Gaia and I.

Connectedness: Our Place in Gaia, the Living Earth.

A walk with Gaia in the small forest near my apartment.

What can I do about Climate Change?

Like you, I worry about how climate change is impacting my life. In Australia, we have extreme events with flooding, drought and bush fires. I ask myself what can I do? The answer requires us to think about how we fit into our living planet and then understand how we can make a difference. This is my story about trying to understand what it means to live with Gaia.

Meeting Gaia in the 80’s.

I first met Gaia in Isaac Asimov’s book “Foundation’s Edge” in the mid 1980’s. Asimov’s story of the planet Gaia intrigued me. Humans on Gaia were part of a sentient self-regulating balanced ecosystem. They were devoid of the attitudes of owning, dominating and exploiting the planet; entirely at odds with the other humans populating Asimov’s Foundation and Galactic Empire.

Now, some 35 years later, Asimov’s story with its sharp contrasts continues to resonate at a deep personal level as I live my life in an apartment disconnected from the land. The calamitous droughts, bush fires and floods in Australia made worse by climate change, are impacting everyone’s lives. Even I, disconnected as I am, had asthma bought on by bush fire smoke blanketing Sydney. I felt pressured and I wanted to do something about mitigating climate change, but what? In this state I rekindled my interest in Gaia, but this time from my engineer perspective.

Learning about Gaia.

During my PhD research I became reacquainted with Gaia through James Lovelock and his Theory of Gaia. This Gaia, the living Earth, emerges from the connections and interactions between all of Earth’s ecosystems. I will just call these connections, relationships and interactions “Connectedness”.

Initially, I thought of Gaia as being akin to mycelium which links the trees of a forest, providing them with water and nutrients and in return receiving sustenance from them. But, Gaia is far more than mycelium. Lovelock sees Gaia as a “self-regulating system made up of the totality of organisms, the surface rocks, the ocean and the atmosphere, all tightly coupled as an evolving system”. Unlike mycelium, Gaia has the goal of the “regulation of Earth’s surface conditions so as always to be as favourable as possible for contemporary life”. In this light, Gaia emerges from the complex non-sentient connectedness of Earth’s ecosystems. So, where do we humans fit?

Gaia is all encompassing and we humans, with our intelligence, are a component ecosystem of Gaia. In this light, human activities have impacted Gaia to the extent of compromising her goal of regulation to bring about global warming.

Being a part of Gaia means that we humans are not the owners of Earth, nor are we the Earth’s custodians. Furthermore, the Earth has not evolved solely for our benefit, and any changes we make to it are, as we have seen, at our own risk. This way of thinking makes clear that we have no special rights over Earth. I believe, our future depends upon re-focusing our intelligence to influence Gaia’s behaviour and bring Earth’s condition back into some sort of balance.

My Aha Moment.

I have often been confronted by the realisation that things I thought I understood, I really didn’t and things I had disregarded through lack of interest, like diet and exercise, turned out to be vital to my future. Gaia is a case in point. Even with my PhD studies, my appreciation of Gaia lacked depth, a bit like the weather in that having read the forecast I’m still surprised when it rains on me!

I’m an engineer and systems analyst by training and my experience is that to develop a deep appreciation of a system I must roll-up my sleeves and get my hands dirty building stuff. I remembered an article I had read on aquaponics and had an “aha” moment. I could connect my garden, LED grow lamps and the fish tank to understand and tinker with Gaia’s interactions between my plants and fish! The only space in my apartment not taken up with various experiments was the living room. So one thing leads to another as you can see in the picture below.

My kit-bashed aquaponics during the 15 minute flood cycle in the corner of my living room.

Tinkering With My Aquaponics Kit

The coming of LED grow lamps enabled me to have a place in my once dark apartment for growing my favourite potted plants: herbs, salad greens, strawberries and chillies. I added other plants to explore what I could do, such as my pet vanilla vine which is now over 4 metres long. I have tended some tropical fish since I was given my sons’ discarded fish tank some 15 years ago. I thought I had a good background to experiment with Aquaponics.

A section of My LED garden for chillies, seedlings and my much loved vanilla vine.

One advantage of living in our connected society is that I have ready access to information. In my case too much information, because I did not know enough about aquaponics to refine my searches and stop the deluge. To learn the basics, I bought some books on-line including Dudley’s Aquaponic Design Plans (2017).

After some careful reading, I felt confident to write a short list of search criteria based on an aquaponics system that would fit in my living room and within my ability to build and maintain it. Eventually I found a small aquaponics demonstration kit commonly used in schools.

My aquaponics shown in the picture, uses the “flood and drain” method which is recommended as a reliable system suitable for a beginner like myself. A trough for 5 pots of plants is supported above the small fish tank. In turn, an LED grow lamp is suspended from a high frame to supply full-spectrum light needed by the plants. I initially timed the LED grow light for 12 hours per day to simulate summer. I put fired clay pebbles in the pots to support the plants.

Once an hour for 15 minutes water from the fish tank is pumped to flood the plastic trough containing the pots, the overflow returns to the tank. The plants’ roots grow down into the water so they can process nutrients. When the flood period is over, the pump turns off and all of the water drains back to the fish tank. The draining water draws air down into the roots of the plants.

The fish wastes (excretions and uneaten food) are processed by naturally occurring bacteria to provide food in the form of nitrates to the plants. In taking up the nutrients the plants filter the water to prevent a build-up of toxins that would harm the fish. It is an elaborate balancing act. I was fortunate in having experience with LED grow lamps with my plants in organic potting mix (see my picture of the second bedroom).

Based on my experience, I planted lettuce and basil seedlings from my garden into 2 pots of clay balls. I made sure that during flooding at least part of the seedling’s root system was in the water. In the remaining pots, I sowed seed directly onto the clay balls, hoping the seed would adhere to them. I noted that the basil seeds formed a gel around themselves and adhered to the clay balls. The lettuce seeds seemed to lodge into the cracks of the clay balls.

Within a few days, I could see the seedlings were starting to sprout. Within a week, much to my amazement, there were signs that the directly sown seeds were also sprouting. The fish were still alive and doing their normal pooing activities. I might add that the fish are not kept in the dark as I like to see them swimming about. Since then, I have eaten several harvests of basil, lettuce and sprouts, including snow peas. I tried mung beans and to put it mildly, never again! One of my sons called them green cardboard. Someone must like mung bean sprouts, just not my family.

Not All Beer and Skittles.

My experience was not all beer and skittles. I expected the aquaponic plant growth rate to be similar to that of my garden under LED grow lamps. However, based on my hard-learnt experience, I realised that the LED lamp supplied with the kit was inadequate for my needs. I replaced the kit’s 8 watt LED grow lamp with a 150 watt unit that happened to be spare from another of my experiments growing tree cuttings. The kale hated the intense light, but as you can see, thrives on my wintry veranda. Mind you Portulaca, basil, lettuce and snow pea sprouts love the new light.

Kale loves my cold veranda.

The stronger LED grow lamp encouraged algae. To combat this, I put in shades made from some railway modelling plastic sheet to keep direct light off the fish tank and then roofed the gap between the sides of the pots and trough with aluminium foil: job done! I learnt to label the plants to avoid forgetting what I was growing and for how long I was growing it — surprising how quickly mustard sprouts go to seed!

With the lettuce and basil growing and the fish settling down, a symbiotic relationship was established naturally between the fish and the plants. This conclusion was based on observing the root systems growing from the base of the pots into the water and looking at the growing rate compared to my soil based plants. With my experience in tropical aquariums I could see the fish were healthy because they weren’t floating upside down at the top of the water!

Aquaponic Compromises and Workarounds

Compromises and workarounds are the order of the day for such a small setup. I added an aerator/filter as I was worried about algae in the fish tank gravel — the fish are tropical, so the water is warm and very good for algae. I did not want to use any chemicals to control the algae as they would be taken up by the plants and end up on my dinner plate! I also found an organic fish food that did not have a lot of chemical additives.

The small open tank meant evaporation was an issue from the start and I have to add water to the tank weekly. I also have to do an occasional water change and attend to anything that needs cleaning. I do have some organic fertiliser that my son made for his fish to add during water changes. It seems a lot of work compared to my LED garden using soil!

My aquaponics is a small and limited example of Gaia’s self-regulating behaviour and for that matter, our role in Gaia. Even so, there were many ways of setting-up, choosing plants and fish and interacting with the tinkered kit. Understanding what was going on was not easy. Much tweaking was needed to achieve even reasonable outcomes.

I found myself enjoying the routine of looking after the aquaponics. Even myy experiment demonstrated human intervention in Gaia. At the start, I helped the plants with small doses of completely organic fertiliser that did not kill the fish. Feeding the fish is an obvious beneficial human intervention. Whereas turning off the LED is an example of our detrimental behaviour to the environment. No light means no plants, so fish die from toxic water.

Lessons from My Aquaponics Experiment.

Even in my aquaponic experiment it was obvious to my systems mind that I was trying to cope with complex biological-physical processes and their interactions. I used my engineering mindset and followed a learn-by-doing methodology (some call it tinkering): try something, see what happens; make small changes; observe results and try again.

I found it difficult to answer the question of how many fish I needed for 5 pots of herbs and vegetables. If I increase the number of fish, more nutrient would be available for the plants, but a point would be reached where the plants could not break down all the excretions of the fish, causing a toxic build-up of nitrates and the fish would sicken. Without fish, the plants would have no nutrients and die. Without the LED grow lamps the plants would not survive with disastrous consequences for the fish. Too much LED light and the plants would suffer leaf burn and worse, with the result that they probably would be unable to effectively process the nutrients and this would lead to problems with the fish.

I learned that all these aquaponic processes are interdependent. Even with this small example, I was able to explore many scenarios involving the concepts of Gaia and my role in Gaia. My experiment helped to lay the basis for a deeper appreciation of connectedness in Gaia.

Gaia and I.

The picture of the park near my apartment sums up my feelings about Gaia. The park is a remnant of the forest that once covered Sydney before English settlement. Now, the small forest is protected. Volunteers are carefully restoring undergrowth, preserving trees and providing habitats for the native animals and birds. You can see a fenced-off area in the picture for current restoration work. The forest’s two walking tracks have sign-posted descriptions of trees, plants and bird life. I love my walks.

The small forest exemplifies our changing attitudes. Here, I see us working with Gaia and encouraging the natural landscape. Surrounded by the trees and dappled by sunlight, I have a sense of peacefulness and a slow healing of my connection with Gaia. In this small precious forest, I feel that there is a future for us working with Gaia through our connectedness. In this small forest, I can see things I could do to help mitigate climate change. Many people doing small things will make a difference.