SM: These days, would you say are you more focused on the application of Gaian understanding within our human systems- societies, economies, and worldviews?

ES: I have focused on the implications and applications of Gaian understanding by first abstracting the basic principles by which living systems self-organize, and then analyzing our human society in their terms. For example, how does our world economy function? Is it organized by the principles of healthy living systems? The answer is a resounding No. Just as we have failed to see our planet as alive- as a larger living system in which we are embedded and on which our livelihood depends- we have not seen our species as this embedded living system. We have seen the Earth as a collection of resources for our use, and as a dumping ground for our wastes. We did not understand how such depletion and pollution would affect us. And we have not treated each other a members of a single living system; rather we have developed enormous inequities that threaten our well-being as a species from within.

Let me explain this a little: Among the principles essential to the health of living systems are empowered participation of all parts and continual negotiation of self-interest at all levels of organization. We can see this easily in our own bodies, where all cells, in all their diversity, are employed and empowered to do their work, and where cells, organs, organ systems and the whole body all work to fulfill their interests. If a few organs had the power to exploit the rest of the body in their own interests and did so, we can see that the body would die. Even a relatively few cells, as in the case of cancer, can cause death to the whole organism. We get those principles at the family level, too, and see that parents do not overfeed one child while starving the others. But when we get beyond the family level, we do not see that our communities, nations and world are just as much living systems as are our bodies and families. So we create gross inequities that threaten the health of all humanity.

At present, our "new world order" of global organization is based on corporate powers and profits at the expense of all other levels of organization, such as local community and even nations. NAFTA, The WTO (World Trade Organization), and the upcoming MAI (Multilateral Agreement of Investments), are corporate power bodies that meet in secret and have the power to overrule laws made at national and local levels that are deemed to violate "free trade." The parliaments and congresses of their member nations actually voted away their own sovereignty. What we have now could rightly be called Fascism, as it was in Germany when the international corporate cartel of I.G. Farben, with Rockefellers' Standard Oil and many other western corporations as partners (all revealed at the Nuremberg Trials), set up slave labor factories and sold weapons to both sides in World War II. Why does the US complain publicly about Chinese slave labor while making their products in China? Why does the US government give money to the Burmese dictatorship that uses it to kill its own people as they hinder "development"? Why is Shell Oil permitted to hire armies to kill African villagers who stand in the way of laying pipelines? We need to wake up fast to defend the living systems that are humanity and the Earth on which we depend!

SM: Are you still involved in the working out of the theoretical aspects of this as science? Where do you think the next wave of Gaian theory will arise from? Critical systems, complexity, and self organization? Or a different area?

ES: My theoretical work is now focused on consciousness. Let me exlplain: In working on evolution from a Gaian perspective I came to see that life does not arise from non-life, but that the whole universe is a self-organizing living system. Western culture, based on its unique science, is the only culture in history to have seen the universe as non-living. That was good for developing technology, but blinded us to the problems I just described. The odd thing is, that while I understood that life cannot bootstrap itself out of non-life, it took me much longer to see that consciousness cannot bootstrap itself out of non-consciousness, and that intelligence does not arise from non-intelligence.

I now believe that consciousness is fundamental in the universe, a position that Willis Harman and I adopted in writing our book of dialogue called Biology Revisioned (to be published shortly by the Institute of Noetic Sciences and North Atlantic Publishers). The question we posed ourselves was: What would biology be like if we assumed consciousness as primary, that is, as existing before the evolution of material nature? One thing we can see is that consciousness can organize itself at new material levels, as when ancient bacteria formed themselves into the communites we call nucleated cells, and when these "multi-creatured cells" organized themselves into "multi-celled creatures." Our human experience of consciousness is its own special variety, through which we can observe, think about and change the rest of nature. Other species seem to "use" their consciousness for aware participation in nature.

Several interpretations of Quantum Theory, long accepted in physics, hold that consciousness is primary in our material universe; that it is necessary for collapsing wave functions, literally for bringing matter into being. This notion of consciousness may include the concept that all possible universes and all possible "things" in all universes, exist as pure consciousness potential outside of timespace. This is the concept of the ancient Greek "Plenum" and of David Bohm's modern physics "implicate order." Physics also now understands the reality of non-local effects; that a particle in one location can instantaneously affect a particle on the other side of the universe. Note that as a fundamental assumption, consciousness becomes undefinable. We can only discuss it as best we can using metaphors familiar from our own experience, such as awareness and intelligence.

SM: How do you see this in relation to biology?

ES:It seems odd to me, since physics has always been considered the fundamental science, that biology has not begun to catch up with quantum theory, now around for half a century, but still adheres to Newtonian mechanics. The discovery of DNA structure in fact gave new impetus to deterministic molecular biology, in which molecules are seen like the atoms of Newton's "billiard ball universe" albeit more complex, pushing each other about mechanically. At the same time, we are seeing the increasing use of metaphors implying intelligent process, such as, for example, "editor genes" and "programmers" along with their "parallel processors" in the cell nucleus. And we are seeing a great deal of evidence, detailed in my book with Harman, that cells actively respond to environmental changes/demands by restructuring their DNA, a vindication of Lamarck.

What I see happening, then, is recognition of consciousness/intelligence at the molecular level creeping into microbiology just as the notion of Earth as alive (conscious and intelligent in its own right) is sneaking up on systems theorists in macrobiology. In my own opinion, the universe, like any living system, operates on conscious micro and macro levels at once. This is, of course, still pretty heretical, but I venture to say it will not be for long.

Personally, I have a great need to make my worldview, my picture of the universe, into a single coherent whole, one that ever changes with new concepts and evidence, but one I always strive to make consistent..

The possible model of all this I favor at present is to see consciousness, electromagnetic energy, and matter as a multi-dimensional continuum- each transforming into the next, like steam, water and ice, or the reverse. We know the equation for EM energy into matter and vice versa from Einstein; the formal relationship between consciousness and EM energy awaits discovery.