Science has forever been trying to analyze the earth, and find out what is wrong with it. Questions were raised as to why things happen on Earth the way they do. One of these questions is, "How does the earth act the way that it does?- Science has many different theories on it. One of these is the Gaia Theory created by James Lovelock. Using this theory, I will show that the climate of the earth is being affected by the organisms on earth, especially humans, and greatly hurting our earth.
We will begin with the question, "What is the Gaia Theory?- The Gaia Theory, again, was proposed by James Lovelock in the 1960's while he was working as a consultant on the "Life on Mars- Viking spacecraft project. He was asked to see if there was life on Mars, and if there was, he was asked if it was comparable to life on Earth. Lovelock saw in this project, that maybe the atmosphere of Mars caused there to be no life on it. There is a difference between the atmosphere of a living planet, and one of a dead one. .
James Lovelock wrote a book about his hypothesis of Gaia in 1979 called, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. The book suggested that " the physical and chemical conditions of the surface of the earth, of the atmosphere and of the oceans has been and is actively made fit and comfortable by the presence of life itself."" In this book, he doesn't suggest that the earth is "alive,"" but it has the potential to be. A few years later he wrote a book called The Ages of Gaia, which turned his hypothesis into a theory saying that the earth, in a way, is alive, and all living things on the earth are keeping everything in balance. Lovelock writes:.
"I recognise that to view the Earth as if it were alive is just a convenient, but different, way of organising the facts of the Earth. I am of course prejudiced in favour of Gaia and have filled my life for the past twenty-five years with the thought that Earth may be alive: not as the ancients saw her "a sentient Goddess with a purpose and foresight "but alive like a tree.
The one-word term combines James Lovelock's notion of Gaia, a living earth, with the idea of dialectical relationships among living and non-living forces; this process constantly remakes terrestrial environments. ... Essays 2. ...