By providing a new way of viewing our planet – one which connects with some of our oldest and most primordial intuitions regarding the animate Earth – Gaia theory ultimately alters our understanding of ourselves, transforming our sense of what it means to be human. For much of the modern era, earthly nature was spoken of as a complex yet mechanical clutch of processes, as a deeply entangled set of objects and objective happenings lacking any inherent life, or agency, of its own. Such a conceptual regime helped sustain the cool detachment that was generally deemed necessary to the furtherance of the natural sciences. Yet the thorough objectification of earthly nature also served to underwrite the sense of human uniqueness that has permeated the modern era.

My first encounter with spawning salmon gleams with a cool, moonlit radiance in my memory. I’d grown up in the suburban east coast and knew nothing of this wild fish and its mysterious ways. It was in the mid-eighties, and I was kayaking in the Prince William Sound a year or two before the taut, ever-shifting surface of that life-filled sea was generously layered with a glistening blanket of oil by the Exxon company. This was my first time in Alaska, and I was stunned by the vastness of the mountains laced with glaciers and the abundance of bald eagles that seemed to gaze down at me from every overhanging branch and snag.