the gaia hypothesis

How much of a tree is alive? Certainly not the outer bark. That falls off in dry scales, or can be scraped off down to the white layers within, and the tree be none the worse. Certainly not the wood. One often comes across old trees that have lost limbs or been carelessly pruned, which are entirely decayed out on the inside, so that nothing is left

BILL MOYERS: Scientists are beginning to talk quite openly about the Gaia principle.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: There you are, the whole planet as an organism.

BILL MOYERS: Mother Earth.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: And you see, if you will think of ourselves as coming out of the earth, rather than as being thrown in here from somewhere else, you know, thrown out of th

Johannes Kepler — who devised his revolutionary laws of planetary motion while defending his mother in a witchcraft trial — was ridiculed for seeing the Earth as an ensouled body that has digestion, that suffers illness, that inhales and exhales like a living organism.

A recent theory of consciousness posits that intelligent awareness can emerge when the components of a large system have a certain level of interconnectivity. Neurons in the human brain reach the critical threshold. In the presence of these chattering cobbles, it seems obvious to me that, according to that definition, Earth is hyperconscious.

if we recognize that life what we call life is a literal physical extension of Earth that Earth and living organisms form a single integrated evolving system and that that system is capable of self-regulation and astonishing resilience having endured for more than four billion years then we need to recognize Earth as the largest known living system

Of late, however, scientists have resurrected the name of an ancient goddess, Gaia, to express the idea of Earth as a living body on which we depend for life.