ANIMISTIC ECOLOGY OF GAIA

Without using the words "spirit" or "soul", many participants expressed a soulful relationships with the rainforest through their celebration of its attributes and functions. It seems that Gaian ecology, the understanding (or metaphor) of the whole Earth as a living system (with rainforest as a key example of such a living system) can really fire people's imaginations. A connection with the sacred can be made and expressed without the necessity of using too much of a 'new age' discourse. Through links with ecology, emotive and animistic statements can be made with the 'respectability' lent by science.

Although the Gaia hypothesis per se was not mentioned in the interviews, the rainforest was evocatively and thoroughly described as a living system. It was also referred to as a 'living entity', and as a 'creature'. Adam, for example, alternative lifestyler and artist, said

"It's immensely intertangled. And it's supporting itself from cyclonic winds. It's really RICH, it seems to grow really big trees. And I could talk about all the buttress roots and the way it recycles nutrients all the time, it's just got the thin layer of nutrients. The soil, and the coolness it makes and the different layers of the canopy and, so that's all the scientific stuff I've read. It's a really different creature from gum-tree forests."

The themes of nourishment and nurturing, and the cycling of life and death were particularly strong. Joan Fielding, a dairy farmer living high on the Atherton Tablelands, described the rainforest as "the land's natural nursery I suppose really - everything grows and nourishes and is nurtured by nature." Trevor Ceely, an engineer in Cairns, explained the functioning of the rainforest in the following way.

"Birth, growth and death. The birth comes back out of the degeneration of the dead trees or animals or whatever, you know. That's where it gets its growth from."

Many references were made to the part rainforest plays in the larger Earth system, but usually in straight ecological terms, e.g., the creation of oxygen, affecting weather patterns, creating soil, filtering water. Environmental activist Linda Thomson used a more anthropomorphic expression to describe the rainforest, more clearly linking her statement to the Gaia hypothesis.

"It has a wholeness which if you leave it alone it's totally in balance, and to me it's the LUNGS OF THE EARTH, the other half of our lungs."

Amy Kirman, a woman in her late 50's running a cleaning business in Cairns, wonders about the living system of the rainforest, and goes on to outline the development of what Warwick Fox calls 'ontological identification' with nature⁽¹⁶⁾.

"How would it have started? A bird bringing a seed, and then the seed growing and then dropping more seeds and the animals carrying them. The little things that live in there, and.... Lots of things. LOTS of things. The mosses that grow in the moisture and the water that FEEDS them and.... Mmmm. You don't really stop and think. It just IS. Especially when you're a CHILD, when you're in these sorts of things. It's just THERE. It's not until you get older, that you sort of, begin to appreciate nature and how MARVELLOUS it is."

FOOTNOTES

(16) See page 54 of John Cameron's article 'Reflections on soul, spirit and environment' (1996, Temenos, 3, 49-55) for a good summary of Fox's typology of self-identification with nature.

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