There is a series of youtube videos
on Gaia.
A "Nature" article.
Within the scientific community,
there are those who argue that the Earth is a living system.
This is called either the Gaia hypothesis or
theory.
While the Gaia movement shares much
with the Earthfolk movement, our grasp of the Living Earth as Mother
and Father is grounded in our heartfelt, deeply emotional
sense of the Living Earth as home to the Forever Family.
"The Gaia Theory
posits that the organic and inorganic components of Planet Earth
have evolved together as a single living, self-regulating
system. It suggests that this living system has automatically
controlled global temperature, atmospheric content, ocean
salinity, and other factors, that maintains its own habitability.
In a phrase, “life maintains conditions suitable for
its own survival.” In this respect, the living system
of Earth can be thought of analogous to the workings of any individual
organism that regulates body temperature, blood salinity, etc. So,
for instance, even though the luminosity of the sun – the Earth’s
heat source – has increased by about 30 percent since life began
almost four billion years ago, the living system has reacted as a
whole to maintain temperatures at levels suitable for life."
"The Gaia theory was developed
in the late 1960’s by Dr. James Lovelock,
a British Scientist and inventor, shortly after his work with NASA
in determining that there was probably no life on Mars. His research
led to profound new insights about life on Earth. The theory gained
an early supporter in Lynn Margulis, a microbiologist
at the University of Massachusetts. In the past 15-20 years, many
of the mechanisms by which Earth self-regulates have been identified.
As one example, it has been shown that cloud formation over the open
ocean is almost entirely a function of the metabolism of oceanic algae
that emit a large sulfur molecule (as a waste gas) that becomes the
condensation nuclei for raindrops. Previously, it was thought that
cloud formation over the ocean was a purely chemical/physical phenomenon.
The cloud formation not only helps regulate Earth’s temperature,
it is an important mechanism by which sulfur is returned to terrestrial
ecosystems." Source: Gaia
theory
