One day, Man went to the goddess earth to thank her for continuously saving humanity from the time immemorial. “Why do you thank me?” She asked with a mysterious smile. Man generously replied, “Despite all these wastes, pollutions, and wounds on your body inflicted for thousands of years, you have still been kind to us and have been saving us.” The goddess said nothing to the egotistically conscious Man. He returned pleased with his generosity.
The deity appeared in the night, in his dream. But there was an uncanny rage in her voice, and her flowing hair hissed restlessly in the violent wind. She emerged from the twisting dark clouds and leaned over the Man and said, “I save myself and all my beings. I self-sustain me, I regulate me and my beings. And in this process of self regulation, if I find that you have become a prime hindrance, I will not hesitate for a second to annihilate all humanity.”
This is my narrative adaptation of James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis. The hypothesis conceives Gaia, the earth, as the main entity saving and sustaining all forms of organic and inorganic existence. The problem lies in man’s attitude toward the planet earth and in saving her. Helping man is not helping the earth or helping the world is not limited to helping man. The helping cry must be understood as a cry of the earth through the voice of the girl and other children.
I was pondering over the use of the word “please” in the title of the COP 15 opening film Please Help the World shown at the Copenhagen climate conference. The “please” is not for the earth but for us. The arrogant collective human psyche thinks that we should help the earth instead of thinking that we should help ourselves. Who is helping whom? Are we helping earth or have now become desperate to help survive ourselves? If humans ignore the earth, she will take care of herself. She will help herself, if necessary, at the cost of humanity.
I’ve always remembered a scholar’s argument. He had said that man should not be criticized so harshly because after all man has done the most to save the world even if he caused the disasters himself. There are thousands of organizations and agencies in the world who claim to take care of the nature and animals. After all, man is the superior among other animals who can plan and conserve the earth through United Nation Environment Program or even by acts as simple as planting trees in a park.
And the blasphemy of knowing and knowledge is that we do not care how many “agencies” and “planning” are at work within the depths of nature, in the world of trees and animals. Man does very little in comparison to what other life forms do to protect the planet.
The anthropocentric worldview is one of the most dangerous perspectives which wrongly puts man above other life forms. Man thinks that he is superior to all other beings and holds the burden of responsibility to save the earth. Environmental awareness carries such pervasive false consciousnesses embedded in most of us. At times, even considering the earth as mother leads to gross misinterpretations: Since she is the mother, the great giving mother, she is a metaphor of milk and tears, always ready to sacrifice herself for the sake of her children. The mother metaphor probably is a very cunning male construct to exploit earth by idealizing her.
In Hindu myths, Sita of the epic The Ramayana has the same sacrificing image. She is an embodiment of mother earth, a daughter of Prithvi (Gaia in Greek) in the epic. She bears immense pain; she suffers to keep others happy. She is man’s ideal woman for his self gratification. She suffers silently and resists and that is why she is glorified by the male. The earth is associated with the same idealistic attributes when she is conceived as mother in myths, arts, and popular imagination of people from Copenhagen to Kathmandu. How do we symbolize the earth then -- the mother, the great demoness, the massive treasure house for all humanity, or the evolutionally fortunate place for us to live in - to make all beings comfortable to live in?
Those who seek answers to these questions would like watching Please Help the World directed by Mikkel Blaabjerg Poulsen and produced by Zentropa RamBuk. The accompaniments of the Danish National Girls Choir and David Rossi’s violin are the best part of the presentation. The movie surely must have driven home the message to world leaders attending the Copenhagen climate summit because positive signs have already been given by some of the leading industrial countries. This time around countries and people seem to be genuinely concerned unlike the Nepali ministers who incurred great expenses to appear in the Himalayas only to manifest their intellectual deficiency.
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