Dear Loudmouth,

The term 'mother earth' is indeed a form of appropriation to describe something which doesn't appear to translate easily into Western thought. It is the same for Lovelock's Gaia, a quite revolutionary concept in many ways but one that is more in common an with indigenous perspective than a traditional Western one, so I am pleased you have taken it up.

Saying 'we respect the land because it provides for us' slips easily into a mothering framing;

“The land is the mother and we are of the land; we do not own the land rather the land owns us. The land is our food, our culture, our spirit and our identity” Dennis Foley, a Gai-mariagal and Wiradjuri man, and Fulbright scholar.

I don't really have an issue with that.

“When people talk about country it is spoken of like a person: we speak to country, we sing to country, we worry about country, and we long for country.”

I'm not sure how divorced this is from your sense of “obligation”.

SR,

Pretty much totally, I would have thought. I don't think there is anything 'spiritual' (whatever the hell that means to an atheist) about the planet, it's a physical body with a multitude of biological etc. processes continually going on, worms, ants, elephants, etc. Nothing much spiritual about any of them, they're busy just surviving and unconsciously ecosystemising, if that's a term.

You are free to believe all the myths you like, if you really do. If Lovelockianism means worshipping some mythical 'spirit', then no, I'm not a Lovelockian. I just want to do as little damage to the environment as possible. And plant a few trees and pick up a bit of local rubbish wherever I can, to make the place a bit greener and more environmentally healthy.

And the Greens don't have a monopoly on that. Certainly not from their inner-city terraces, sipping their kale smoothies and charging their electric cars using coal-generated electricity, but still feeling smug about their virtuous behaviour. W@nkers.

Joe

Dear Loudmouth,

“You are free to believe all the myths you like, if you really do. If Lovelockianism means worshipping some mythical 'spirit', then no, I'm not a Lovelockian.”

No it doesn't have to mean that at all but a wider sense that we and all other life on this planet 'are all in this together' is something you appear to have garnered and I feel it is quite reasonable to do so.

The notion that we might be the only place in the universe to harbour life as we know it can either drive a sense of exceptionalism or a sense of solidarity and obligation, but not both. You seem to lean toward the latter which is a form of Lovelockianism in my book.

Whether that extends to a sense of an overarching life force which essentially is the sum of all living things is up to you but we need to be able to recognise those who wrote or verbalised our myths were likely trying to find a way to express and make sense of this notion.

It is only when these things are inflicted with doctrine and mantra that they become something else, religion for instance.

Sorry, Steele, I'm not into religion. Except of course for any grand moral parables or principles: love thy neighbour (and even strangers and foreigners: the Good Samaritan story, for example) as one's own, all people are equal, do unto others only as you would have them do unto you, try to tread lightly on the earth, etc.

So my Lovelockianism stops short of 'spiritual' - it's far more practical, even Marxian, than that. In my view, that's precisely why we do have obligations to the environment - because it's insensate, inanimate, and can't be airily assumed to somehow fix itself blabla after what we have done to it. That's up to us.

Joe