concept

Gaia hypothesis

Proposed by James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the early 1970s, the idea that Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and crust form a single, tightly coupled system that holds surface conditions favourable to life. Its "weak" form - that life and the physical environment co-evolve and biological feedbacks shape climate - is now mainstream. Its "strong" form - that the planet actively regulates itself like a purposeful organism - is widely rejected for smuggling in teleology. It is the lens for reading Pandora: can a planet *be* a living thing rather than merely *carry* life?