One Earthly Body
Why Metaphors Matter
Built into the very language we use to comprehend and navigate in the world, are the use of metaphors or comparisons—using something we know and understand to try to comprehend something new or difficult to grasp. Even something mundane like talking about a “ferocious storm” is using a metaphor—your comparing the action of the storm to that of a person who’s ferocious.
How Metaphors Affect Us
We all know that walking around all day chanting, “I’m stupid!,” is going to have a different affect on us than if we were chanting, “I’m brilliant!” What do you think the effect of thinking of your body as, say, a work of art vs. a machine vs. a musical instrument might be? In her blog about Body Metaphors, Katie graphically depicts these possibilities and more, explaining that she has stopped thinking of her body (and its size) as a way to measure herself and now thinks of her body as a home she lives in. I imagine that this shift in her thinking affects how she treats her body every day.
What if, instead of the models we are currently using, we imagined the world we live in as one, huge body that we are part of? James Lovelock proposed a scientific theorem that does just that, the Gaia Theory. Whether we find the scientific reasoning behind the Gaia Theory persuasive or not, we can use the idea as a metaphor. In this light, the functioning of our bodies can be a model of how the world around us functions as our larger body. When we conceive the world this way, some things become obvious. Warfare would be like the left hand fighting the right. Imagining that one species is better than another would be like choosing between the cells in your heart or those in your lungs. Which would you rather do without?
And the need for different kinds of people with different perspectives and talents becomes obvious. Think about the diversity in our nervous system—our bodies would be greatly impoverished if we only had one kind of neuron. So, too, would our world be a less habitable place were there to be only a few kinds of plants or animals, or if humanity had only humans that conformed to some narrow standard of what is considered to be “normal”. If we want our planet to continue to function as a complex, dynamic living system, maybe we better start imagining her as she is our Greater, Planetary Body. Just like our individual bodies, she’s the only Planetary Body we have.
A Better Model
Metaphors for the Earth
An ancient metaphor for the Earth was that the planet functions like a living being. One of the ways this organic metaphor is by imagining the Earth as our Mother. But in the late middle ages a new metaphor emerged: the metaphor of the Earth as machine. This metaphor reached its ultimate extension when the idea of the planet as a giant spaceship was coined by the emerging environmental movement. This metaphor is used not only to help students begin to understand the complexities of Earth’s systems, but also to set policy. But is this really the most effective model for life on Earth?
Orders of Scale and Complexity
How Metaphors Work
Metaphors function like scientific models. The more accurate the metaphor, the better it works as a guide that predicts real-world events. Scientists call this “garbage in/garbage out”. If the scientific models we make to attempt to comprehend a complex system aren’t working, the results they predict won’t match what happens in the real-world. When public policy is based on inaccurate or poor models, then the results of that policy won’t match up with what we hoped would happen. When we look around at the world today, I think many of us question the wisdom of the policies we’ve enacted. What if the problem is that they are based on out-moded, inaccurate models of the world and our relationship to it?
