HOPESTAR
GAIA THEORY
Although the cosmologies of many traditional tribal societies revolved around similar concepts, Gaia Theory is the first scientific model to explain the earth and the biosphere as one integrated, self-regulating organism. By linking factors like plankton in the oceans, micro-organisms in the soil and the role of tropical rainforests in maintaining a stable climate, Gaia Theory reveals the global cycles which maintain homeostasis, the balanced conditions which life requires.
An exploding human population has combined with certain technologies and activities to have a significant impact on homeostasis, disrupting the systems that support life. For example, our reliance on fossil fuels like coal, oil and gas, has led to increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, leading to global warming and climate change. To make matters worse, human activities like deforestation create 'positive feedback loops', destroying the habitats which help to 'fix' carbon from the atmosphere and thereby increasing the speed at which global warming occurs.
By presenting a holistic model for studying the planet, Gaia Theory has laid the foundations of a new multi-disciplinary approach called Earth System Science. Rather than the mechanistic, or reductionist approach, which seeks to understand biological systems by reducing them to their constituent parts - like genes and DNA - as if they were a machine, Earth Systems Science looks at the flows and interrelations between organisms.
'Complex systems' are those that cannot be explained purely in terms of cause and effect. Purposeful human organisations, from tribes to corporations and political institutions, are known as 'soft systems'. When systems are stripped apart through reductionism, they cannot perform the functions they were capable of when combined. For example, a bicycle cannot be ridden when not assembled correctly - the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. In living systems, these 'emergent properties' appear in the their ability to be adaptive and self-organising, creating complex, adaptive, self-organising systems, like Gaia or the human body itself.