationships between the self-organised actions of the members of a particular democratic system, the democracy of which they are a part, and the Gaian system to which we all belong.
Many will optimistically agree with James Lovelock’s view that, “Potentially, at least, we have the intelligence to learn how to work with Gaia, rather than undermining her”.i The intelligence? Yes. But systems for co-learning how to use it? No. Under the Global Monetocracy there is no possibility whatsoever of that potential being realised. The only chance, we believe, of averting the disaster that a Gaian system-shift will spell for the human family, is a system-shift in our democracies. In that sense, we are in a race to reconfigure our democratic systems before Gaia launches on her own systems shift. All we can hope is that Gaia does not get there first.
In our current state of knowledge, it is impossible to say whether the Gaian-shift will result in a new ice age, or the melting of the polar ice-caps and the drowning of millions of low-lying islands and coastal cities, towns and villages. It is important to note that the shift is an example of Gaia’s balancing feedback mechanisms in operation, and that, because of the phenomena of systems lag, it may now be irreversible. Even if our outputs of carbon dioxide and methane were reduced to pre-Industrial levels tomorrow, the amounts that we have already added to the atmosphere could be sufficient to trigger a Gaian system-shift. Unfortunately, because of the complex nature of the systems involved, no one can predict when the shift, if it occurs, will happen. When it does come it will happen quickly, in a matter of decades. At that time, if the human family has reconfigured its societies into Gaian democracies, their chances of adapting speedily and creatively to the new Gaian environment will be vastly improved. If today’s Global Monetocracy still holds sway, the consequences of the Gaian shift are likely to be horrific.
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