Two decades ago, a British scientist named
James Lovelock put forth an imaginative and poetic view of how the Earth functions. The planet's living organisms, he said, act together to regulate the global environment: Life interacts chemically and physically with the air, the waters and the rocks to maintain optimum conditions for itself.
In fact, Dr. Lovelock said, the Earth itself
appears to behave like a living organism. He named the organism Gaia (pronounced GUY-uh), after the Earth goddess of the Greeks. The Gaia hypothesis beguiled environmentalists and others inspired by the unitary view of Earth from space as a ''dappled sapphire,'' in Dr. Lovelock's phrase.
The concept acquired mystical overtones, and not least for that reason it was shunned by other scientists, some of whom ridiculed it as a fairy tale.
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New york times
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