Gaia Hypothesis

IN THE 1960s, James Lovelock put forward a theory that the earth has a self-regulating system that interacts between the living and non-living parts to promote life. He called it The Gaia Hypothesis.

The theory now says that life maintains suitable conditions for its continuance on Earth.

Now we have an overpopulated world and it’s easy to find websites that show us that there are species extinctions, over-fishing, deforestation and the like.

A long time ago, all the carbon that is now buried as coal and oil was once in the air and there are scientific papers that estimate that at that time the CO2 levels were at least six times what they are today.

So the Earth must have been a steamy, stormy tropical sort of place for a very long time – hundreds of millions of years – where lots of species thrived.

So now, with the Earth heating up and it likely that large human populations will decline, is there a correction going on? Aren’t we seeing the Gaia theory proving itself?

THEO WILMS

New Plymouth