The Gaia Hypothesis
(This is an excerpt from a University Of Metaphysical Sciences course at www.umsonline.org,
please feel free to visit the school website)
As the concepts of nature began to become more important to science, new ideas began to bloom on more philosophical levels. The complexity that had developed from these sciences of the past, turned over into a holistic idea of unison often called Gaia instead of Mother Earth.
Recently the word Gaia has emerged into common vocabulary again. The roots of Gaia are ancient, like the origins of the word. The newer ideas were in part inspired by Jame Hutton "the father of geology" who wrote about the Earth as a super organism in 1785. Gaia has become, in more recent years, a hypothesis and then even a theory, commonly called the Gaia Hypothesis. This scientific theory began with James Lovelock (with the supportive advice of Lynn Margulis) but it branched out to many scientists, philosophers, and authors. It is the idea that the Earth, or Gaia, is a living organism within itself. Or, as Elisabet Sahtourris puts it in Earth Dance (2000), “…the Earth is a live planet rather than a planet with life upon it…” This is a confusing concept for many scientists because biologist cannot decide on an exact definition for what life really is. Lovelock defines life in his book The Ages Of Gaia (1988), “... an entity or a process.” Further he writes, “The concept of Gaia is entirely linked with the concept of life.” Even if scientists can not decide what life is in scientific terms, no one can deny that it is important in every moment, everywhere. Lovelock says about life, “It is edible, lovable, or lethal.” He also writes extensively about how important our connection with Gaia is, “Our future depends much more upon a right relationship with Gaia than with the never-ending drama of human interest.” He proves that the Earth has had the ability to maintain a constant temperature and consistency in atmosphere gases throughout its evolution. He wrote that Gaia, “regulates itself as a system,” therefore, Gaia “is a system. The human body is also a system...” With this idea we can see that global warming is Gaia having a fever. Lovelock writes in The Ages Of Gaia (1988), “Individuals interact with Gaia in the cycling of the elements and in the control of the climate, just like a cell does in the body.” But Lovelock reflected in the new preface of the book Gaia (2000), “We need to love and respect the Earth with the same intensity that we give to our families and our tribe,” not just understand it as a living organism.
More research about living organisms show that life, if studied with high powered microscopes, continues far beyond the naked eye. Lewis Thomas wrote in his book The Lives Of A Cell (1974) about our connection with Gaia, “Man is embedded in nature. There is nothing fragile about the earth's membrane, humans however, are very fragile.” Furthermore, he wrote, “Every creature is, in some sense, connected to and dependent on the rest." It seems that the Earth is not only an organism, but the body which we live on and are part of in every sense.
Thomas also wrote that scientists have studied microscopic organisms in such detail that they realized inside cells there are atoms and inside these there are subatomic atoms, which when studied closely appear to have living organisms or even entire systems inside of them. Thomas is quoted often as saying, "I have been trying to think of the earth as a kind of organism, but it is no go... If not like an organism, what is it like, what is it most like? Then, satisfactorily for that moment, it came to me: it is most like a single cell." Therefore, with the definitions of life that we have developed thus far, Gaia must be living. Possibly, if life can be examined at the smallest scale, then it should also be viewed from the broadest scale. Both a cell and the Earth are complex worlds in themselves. The examination of life has no visible end.
One woman who brought the Gaia theory to new horizons is Elisabet Sahtouris in Earth Dance: Living Systems In Evolution (2000). She acknowledges that scientists cannot agree on a definition for life, but she believes that “life is the essence or process of the whole living being.” She writes extensively about the evolutionary process which Gaia has gone through and the humans’ place in this process. She says that the human race is in its “adolescent” stage as a species, and like most teenagers, the human species is rebelling against the ways of native and indigenous ways of living in balance with the Earth Mother. Yet, Sahtouris is hopeful that we are maturing into adulthood and as a species we are about to achieve a greater understanding than ever before. Further, she writes that every creature would see itself as the superior creature on this planet if it thought the way we do. “And so all these forms of Gaian life—bacteria, fungi, plants and animals—could find reason to see themselves as superior to the others. Even rocks, for that matter, could see the whole world as nothing more than its own dance, its endless transformation into living creatures and back into rock. Try for yourself the exercise of looking out over your world and seeing all of it—the airplanes, their cities, the furniture in your house, this book in your hands—all as no more and less than rock rearranged.” This could help people to get out of anthropocentrism. Exercises such as this could help establish a better connection to the Earth Mother.