Mother Earth: What if she is alive?
Today is International Mother Earth Day. Is it possible that our planet is in fact a living, breathing organism?
Today is International Mother Earth Day – Gaia Day.
Gaia is the ancient Greek goddess of the earth – the great Mother Goddess. She is Earth itself.
Throughout history, the concept of Mother Earth has been a part of human culture in one form or another.
What if the earth is ‘alive’?
Contrary to the common belief that the earth is simply a dense planet whose only function is a resource for its inhabitants, our planet is in fact a living, breathing organism. When we think of the earth holistically, as one living entity, instead of the sum of its parts, it takes on a new meaning.
Earth’s seasonal transformations
John Nelson illustrated the “Breathing Earth”, which are two animated GIFs he designed to visualize what a year’s worth of earth’s seasonal transformations look like from outer space. Nelson–a data visualizer, stitched together from NASA’s website, 12 cloud-free satellite photographs taken each month over the course of a year. Once the images were put together in a sequence, the mesmerizing animations showed how as the climate changes, the planet comes alive. Earth appears to breathe when ice cover grows and melts – in and out, in and out.
What is Gaia?
James Lovelock published a book in 1979 about the earth acting as a single system – it is a coherent, self-regulated, assemblage of physical, chemical, geological, and biological forces that interact to maintain a unified whole balanced between the input of energy from the sun and the thermal sink of energy into space.
The truly startling component of the Gaia hypothesis is the idea that the earth is a single living entity.
The connectedness of all things
The idea of the earth acting as a single system has stimulated a new awareness of the connectedness of all things and the impact that man has on global processes.
Everything that happens on the planet – the deforestation/reforestation of trees, the increase/decrease of emissions of carbon dioxide, the removal or planting of croplands – all have an affect on our planet.
