“I compare the Earth and her atmosphere to a great liv­ing being perpetually inhaling and exhaling.”

— Goethe

In 1979, James Lovelock published Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, which popularized the Gaia Hypothesis, later called the “Gaia Theory.” Lovelock had been working for NASA, trying to determine whether life might exist on Mars, when he had an in­sight. Lovelock and others who followed him, like the biochem­ist, Lynn Margulis, envisioned the Earth as a complex self-regulat­ing system, the various parts of which interact with each other to maintain homeostasis, the conditions conducive to life, including the stability of global temperature, ocean salinity, oxy­gen in the atmosphere, and other environmental variables that affect the habitability of Earth:

“The entire range of living matter on Earth, from whales to viruses, and from oaks to algae, could be regarded as con­stituting a single living entity, capable of manipulat­ing the Earth’s atmosphere to suit its overall needs and en­dowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts.”

In other words, the totality of the Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil constitute “a feedback or cybernetic system that seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.” Lovelock named his theory after the Greek god­dess of the Earth, Gaia, who reproduced parthenogenically (asexu­ally).

The Gaia Theory received a mixed response from the scien­tific community, but the idea took hold of the popular imagina­tion and was embraced by many environmentalists and Neo-Pagans. Popular conceptions of the Gaia Theory include the idea that the Earth is better understood as a living being than as a ma­chine, with the planet’s atmosphere compared to a person’s breath, the rivers and oceans compared to the circulatory sys­tem, and the topsoil, flora, and fauna (including us) compared to the skin. Some go so far as to literalize this anthropomorphiza­tion, treating Gaia as a planetary being with the power to purpose­fully intervene in the course of history. The scientifically accepted form of the theory is much more conservative, viewing equilibrium as an undirected emergent property of a complex system, the product of the self-interested pursuits of individual species. Lovelock himself was clear that Gaia is a metaphor. He does not see the Earth as sentient, but he has suggested that a Gaian religion of nature might replace theistic religion.

In any case, the Gaia Theory calls into question many deeply ingrained scientific and cultural assumptions and challenges us to perceive our world in a new way. According to cultural ecol­ogist, David Abram, one of the implications of the Gaia Theory is that we must no longer think of ourselves as living on the Earth; rather we live in the Earth:

“We must remember and reacquaint ourselves with the very medium within which we move. The air can no longer be considered a merely negative presence, an ab­sence of solid things: henceforth the air is itself a den­sity—mysterious, indeed, for its invisibility, but a thick and tactile presence nonetheless. We are immersed in its depths as surely as fish are immersed in the sea.”

The Gaia Theory also illustrates how we are radically intercon­nected with all other living beings on the planet, human and other-than-human, as well as with the non-living elements of the Earth. As Lynn Margulis has explained, our existence is the re­sult of the cooperative, symbiotic merging of earlier life forms to produce greater and greater complexity. Within every cell in our bodies there is a small life form called “mitochondria,” which transforms chemicals into usable energy for our bodies. Without mitochondria our lives would not be possible, and with­out us their lives would not be possible. And yet, mitochon­dria have their own DNA, their own reproductive processes, their own life cycles. Similarly, we humans carry on our lives seem­ingly independently of Gaia, like the mitochondria inside of us, and yet we exist within a larger living entity up on which we depend for our lives.

Neo-Pagans tend to take the Gaia Theory as confirmation of a pantheistic worldview. In 1971, Neo-Pagan founder, Oberon Zell, had a Gaia-like vision that he described in his essay, “Thea­genesis: The Birth of the Goddess.” This was several years be­fore Lovelock’s ideas were popularized, which suggests this idea was percolating from the Collective Unconscious at the time. Zell declared, “It is a biological fact that all life on Earth com­prises one single living organism! Literally, we are all ‘One.’ The blue whale and the redwood tree are not the largest living organ­isms on Earth; the entire planetary biosphere is.” Zell called this planetary organism “Terrebia” and identified it as a Goddess, who we instinctively call “Mother Earth” or “Mother Nature.”

Some deep ecologists are critical of the New Age and Neo-Pagan appropriation of the Gaia Theory to the extent that it can foster the illusion of control over the complex system that is the Earth. But Gaia Theory teaches that most natural phenomena are nonlinear systems, making them fundamentally unpredicta­ble beyond the short term. This should inspire a deep humility in the face of a far more complex being than we are capable of fully understanding, much less controlling.

Updated 2019