Gaia Hypothesis Quotes

Evolution is no linear family tree, but change in the single multidimensional being that has grown to cover the entire surface of Earth.

There is even an opposing theory to the Gaia thesis: that instead of a Mother Earth which nourishes and cherishes us, we instead inhabit a planet that is determined to extinguish us. It is called the Medea hypothesis.

Both the mythical and archaeological evidence indicate that perhaps the most notable quality of the pre-dominator mind was its recognition of our oneness with all of nature,which lies at the heart of both Neolithic and the Cretan worship of the Goddess. Increasingly, the work of modern ecologists indicates that this earlier quality of mind, in our time often associated with some types of Eastern spirituality, was far advanced beyond today's environmentally destructive ideology.

Evidence supporting James Lovelock’s ‘Gaia hypothesis’ – that the earth functions as a coherent and self-regulating system – appears, at the ecosystem level, to be accumulating.

Gaia?” “There was this theory, over two hundred years ago, called the Gaia hypothesis. Essentially that all living matter on earth works together to create life, to make earth habitable. A regulation among matter to fight disorder. Life can’t exist without fighting disorder.

See,' said (Liberty Hyde) Bailey, 'how the leaves of this small plant stand forth extended to bathe themselves in the light. ... THese leaves will die. They will rot. They will disappear into the universal mold. The energy that is in them will be released to reappear, the ions to act again, perhaps in the corn on the plain, perhaps in the body of a bird. The atoms and the ions remain or resurrect; the forms change and flux. We see the forms and mourn the change. We think all is lost; yet nothing is lost. The harmony of life is never ending.' The economy of nature provides that nothing be lost.

Everything follows these rules of going towards a lower energy and maximum randomness except one thing - life! Life wants to live and become more complex, smarter, Life wants to use the basic elements like air,water and nutrients to grow and develop.

Presumably, it won’t be only one way. Even before the age of climate change, the literature of conservation furnished many metaphors to choose from. James Lovelock gave us the Gaia hypothesis, which conjured an image of the world as a single, evolving quasi-biological entity. Buckminster Fuller popularized “spaceship earth,” which presents the planet as a kind of desperate life raft in what Archibald MacLeish called “the enormous, empty night”; today, the phrase suggests a vivid picture of a world spinning through the solar system barnacled with enough carbon capture plants to actually stall out warming, or even reverse it, restoring as if by magic the breathability of the air between the machines. The Voyager 1 space probe gave us the “Pale Blue Dot”—the inescapable smallness, and fragility, of the entire experiment we’re engaged in, together, whether we like it or not. Personally, I think that climate change itself offers the most invigorating picture, in that even its cruelty flatters our sense of power, and in so doing calls the world, as one, to action. At least I hope it does. But that is another meaning of the climate kaleidoscope. You can choose your metaphor. You can’t choose the planet, which is the only one any of us will ever call home.

Medea has long been used as a frame to describe women who exhibit violence against their offspring, no matter how appropriate the comparison might be. There is even an opposing theory to the Gaia thesis: that instead of a Mother Earth which nourishes and cherishes us, we instead inhabit a planet determined to extinguish us. It is called the Medea Hypothesis.

In Scandanavia, 'Iverson finds that the whole spectrum of pollen deposits is altered when (in early Neolithic times) ... the first farmers appear. Cereal pollens increase. Plants of oak woodland lessen and disappear; birch pollen increases rapidly -- it is one of the trees which can come in after an extensive burn. For the pollen record, the effect of early agriculture is as severe as a shift in climate.

The planet is going to have the last word concerning the damage humans are inflicting upon it. It’s only going to take so much abuse, and then it may well burp and snort a little, and destroy a good bit of the population. I don’t think it would be a stretch to take the hypothesis one step further and attribute such a defense strategy to a kind of planetary intelligence.

The ability of future superintelligent machines and enhanced humans alike to instantly transfer knowledge and directly share experiences with each other in digital format will lead to evolution of intelligence from relatively isolated individual minds to the global community of hyperconnected digital minds. The forthcoming phenomenon, the Syntellect Emergence, or the Cybernetic Singularity, is already seen on the horizon, when Digital Gaia, the global neural network of billions of hyperconnected humans and superintelligent machines, and trillions of sensors around the planet, 'wakes up' as a living, conscious superorganism. It is when, essentially, you yourself transcend to the higher Gaian Mind.

A new ecosystem approach—on an earthwide scale—is the Gaia hypothesis (Lovelock 1988). Whereas

frustratingly vague and tautological: the Gaia hypothesis suggested that for a planet to be habitable, it must first be inhabited.