The Multi-faceted Term Gaia - Essay Example

This concept of the Earth functioning as one organism is obvious in many different aspects of life that most of us, as a population, take for granted.  For example, the fact that the Earth’s temperature doesn’t really vary more than a couple of degrees shows that the earth is, in fact regulating something that is not constant.  This would not be possible if the Earth’s components were functioning separately.  “It has never been too hot or too cold for life to survive on our planet, in spite of drastic changes in the composition of the early atmosphere and variations in the sun’s output energy.

” (Lovelock, p 48). This is linked to humans in the way that our bodies sweat and shiver to maintain body temperature.  The Earth is not exactly shivering or sweating but is regulating its own temperature as most living organisms do, which is why the hypothesis stating that earth is functioning as a single organism is called the Gaia hypothesis, named after the ancient Greek Goddess of the Earth.The word Gaia may have many different meanings in many different circles but the essence is the same.

  Gaia is the Earth, its spirit, its Goddess and it’s the unique technique in which the earth functions, a self-contained and remarkable anomaly in our solar system.