Pax Gaea Human Rights World Post

What Is Pax Gaea?

Recently I have entertained a few e-mails speculating on the "meaning" of Pax Gaea. I must admit that the speculations have been quite amusing. One person suggested that I have converted my family to Wicca or that I’m promoting some new brand of earth worship and am out to build my cult fortress in the mountains of Mexico. While I have no problems with Wiccans and I do revere the earth on a number of levels, there is absolutely nothing religious about the Pax Gaea philosophy although there are a number of spiritual aspects to it. But its origin had nothing to do with spirituality at all. It had to do with plans I have been making for a round the world driving trip and the quest for a really cool name.

I have always been fascinated by the great adventures of the past starting with the original migrations of the Asians over the Bering Land Bridge of the Americas and the Polynesians and their population of the South Pacific and possibly the southern tip of the Americas. Since then, from the Phoenicians to the Vikings to the great age of exploration in the 15th through 19th Centuries all the way to deep sea and deep space we've just kept exploring and searching and finding great new discoveries that shatter all pre-conceived notions of the world or universe we though we knew. Since I was a kid I marveled at those people who were brave enough to give up the comforts of home and family and were curious, crazy, or greedy enough to venture off into the unknown. I make not always like or agree with the end result of that exploration, but the journey itself is always a source of wonder and amazement.

This served as my basis of interest in the sciences as well. As I began my own internal exploration, calling into question all that I had been raised to believe, I became infinitely fascinated with the sciences. It’s a natural progression as it is merely exploration of how things work and how can you harness that knowledge to affect it. As I learned more I discovered it only lead to more questions. Good for me as I am infinitely curious about everything. While I am an adherent to the axiom of Occam’s Razor, the notion that the simplest answer is usually the correct one, I also came to understand that, before you can apply that principle, you have to have a very broad base of knowledge in order to reach that simple answer. So I have been on a lifelong search for knowledge that will likely continue until my dying day.

Naturally that has led me to questions regarding the very nature of what Stephen J. Gould coined as the Two Magisteria, the two realms of science and religion that seeks to answer all the great questions of life in very different ways. He posited that the realms of science and religion were not wholly mutually exclusive. While science may try to answer questions naturalistically, religion based its conclusions on supernatural answers. He suggested it as two very large circles that, at a very narrow point, both bump against one another. By defining that veritable no-mans lands, science and religion could possibly one day stop viewing each other as competitors and, instead, work together to solve the bigger questions that both realms seemed to fall short. It is an interesting notion and one that has occupied my thoughts for years.

I began to posit that on other aspects of life such as commerce and politics, freedom and security, the past and the future, the real and the imaginary and began to see that, when you seek commonalities between two competing points, you can find even more comparisons that expand that field of overlap. What if you pursued every situation with the same intent? What if you stopped seeing the difference in things and found the similarities? What if instead of expecting a confrontation you instead expected an accommodation? Would you not begin to see things draw together rather then drive apart?

It’s a glaring obviate to anyone who understands human nature that all humans have much more in common then they have different. Start genetically. When you consider that all share 99.9% percent common traits and that the .1% is what determines the race, ethnicity, hair and eye color, body type and which diseases or maladies will inflict one person or the other, it’s pretty amazing how we let that .1% define everything about us. That .1% gets amplified by such factors as birthplace, early childhood development, religious instruction, political indoctrination, socio-economics and education and the era in which you are born. These factors are all that makes the difference and yet it is these differences that drive us apart. But take what each of us, other than the genetic, have in common. Except for those afflicted with some sort of chemical or brain abnormality we really only want the same thing. The ability to get up in the morning at the place of our choosing, to be able to provide for ourselves and our families, to gain more than we expend, to obtain knowledge or resources that allow us to make life better and easier for our offspring, to be able to partake in those oh-so-human pleasures freely, to go to sleep with a reasonable assumption that we will not be molested or murdered and to expire relatively painlessly after a long, healthy, productive life, preferably in our sleep with the knowledge that we lived a good life. How we get there is all based upon those amplifying factors and the capabilities of our base genetic stock. The other thing we all have in common as that we’re living these lives on the same small bubble a mere 25,000 miles in circumference with the vast majority of it covered in water. When you consider there is 5 billion of us all sharing a small percentage of the land mass, it would seem to make sense we should do what we can to get along so that little speck of dry ground doesn’t feel...or become smaller.

So back to my fascination with explorers. Up until fairly recently, our ability to share our various knowledge bases was limited owing to distance, language and political barriers that prohibited us from know much more beyond our limited view. But technology has changed that and now, we can conduct instantaneous information with total strangers half way around the globe and actually break through these barriers and get to know people without the filter of culture, language and politics. And it is amazing that, when you bother to actually talk to someone from a culture or nation supposedly at war or in diametric opposition to you, you find that they misunderstand you as much as you misunderstand them. You discover that we are not the cartoon caricatures our respective leaders try to draw of one another. You find how totally human they are and how they really only want in life what you want. So why do we let our leaders, religious, political or economic continue to divide us? And why are they so committed to making sure we loathe and fear each other so badly? Could it be that, by keeping us divided they get to control us? They assure their value and perpetuate their station by making themselves the only thing that keeps those "others" from destroying us?

When I began to grasp this simple but oh so powerful notion, I began to feel what no minister, no politician or no employer could make me feel... I began to feel free. I began to realize that when I no longer needed to be afraid of those who are different than me I can choose to get to know them and feel confident that they have no more malice towards me than I have towards them.

That’s when I began planning my own great expedition, one that is driven to visit every place on my planet that I can drive my Land Rover. I sat down and began sketching this plan that links every country by road or by ferry that would roll my wheels across every border. I had followed the day to day progress of a team of explorers that were doing a mini-version on this concept on behalf of Parkinson’s Disease called, appropriately enough, http://www.drivearoundtheworld.com . Okay, so I began laying out this meticulous concept that would link all 240 nations from pole to pole and I calculated how it could be done in four years, starting and ending in New York City. And it needed a reason other than my desire to log some 250,000 miles other than my fascination to do so. So I began working on that one concept on which we all have nations have common ground... the fight against pediatric aids. No matter how you feel about the adults who contract this deadly disease and how they do so, we can all at least agree that children born with this life ending illness are innocent of their plight can’t we?
So such a huge idea required an equally loft name. And I tried to formulate a concept that takes all my hopes and beliefs in people and our shard commonalities and put it all under one banner. And so I reached into my beloved world of science for the answer for one word that would crystalize the concept. And that word was... Pangaea.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, blame your eighth grade science teacher. While it has gone through various states of debate, the theory is sound and accepted by the vast body of scientists. Pangaea is the name given to the one Super Continent that existed billions of years ago. It suggests that in the early days of Earth creation, when dry land began to initially form, the world consisted of one big continent, But, as the earth is fluid and subject to movement, an action known as plate tectonics, the continent began to expand and separate forming what are our current continents today. As the earth is water and a relatively thin crust float over a molten ball of lava, we see the planet ever undergoing growth and rebirth through vulcanism, And plate tectonics is something we experience every minute of every day but rarely feel in the form of earthquakes and the other natural events that result from them like tsunamis and landslides. You have to be in awe of a force so strong as to be able to drive these mass bodies apart. But what kind of sheer power and will would you need to draw them back together, if not physically, at least metaphorically?

And that was where the concept of Pax Gaea came together. I liked the idea that, no matter how power the forces that try to drive us apart, if our will is greater than those forces of division, we can be drawn back together. And the name worked on so many levels. Take the two words, Pax from the Latin "Peace" and "Gaea" from the Greek for earth. Peace Earth. What a concept! And despite our divisions, if we could acknowlege each other’s common humanity and unite on one cause, we begin the process of drawing together.

As I said there is nothing religious about the philosophy or mission of Pax Gaea. But there is something spiritual. Again, drawing from my endless fascination for scientific theory, I began reading on the theories of James Lovelock. He spent decade as a chemist working for NASA to create sensors that would detect the most minute traces of organic chemical that would suggest the presence of life. His work led him to the theory that the earth behaves as a Super Organism made up from all living things and from their material environment. A writer friend suggested dubbing it the Gaia Theory. Lovelock argues that such things as the level of oxygen, the formation of clouds, and the saltiness of the oceans may be controlled by interacting physical, chemical and biological processes. He believes that "the self-regulation of climate and chemical composition is a process that emerges from the rightly coupled evolution of rocks, air and the ocean - in addition to that of organisms. Such interlocking self-regulation, while rarely optimal - consider the cold and hot places of the earth, the wet and the dry - nevertheless keeps the Earth a place fit for life."

It’s a fascinating concept and, if it proves to be true, what an amazing thought that we are fortunate enough to be very rare within the universe to have been part of the evolutionary process of a living, breathing sentient creature called Earth. Which leads us back to Stephen J. Gould and his concept of the Two Magisteria.Is this one of those juxtapositions where both the realms of science and religion could share common ground. If there enough possibility for the scientist to conceed a power greater than natural and for the cleric to admit that the true answers to meaning of existence lies not in faith of an afterlife, but an in depth scientific study of this life? These were the questions Carl Sagan pondered as he stared into the cosmos. What if every answer we were seeing about the beginning of life can be found right here? What if the answer to "why are we here" could be answered, because Gaia wanted it to?

What if all the answers to all the great mysteries was right here in place sight, at the tips of our toes?

That is Pax Gaea.

posted by Dave Carroll @ 8/31/2006 05:31:00 AM