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Who are we, what are we doing
here?
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What is the hypothesis of Gaia? Stated simply, the idea is
that we may have discovered a living being bigger, more ancient, and more
complex than anything from our wildest dreams. That being, called Gaia, is the Earth.
The following is an excerpt from "Scientists on Gaia" by Stephen
Schneider and Penelope Boston (MIT Press):
"For more than a century students of the evolution of the living and
nonliving parts of the Earth have known that life influences the physical and
chemical characteristic of the planet. Nevertheless, the dominant paradigm in
earth sciences has been that inexorable inorganic forces, such as changing
energy output from the Sun, collisions of the Earth with extraterrestrial
bodies, continental drift, or other orbital element variations have been the
principal driving forces behind climate twenty years ago. James Lovelock and
Lynn Margulis coined the phrase the Gaia hypothesis to suggest not only that
life has a greater influence on the evolution of the Earth than is typically
assumed across most earth science disciplines but also that life serves as an
active control system. In fact, they suggest that life on Earth provides a
cybernetic, homeostatic feeback system, leading to stabilization of global
temperature, chemical composition, and so forth.
When first introduced in the early 1970s the Gaia hypothesis attracted the
most attention from theologians interested in the possibility that the Earth
controlled its environment on purpose (i.e., teleological implications), from
those looking for "oneness" in nature, and from those defending
polluting industries, for whom the Gaia hypothesis provided a convenient excuse
whereby some collective set of natural processes would largely offset any
potential damages from human disturbance to earth systems. Although none of
these aspects was underlined in the scientific work of Lovelock and Margulis,
these nonscientific side issues diverted attention in the scientific community
away from a serious anaylsis of the Gaia hypotheses and its implications. By the
mid 1980s, Gaia advocates and detractors began a series of critiques and
countercritiques, often carried out through third parties such as television
documentary producers One of us (Schneider) having been party to such a debate
came to realize the absurdity of the situation in which an interesting and
controversial idea like the Gaia hypothesis was being debated largely in
nonscientific forums, if at all"
Earth System Science is not entirely equivalent to the Gaia Hypothesis,
although both take an interdisciplinary approach to studying systems operations
on a planetary-scale. Earth System Science seeks to understand the mass and
energy transfers among interacting components of the Earth System (biosphere,
hydrophere, geosphere, atmosphere, and anthrosphere), which is not entirely
synonymous to the the Gaia principle which purports that for practical purposes
it may be useful to consider the earth as if it were a living organism. For the
student interested in the scientific debate of the Gaia hypothesis, an excellent
treatment is provided in "Scientists
on Gaia", edited by Stephen Schneider and Penelope Boston, The MIT
Press, Cambridge, MA, 1991.
http://www.geology.ufl.edu/GAIA_hypothesis.html
Gaia Links:
Gaia
Institute
Read Scientists
on Gaia
http://www.gaiaculture.org/philosophy.html
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