Word: gaia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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According to the Gaia hypothesis, earth's atmosphere would be unstable for life if it were not regulated by the biosphere, the envelope of life surrounding earth. Oxygen levels have remained at roughly 21% of the atmosphere for 200 million years, Lovelock asserts, whereas they should have fluctuated wildly, according to some geochemical models of the atmosphere. Were oxygen levels to rise above 25%, spontaneous fires would break out; if they dropped below 15%, many higher life-forms would suffocate. Climatologist Tyler Volk of New York University argues that life controls earth's temperature as well. In a study recently...
Scientists have begun to regard Gaia more seriously because the world has forced them to do so. If they are to understand such pressing environmental problems as the greenhouse effect or the consequences of mass extinctions, they will have to overcome their reluctance to look beyond their own specialties: nature does not necessarily respect the arbitrary boundaries established for scientific disciplines. By focusing on entire systems, Gaia provides a framework through which marine biologists, geochemists and geophysicists can integrate their work...
...regulate earth's climate and atmosphere. Lovelock maintains that this makes it all the more imperative that man halt the mass extinctions threatened by the destruction of tropical forests, because he does not know what creatures are essential to his own survival. At the American Geophysical Union conference on Gaia, Lovelock argued that diversity makes earth both stable and habitable: "You cannot have a sparse planet any more than you can have half an animal...
...Gaia's critics have by no means been silenced. Some dispute the degree to which life-forms stabilize the atmosphere and temper the climate. Others contend that the emergence of oxygen in earth's atmosphere contradicts Gaia because it made the air poisonous for anaerobic creatures of primordial times. Evolutionary scholar Richard Dawkins argues that earth cannot be considered an organism because it does not reproduce. Gaian proponents respond that the increase of oxygen in the atmosphere was slow enough to allow the mix of life- forms to adjust, and physician-author Lewis Thomas answers Dawkins by coyly suggesting that...
...critics notwithstanding, Gaia seems to be gaining in influence among both scientists and theologians. To some, Gaia's appeal is that it promises to end the long estrangement of Western science and religion. Even if the biosphere regulates the planet by feedback, Gaia still integrates living things and inanimate forces into a unified system, allowing both science and religion to look at life as something more than a mere accident. Says James Parks Morton, dean of New York City's St. John the Divine Episcopal Cathedral and a leading religious advocate of Gaia's: "The very nature of this hypothesis...