The Gaia hypothesis represents a unique moment in scientific thought: the first glimpse, from within the domain of pure and precise science, that this planet might best be described as a coherent, living entity. The hypothesis itself arose in an attempt to make sense of certain anomalous aspects of the Earth’s atmosphere. It suggests that ...
Many scientists and theorists claim that the Gaia hypothesis is merely a fancy name for a set of interactions, between organisms and their presumably inorganic environment, that have long been known to science. Every high school student is familiar with the fact that the oxygen content of the atmosphere is dependent on the photosynthetic activity ...
Biodiversity is the diversity of life at various levels of organisation, ranging from genes, species, ecosystems, biomes and landscapes. As far as we can tell, the Earth just before the appearance of modern humans was the most biodiverse it has ever been during the three and a half billion years of life’s tenure on this ...
Our thesis: Life has retained planetary water. We champion the poorly developed Gaian view that life has vigorously helped maintain abundant water on the Earth’s surface over the last three and a half thousand million years. We defend the idea that life’s populations persist and continue to expand on Earth not because of any “lucky ...
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 ...