Gaianist

Gaianists derive their ideas from the recent theory of James Lovelock, who argues that the biosphere operates as if it were a single living entity which he calls Gaia, after the Greek Goddess of the earth (Chapter 1).

Lovelock’s hypothesis does not attribute intelligence to Gaia. But many Gaianists do: particularly deep ecologists and New Agers.

Rather than talk of increasing control of nature, deep ecologists and Gaianists, for example, warn of the ‘revenge of nature’, a notion that has also started to appear in some recent environmental histories such as that of Murphy (1994).