Word: gaia
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...destruction of the Amazon, but he has also vowed to protect Brazil's last remaining Atlantic forests and gravely threatened savannas. Some Brazilians are concerned that the new Secretary might be too inflexible and idealistic for the rough realities of government, but Lutzenberger, 63, calls himself a "possibilist." The Gaia Foundation, a private organization he set up, finances problem-solving environmental projects. Example: an effort to help poor settlers improve agricultural techniques so that they do not have to clear as much forest land to produce enough crops...
...Greek earth goddess Gaia would appreciate it, and the benefit for Mother Earth would not be insignificant...
...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...