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Article Two
A Tale of Two Values
Stephen Powell
Continuing our look at the current issue in sustainability, Stephen Powell, director of the Gaia Coach Institute, a leadership organisation based in Wales, argues the case for looking at sustainability as a tale of two values.
Much of the literature on environmental challenges can be seen as a series of attempts to answer the question “What’s the scope of the task?” Some answers to this question are extremely daunting! Take the views of Professor Jared Diamond. In his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive, Diamond says the task of creating sustainable societies has 12 components - they range from preserving natural habits to controlling population – and if we tackle only 11 of these issues and neglect just one we’re still in trouble.
The professor is a redoubtable chronicler of our current ills and could be spot-on in his analysis. But there are surely less intimidating ways of thinking about the task, while still respecting the complexity of the global emergency we face.
I have been working for some time now with the concept that the task of living sustainably has two parts. I call them 'Gaia' (originally the Greek divinity of the Earth who has given her name to Gaia Theory) and 'Coach'. The new profession of coaching focuses on development of the leader within and it puts a strong emphasis on the quality of inner dialogue. They are both rich bundles of values with different energies about them. I see them as complementary and I think that together they form a basis for human flourishing.
In the Gaia bundle there is a strong dose of humility, a sense of seeing ourselves as part of a greater whole. We need this kind of humility, this overarching perspective that in the best possible sense puts us humans in our place. There is also, in the Gaia bundle, a visceral sense of connection to the living Earth. This, I believe, is vital for the human future.
The British-born scientist Freeman Dyson, for years Professor of Physics at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, has written very eloquently on this theme. Walking through Washington one day, Dyson was mugged and found himself lying on his back under some bushes in C Street, after two robbers had fractured his skull and jaw. A motorist kindly pulled the blood-spattered physicist out of the shrubbery and his life quickly returned to its ordinary routines. But Dyson, in his book, From Eros to Gaia, calls the experience a “moment of illumination when the glory of earth and heaven was revealed to me”. He was reminded of Tolstoy’s description in War and Peace of Prince Andrei lying wounded on the battlefield of Austerlitz. The prince was not really concerned about his fate, but was conscious only of the blue sky above. Both Prince Andrei and Dyson peacefully contemplated the beauty of the sky even though they knew that death could be imminent. A core experience here is an emotional bond to the Earth.
Dyson ends his book with these words: “As humanity moves into the future and takes control of its evolution, our first priority must be to preserve our emotional bond to Gaia. This bond must be our pulley. If it stays intact, then our species will remain fundamentally sane.”
In my opinion, there is a shadow side to the Gaia bundle. Individual Gaian scientists can become so focused on the big planetary picture that the human species is nearly forgotten. A few years ago, I had a conversation with the eminent American microbiologist Lynn Margulis, co-author of Gaia Theory along with the British chemist James Lovelock. I asked Margulis what in her opinion were the attributes of a Gaian leader. Her answer was unforgettable: “Oh, people bore me.” Margulis is a towering figure in contemporary science and I don’t think she was being wholly serious. But nor was she being totally frivolous – people are not her prime concern and her scientific work is concerned essentially with bacteria.
We need students of bacteria since we cannot conceive of human life without bacteria. But we also need students of human learning. And that is where the Coach bundle comes in. The modern coaching world gives us insights into, and a vocabulary for, how adults learn, how we renew ourselves and create fresh meaningful challenges in our lives. We face the task of renewing our planetary ecosystems and a coherent view of how individual human renewal works is a great starting point.
My teacher in this important area of study has been the American scholar Frederic Hudson, one of the pioneers of coaching. Hudson defines coaching as “development of the leader within” and this means the Coach bundle has a very different energy to Gaia. There’s a readiness here to be big and bold, to be a self-directed matrix taking risks in the rough and tumble of life. At the centre always is a willingness to make learning central and to extract the lessons from all experience, however painful it may be.
So, back to the crucial subject of renewal. On a summer’s day, in Vail, Colorado, I once watched Hudson explain his four-phase cycle of adult learning, the Cycle of Renewal. Phase One is Go For It, a high-energy phase when you’re aligned 
with your values and living your dream. But we humans are apt to tire of an unchanging life. Your dream can become your cage and you sink into the Doldrums, a toxic phase where you feel utterly trapped. In fact there are two escape routes. One is a mini-transition, where you tweak something fairly minor in your life and return to Go For It. The other very different route leads to Phase Three, Cocooning, a place of being not doing, a dreamy phase of introspection where you’re not in control. When you go into Cocooning you don’t know who you will be when you emerge, because you’ll grow a new sense of purpose. After going through this deep process of Cocooning you move into Getting Ready, to learn new practical skills and to network. When you’ve acquired these skills you’re back in Go For It.
To stand full square in Go For It and be a teacher and a leader, requires courage. Some of the coaching I have done with environmentalists has centred on helping individuals to get beyond the point of feeling a charlatan because they don’t have all the answers to the conundrum of sustainability. After all, why should we have all the answers? Being on the journey of looking creatively for solutions counts in my book as staking out the territory of a Gaian Go For It.
The shadow side of the Coach bundle is that the conversations between coach and coachee can become focused entirely on the individual and ignore the rest of the natural world. We cannot allow this to happen – Gaia, the living Earth, must be present in our conversations as teacher and guide. As a species, we cannot be tricked into a kind of mini- transition which sees solutions in technology alone. We need a deeper spiritual path which reassesses our relationship to the rest of the natural world and to one another. At the species level, we need to cocoon and give new answers to deep questions about who we are.
We also need to have a sense of the core values in a Gaian Go for It, in a way of living that is compatible with a sustainable future. Richard St.George, a former director of Schumacher UK, a Bristol-based environmental think tank teaches that there are five elements in a Gaian Go for It. He calls them go zero, go local, go slow, go simple and go conscious. The first is about zero carbon living, the last about being conscious of one’s own real needs, passions, talents and aspirations, not buying into a model held out by the consumer society. The three – local, slow and simple - should be more or less self-explanatory. At the Gaia Coach Institute we run courses where individuals can explore all of these ideas, apply them to their lives and develop their own unique leadership style. We have made a start and our aim is to build an international learning community that makes Gaian souls braver.