The Gaia Hypothesis A Living Planetary Organism essays

The Gaia Hypothesis A Living Planetary Organism essays The notion of a living Earth is hardly a "new" perspective; ancient human history and archeological evidence suggests that most primitive incorporated at least some general beliefs in a conscious "Mother Earth". paying homage to or praying to this entity is a theme central to many Both the ancient Greeks and early Christians believed in a conscious St. Thomas Aquinas, to a lesser degree (Sagan). In fact, the etiology of based on the word Ge (or Gaia), the name of the Earth goddess of the (OceansOn-line). Likewise, interpreting weather phenomena as a purported communication between man and his gods and the practice of sacrificial triggered by weather or seasonal changes is evident, in myriad variations, early theistic philosophical perspectives. Even the more modern or scientific notion that the Earth is, in many living organism rather than an inanimate biosphere merely supporting biological life is not entirely new. Renowned eighteenth century geologist considered the Earth to be a super organism of some sort almost two hundred before James Lovejoy and the biologist Lynn Margulis reintroduced the more scientific form in the 1960's and 70's. Writing shortly before James description of a living planet, Lewis Thomas, a physician and contemporary wrote The Lives of a Cell, a series of essays in which he expressed the "Viewed from the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing the earth, catching the breath, is that it is alive. The photographs the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground, dry as an old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming, membrane of blue sky, is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part cosmos. If you could look long enough, you would see the swirling of great drifts of white cloud, covering and uncovering the half-hidden masses of land. If you had b...