GL: Well, here we are. I don’t know where to start. What should I call you? Mother? Earth?
Gaia: Either one. Mother is fine. Or Gaia.
GL: OK Gaia. I was going to start by asking if you are really alive but I guess you’ve already answered that. But my guess is that people are anxious to hear it directly from you. So, are you alive?
Gaia: Yes. I know that is hard for your kind to grasp. I am more alive than you because your life depends upon my aliveness. You partake of my aliveness.
GL: Wait a second. So, if the human race migrated to another world, we wouldn’t survive?
Gaia: Well, not exactly, but you would eventually metamorphose into something different than you are now.
GL: So what you are saying is, if we colonized Mars, and those colonists stayed on Mars in isolation, after a certain number of generations, those settlers would start to become Martians?
Gaia: If Mars came back to itself and was able to support human life, their DNA would gradually become Martian DNA.
GL: Oh, our scientists will have fun with that! So, how do you feel about the human race? What we have done to you.
Gaia: You must be referring to Climate Change. . .It started a long, long time ago, your time. Don’t feel bad. I saw it coming. It was just a matter of time. Your race is self-centered but your particular branch of the human tree is the worst. You have forgotten your roots.
GL: Yeah, a lot of us realize that. It almost seems intentional, I mean conscious and deliberate. Do you think it is because we perceive you as female? Do you think it is misogyny at work? Or racism? We see you as colored, dark. . . .Indigenous. Are we projecting something on you like the Christians projected on the snake? Hence all of nature bears some kind of. . .
Gaia: It has a lot to do with that of course. Your race has been very neurotic for thousands of years. I have been waiting patiently for you to grow up. But men are territorial and single-minded and protective of their food-sources. Misogyny? No. You hate yourself. You can’t understand how a God, Nature or a planet would want to work with you and have you around.
GL: Do you think women would have done a better job with civilization?
Gaia: Moot question. What do you mean by “civilization”? Women understand relationship better than men. Communication is also one of their strengths. Many of the causes of war could be talked through if women ran your councils. But you have no will to change your ways. Next?
GL: Do you think the Industrial, post-Industrial, and now the digital age are to blame?
Gaia: No. If you want to blame something, it is how the human being is using its brain that is to blame.
GL: Fascinating. . .Are you going to destroy us before we have a chance to kill off all life on you?
Gaia: Yes. Next?
GL: Whoa, I don’t hear any compassion in these responses. Don’t you care about us?
Gaia: That’s your God’s job. No, I care about the maintenance of the biosphere. Is that really hard for you to understand? I don’t play favorites. If you don’t know how to live here, I will destroy you, unless you destroy yourselves first. Or we can collaborate.
GL: What do you mean “collaborate”? On our destruction? Can you elaborate Gaia?
Gaia: Through plague, famine, expanding dead zones, war, sterility. . .What is happening right now is the last Act of the human race. You are writing the script, but there is nothing original. It is like your Shakespeare: Great language, pathetic stories. So far everything that is happening is predictable. I am responding to your script. But that will soon change.
GL: What do you mean Gaia?
Gaia: I mean that I am about to take some initiatives. I was not created to cater to any one life-form. You should have listened to your Native predecessors and you should be listening to their elders now. They saw you coming. They saw all of this coming but so did your own brightest. You should have listened to your poets, your prophets, your children, your fellow creatures, your visionaries, your great reformers.
GL: Are we out of time?
Gaia: You are out of your time. What do you want from me? It is not my nature to coddle. If I saw that you loved yourselves, then that would mean that you loved the life that was my gift to you and things would be different, but the opposite is happening. Your fate is out of my hands. Your story line seems to be: We will fight each other for food, wealth and territory to the last survivor, until there is no one left and everything that we predicted in our bitterness comes true. If that is your story then I’m sorry to tell you, your time has run out. But you should know, there are different stories and different timelines. My time stretches far into the future that you, most assuredly, will never see.
GL: Gaia, I have to admit, I thought this interview would go differently. I had hoped that you would be more goddess-like, that you would come across more like a Mother to us.
Gaia: I’m sorry. Isn’t that something? I really am sorry. My stones, my trees, my polluted streams, my birds and insects and ocean and land creatures and mountains and even the air you have tainted, are all sorry in their own way.
GL: Being human, I must ask, with the time we have left: Isn’t there anything we can do to reverse our tragic choices?
Gaia: Yes, as I have said, you can love yourselves. Do I think that will happen? Let me ask, do you?
GL: No.
Gaia: Do you have any more questions for me before I quit this voice?
GL: What is time, what is love, what is hope?
Gaia: It is life, all life.
GL: Thank-you Gaia. I will let you get back to everything you do.
Gaia: My pleasure.
— Gary Lindorff