Gaia

Gaia PDF Author: James Lovelock
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198784880
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Gaia, in which James Lovelock puts forward his inspirational and controversial idea that the Earth functions as a single organism, with life influencing planetary processes to form a self-regulating system aiding its own survival, is now a classic work that continues to provoke heated scientific debate.

Gaia

Gaia PDF Author: James Lovelock
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198784880
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
Gaia, in which James Lovelock puts forward his inspirational and controversial idea that the Earth functions as a single organism, with life influencing planetary processes to form a self-regulating system aiding its own survival, is now a classic work that continues to provoke heated scientific debate.

Gaia

Gaia PDF Author: J. E. Lovelock
Publisher: Oxford Paperbacks
ISBN: 0192862189
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 169

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Book Description
This classic work is reissued with a new preface by the author. Written for non-scientists the idea is put forward that life on Earth functions as a single organism.

Gaia and the New Politics of Love

Gaia and the New Politics of Love PDF Author: Serena Anderlini-D'Onofrio
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
ISBN: 1583942963
Category : Health & Fitness
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
***WINNER, 2010 Nautilus Silver Book Award – Cosmology/New Science Gaia theory argues that the flora and fauna of the planet operate in a self-regulating web that keeps the world livable. According to the theory, humankind is the most powerful species in this web and also its biggest threat. This provocative book explores ways to minimize and ultimately eliminate this threat with love and intimacy. Controversial Italian author Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio has authored the first global ecology study based on an analysis of human health. Anderlini-D’Onofrio identifies her remedy within the context of Gaia theory, re-envisioning it as a more inclusive philosophy that positively impacts not only relationships, but world ecology under duress. The author links human sexuality to the global ecosystem, claiming that freedom from fear will stimulate a holistic health movement powerful enough to heal relationships and restore planetary balance. Gaia and the New Politics of Love is bracing in its range, weaving together issues of human and global health; the relationship of politics, sexuality, and ecology; practices and styles of love; the changing roles of eroticism and gender in our lives; and polyamory, bisexuality, and the AIDS reappraisal movement. Clarification Statement from the Author The argument of this book emphasizes the arts of loving as a way to help humanity make peace with our hostess Gaia, the third planet. Some of these arts involve sharing emotional resources and amorous partners. Often, the arts of loving require the use of barriers: mechanical protections such as condoms. At times they do not because only tantric energies are exchanged. The author of this book is persuaded that barriers are recommendable when sexual practices result in the exchange of deep body fluids, unless previous fluid-bonding arrangements have been made. The author is also persuaded that good practices of holistic health contribute to strengthening the immune systems of those who engage in the arts of loving. Safety practices are important in making the arts of loving healthy regardless of what factors are involved in the syndromes most prevalent today, including AIDS and other conditions in the STD spectrum. Historically, disagreement has moved knowledge forward: Today’s science is the result of yesterday’s disagreements and controversies. The author believes in critical thinking and she respects dissidence in science today, including Gaia science, reappraisals of AIDS, and holistic medicine. She hopes her readers will be open to hearing more than one side of a story. This statement and the contents of this book do not constitute medical advice in any way. Readers are invited to consult their own healers and health care providers. Serena Anderlini-D’Onofrio, PhD Author of Gaia and the New Politics of Love Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, March 2010 Blog: http://polyplanet.blogspot.com/ From the Trade Paperback edition.

Becoming Gaia

Becoming Gaia PDF Author: Sean Kelly
Publisher: Integral Imprint
ISBN: 9781947544284
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description


On Gaia

On Gaia PDF Author: Toby Tyrrell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400847915
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
A critical examination of James Lovelock's controversial Gaia hypothesis One of the enduring questions about our planet is how it has remained continuously habitable over vast stretches of geological time despite the fact that its atmosphere and climate are potentially unstable. James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis posits that life itself has intervened in the regulation of the planetary environment in order to keep it stable and favorable for life. First proposed in the 1970s, Lovelock's hypothesis remains highly controversial and continues to provoke fierce debate. On Gaia undertakes the first in-depth investigation of the arguments put forward by Lovelock and others—and concludes that the evidence doesn't stack up in support of Gaia. Toby Tyrrell draws on the latest findings in fields as diverse as climate science, oceanography, atmospheric science, geology, ecology, and evolutionary biology. He takes readers to obscure corners of the natural world, from southern Africa where ancient rocks reveal that icebergs were once present near the equator, to mimics of cleaner fish on Indonesian reefs, to blind fish deep in Mexican caves. Tyrrell weaves these and many other intriguing observations into a comprehensive analysis of the major assertions and lines of argument underpinning Gaia, and finds that it is not a credible picture of how life and Earth interact. On Gaia reflects on the scientific evidence indicating that life and environment mutually affect each other, and proposes that feedbacks on Earth do not provide robust protection against the environment becoming uninhabitable—or against poor stewardship by us.

Facing Gaia

Facing Gaia PDF Author: Bruno Latour
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0745684351
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 300

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Book Description
The emergence of modern sciences in the seventeenth century profoundly renewed our understanding of nature. For the last three centuries new ideas of nature have been continually developed by theology, politics, economics, and science, especially the sciences of the material world. The situation is even more unstable today, now that we have entered an ecological mutation of unprecedented scale. Some call it the Anthropocene, but it is best described as a new climatic regime. And a new regime it certainly is, since the many unexpected connections between human activity and the natural world oblige every one of us to reopen the earlier notions of nature and redistribute what had been packed inside. So the question now arises: what will replace the old ways of looking at nature? This book explores a potential candidate proposed by James Lovelock when he chose the name 'Gaia' for the fragile, complex system through which living phenomena modify the Earth. The fact that he was immediately misunderstood proves simply that his readers have tried to fit this new notion into an older frame, transforming Gaia into a single organism, a kind of giant thermostat, some sort of New Age goddess, or even divine Providence. In this series of lectures on 'natural religion,' Bruno Latour argues that the complex and ambiguous figure of Gaia offers, on the contrary, an ideal way to disentangle the ethical, political, theological, and scientific aspects of the now obsolete notion of nature. He lays the groundwork for a future collaboration among scientists, theologians, activists, and artists as they, and we, begin to adjust to the new climatic regime.

Gaia’s Body

Gaia’s Body PDF Author: Tyler Volk
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1461221900
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 277

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Book Description
If the biosphere really is a single coherent system, then it must have something like a physiology. It must have systems and processes that perform living functions. In Gaia's Body, Tyler Volk describes the environment that enables the biosphere to exist, various ways of looking at its "anatomy" and "physiology", the major biogeographical regions such as rainforests, deserts, and tundra, the major substances the biosphere is made of, and the chemical cycles that keep it in balance. He then looks at the question of whether there are any long-term trends in the earth's evolution, and examines the role of humanity in Gaia's past and future. Both adherents and sceptics have often been concerned that Gaia theory contains too much goddess and too few verifiable hypotheses. This is the book that describes, for scientists, students, and lay readers alike, the theory's firm basis in science.

The Gaia Hypothesis

The Gaia Hypothesis PDF Author: Michael Ruse
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 022606039X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267

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Book Description
“The book is full of empathetic, insightful, and often very funny portraits of Margulis, Lovelock, and a community of other figures associated with Gaia.” —Carla Nappi, New Books in Science, Technology, and Society In 1965 English scientist James Lovelock had a flash of insight: the Earth is not just teeming with life; the Earth, in some sense, is life. He mulled this revolutionary idea over for several years, first with his close friend the novelist William Golding, and then in an extensive collaboration with the American scientist Lynn Margulis. In the early 1970s, he finally went public with the Gaia hypothesis, the idea that everything happens for an end: the good of planet Earth. Lovelock and Margulis were scorned by professional scientists, but the general public enthusiastically embraced Lovelock and his hypothesis. In The Gaia Hypothesis, philosopher Michael Ruse, with his characteristic clarity and wit, uses Gaia and its history, its supporters and detractors, to illuminate the nature of science itself. Gaia emerged in the 1960s, a decade when authority was questioned and status and dignity stood for nothing, but its story is much older. Ruse traces Gaia’s connection to Plato and a long history of goal-directed and holistic—or organicist—thinking and explains why Lovelock and Margulis’s peers rejected it as pseudoscience. But Ruse also shows why the project was a success. He argues that Lovelock and Margulis should be commended for giving philosophy firm scientific basis and for provoking important scientific discussion about the world as a whole, its homeostasis or—in this age of global environmental uncertainty—its lack thereof. “[Ruse’s] treatment is thought-provoking and original, as you would expect from this perceptive, irrepressible philosopher of biology.” —New Scientist

Novacene

Novacene PDF Author: James Lovelock
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262539519
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 155

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Book Description
A fascinating new study from the originator of the Gaia Theory, “who conceived the first wholly new way of looking at life on earth since Charles Darwin” (Independent) One of the world’s leading scientific thinkers offers a vision of a future epoch in which humans and artificial intelligence unite to save the Earth. James Lovelock, creator of the Gaia hypothesis and the greatest environmental thinker of our time, has produced an astounding new theory about future of life on Earth. He argues that the Anthropocene—the age in which humans acquired planetary-scale technologies—is, after 300 years, coming to an end. A new age—the Novacene—has already begun. In the Novacene, new beings will emerge from existing artificial intelligence systems. They will think 10,000 times faster than we do and they will regard us as we now regard plants. But this will not be the cruel, violent machine takeover of the planet imagined by science fiction. These hyperintelligent beings will be as dependent on the health of the planet as we are. They will need the planetary cooling system of Gaia to defend them from the increasing heat of the sun as much as we do. And Gaia depends on organic life. We will be partners in this project. It is crucial, Lovelock argues, that the intelligence of Earth survives and prospers. He does not think there are intelligent aliens, so we are the only beings capable of understanding the cosmos. Perhaps, he speculates, the Novacene could even be the beginning of a process that will finally lead to intelligence suffusing the entire cosmos. At the age of 100, James Lovelock has produced the most important and compelling work of his life.

Scientists Debate Gaia

Scientists Debate Gaia PDF Author: Stephen Henry Schneider
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 9780262194983
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 412

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Book Description
Leading scientists bring the controversy over Gaia up to date by exploring a broad range of recent thinking on Gaia theory.