The British scientist James Lovelock and his American collaborator Lynn Margulis have described the Earth as a superorganism, which automatically self-regulates in a manner that maintains the conditions for life, just as the human body self-regulates to keep internal systems in functional balance. This is the Gaia hypothesis, so named after the goddess of the Earth in Greek mythology. And indeed these findings from Earth-systems science and biogeochemistry would not be surprising to peoples who have long regarded the Earth as a living being, or even as a mother.
