concept

Earth-system science

The discipline that treats Earth as a single, tightly coupled system of rock, water, air, and life - exactly as Lovelock urged - but drops the loaded talk of a living organism and replaces it with the checkable: specific feedback loops, each a measurable piece of chemistry or physics, that together hold the planet's climate within habitable bounds over enormous spans of time. It is the respectable descendant of the Gaia hypothesis: it keeps the defensible core (life and environment co-evolve and shape each other) and discards the teleology. No mysticism, no will - just negative feedbacks found, named, and quantified.