Читать книгу Active Hope - Joanna Macy - Страница 43

The skill side of gratitude involves recognizing and valuing benefits we might have previously ignored. New information makes a difference; our gratitude to others, and our enthusiasm to help them, can suddenly grow if we discover they have done us a great favor. You might think of examples of this from your own life, perhaps times you’ve felt warmer toward someone after hearing of support provided to you. This same principle holds true in our relationship with our world.

Just as we depend on plants for food, we also rely on them to make air breathable. Our two neighboring planets, Mars and Venus, have atmospheres that would kill us in a few minutes, and we’ve only recently discovered that Earth’s atmosphere used to be similar. Three billion years ago, our planet’s air, like that of Mars and Venus, had much more carbon dioxide and hardly any oxygen.²⁰ Over the next 2 billion years or so, early plant life did us the remarkable service of making our atmosphere breathable by adding an abundance of oxygen and removing much of the carbon dioxide.

Oxygen is a highly reactive gas, which wouldn’t normally be expected to exist at levels as high as the 20 percent we have now. It was the chemically unlikely fact that oxygen has remained at this level for hundreds of millions of years that led British scientist James Lovelock to develop the early ideas of Gaia theory. Here is how he described his moment of insight:

An awesome thought came to me. The Earth’s atmosphere was an extraordinary and unstable mixture of gases, yet I knew that it was constant in composition over quite long periods of time. Could it be that life on Earth not only made the atmosphere, but also regulated it — keeping it at a constant composition, and at a level favourable for organisms?²¹

The core tenet of Gaia theory is that our planet is a self-regulating system. There’s a parallel here to the way our bodies keep arterial oxygen and temperature levels stable or the way termite colonies maintain their internal temperature and humidity. Living systems have the capacity to keep themselves in balance. Gaia theory shows how life looks after itself, different species acting together to maintain the balance of nature. In addition to maintaining oxygen levels, life plays a role in regulating the salinity of the sea and the dynamics of our climate.

As stars grow older, they tend to burn brighter. Because of this, it is estimated that our sun now puts out at least 25 percent more heat than it did when life began on Earth three and a half billion years ago.²² Yet has our planet also gotten 25 percent hotter? Human life wouldn’t exist if it had. And we have plant life to thank for this. By absorbing carbon dioxide, plants reduce the greenhouse effect of this gas, keeping the planetary temperature within a range suitable for complex life such as ours.