Changing Climate and the Urgency of Women’s Knowledge

GAIA

Gaia, Or Gaea, was a primordial Diety in the Greek pantheon. She was Earth. From her grew a naming of mid-20th Century theory of the Earth as a single living organism. All of her layers, from the atmospheric to the innermost roiling, molten core, and all the spheres of biological interactions between organisms and their environments are said to interact as a single living organisms within which any single change has far-reach, most often unpredictable consequences.

Information exchange is one of the interactions within this system. It can occur between people or between molecules and some would take it down to the non-living component of atoms. Now with the birth of the understanding of quantum interactions in our universe it appears that there is information exchange even between inert material elements. Processes come into the mix and it all gets too heady to discuss to hear, plus I am an well-trained in anthropology not in physics, so I will keep this look at women’s information and Gaian processes to areas in which I have some credibility.

WOMEN’S INFORMATION

It is no secret that information related to women is treated with lesser importance than that of men. To see this just look at how, in the world of pharmacology and medicine, there is dearth of research by, for, and inclusive of women.

It you have done any research in genealogy in the U.S. records system you will know that finding reliable information about female ancestry is challenging at best. A good place to start is with this document from the Library of Congress.

I’ve said many times that the most women through the lifetimes of my mothers generation (born over 100 years ago) might expect as legacy is the careful preservation of an embroidery sampler, a headstone with her first and her husband’s last or family name, or a plaque in the corner of a church library noting her dedication to the education of the church ‘s children (as is the case in the third example with my huband’s maternal grandmother who had a plaque of which I do not have a picture in the Trace Creek Baptist Church in New Johnsonville, TN, USA.)

I think I have adequately illustrated the problem with our history. Now let’s shift to the future.

The future of human history may well rest on the climatic systems on our planet. Climate has certainly play a significant part in previous stages of human history. The collapse of Bronze Age Civilization was certainly influenced by if not singularly caused by climate change around the Mediterranean.

STATISTICS OF THE FUTURE

No matter what happens per global warming, rapidly changing, intense weather patterns are on the increase and will remain so for the foreseeable future. And given the age-old distribution the division of labor between the sexes, how we deal with whatever is to come in our daily lives will largely be up to women because:

• Women live longer than men if all things are equal, which they aren’t.
  • In the US there are more females than males at every age. Around the world, the concept of missing women due to gender selective abortion and infanticide, as well as skewed rates of care and abuse explains the unnatural presence of more men than women in specific populations and in the world population at large.
• Women have the most contact with infants and children and as such are responsible for the cultural indoctrination of children.

If women took advantage of these tendencies there would be a pronounced gradual increase of knowledge derived from women’s lives, from what exists now, according to statistical processes. There is also the general vulnerability of males; women have lower mortality levels at all ages. With a more stressful and difficult climate in the future, more pronounced differences in mortality rates are a logical expectation.

Writing allowed for the preservation of information; the creation of records. Printing, i.e. publication, changed how information was consumed and distributed. Radio also changed these channels. The digital storage of information and the sharing of that information over the internet seems to have changed everything related to communication.

OPPORTUNITIES FOR INFO GENERATION, ACCESS, AND USE

Flooding the information sphere with everything we know will not change the past, but it might change our trajectory. We have to be smart, we have to act from scientifically sound information. We have to put everything into saving a livable world for our children. Small changes in the present magnify across time. The majority of women have always put the good of their children ahead of their own. We just have to encourage all women to write what we know. Ultimately there are more of us and the majority of us will act reasonably if not coerced to do what is not in their best of their families. Even if we cannot change enough to stop climate change, we can survive as best we can with the full knowledge of our species and not with a literally half-witted data set.

As some of the women who are creating this new cultural information, we have tremendous influence over the very nature of this new thing we are building and the trajectories that will be built upon beyond our lifetimes.  This new type and level of influence over communication is fortuitous as several constants of the physical world and humanity’s place on that world for the last many centuries are morphing in unpredictable fashion.

We may not be able to anticipate what the future will be, but we have opportunity to influence the changes that are transpiring with an openness and a balance that has not been available to us for millennia if ever.

— Something I wrote a while back. https://womenslegacyproject.com/ponder/philosophy/digital-legacy/

Yes, there are tremendous opportunities for women connected globally just talking about their lives, what they preserve of women’s culture through family and community stories, and what they want to do differently in the future. We are building the first instantaneous, global information sphere and it has more women generated info than has ever been possible. It is sort of a “build it and they will come approach” to living systems theory in that it is important to have context and to have redundancy for communication to take place. Not everything has to be great but there has to be enough stuff to for fuel and throughput. Women are creating our history by recording it for the first time, and by doing so we are nudging the future in an unknown but feminine direction. Will such system a save our earth? No, the Earth we know will not be the coming Earth, but we may continue to exist because of the mediating balance that women’s knowledge provides.