Angry in the Great White North

The basic idea is that the biosphere does not exist on an Earth that happens to be hospitable to life, but that it is part of the system that ensures that hospitable environment in the first place. The idea was first proposed by the British scientist Sir James Lovelock. He suggested many specific examples of the feedback loops that included both geological and biological components:

The volcanoes make the CO2 enter the atmosphere, CO2 participates in limestone weathering, itself accelerated by temperature and soil life, the dissolved CO2 is then used by the algae and released on the ocean floor. CO2 excess can be compensated by an increase of coccolithophoride life, increasing the amount of CO2 locked in the ocean floor. Coccolithophorides increase the cloud cover, hence control the surface temperature, help cool the whole planet and favor precipitations which are necessary for terrestrial plants. For Lovelock, coccolithophorides are one stage in a regulatory feedback loop. Lately the atmospheric CO2 concentration has increased and there is some evidence that concentrations of ocean algal blooms are also increasing.

Scientists generally accept that there are feedback mechanisms that incorporate biological components. The Gaia hypothesis has been criticized for extending beyond specific examples. The notion that the biosphere as a totality could be considered a single living organism, or more accurately, the planet itself (hence the name "Gaia" which refers to the Greek "earth mother" goddess) is pointed to as an unjustified extension, unsupported by the evidence.

Nevertheless, the idea has been taken up with great enthusiasm by the environmentalist movement. They even have a name -- the Gaians:

Disciples of 21st-century Gaia believe that all living things on earth are interconnected (except man) and that to damage or destroy even the tiniest insect is the equivalent of wiping out an entire ecological system. In layman understanding: Don't swat that fly hovering around the pablum you're feeding the baby.

Former Vice President Al Gore could be the most recognized disciple of Gaia.

So what do they think of Sir James Lovelock? Right now, they're pretty peeved:

The British biologist James Lovelock is one the most revered gurus of the environmentalist movement. Nevertheless, he caused uproar when he spoke out last year to encourage greens to adopt nuclear energy as the most practical option for powering our societies without adding more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. In his new book, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity, he lays out his argument for nuclear power in more detail, as well as providing a biting insider's critique of the Green movement he has done so much to inspire, arguing "they must drop their wrong-headed objection to nuclear energy".

Whatever criticisms have been leveled at Lovelock, it must be said that he seems to still think like a scientist, and that means recognizing the truth in the data, regardless of what it might mean to your preconceptions:

Lovelock cites data that radiation from the Chernobyl reactor accident in Ukraine in 1986 killed, according to the latest World Health Organization survey, 75 people, almost all either operating the plant at the time or rescue workers at the scene. The zone around the plant, evacuated 20 years ago, has now become a thriving nature reserve. Similarly for the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island, the number of deaths resulting seems to have been zero. A breach in a dam could, by contrast, easily kill tens of thousands downstream, or perhaps half a million in the case of the giant Three Gorges project in central China. Lovelock points to research from the Paul Scherrer Institute, a Swiss government research laboratory, showing that nuclear power has been responsible for a tiny fraction of the fatalities, a fortieth, of renewable hydroelectric power.

Lovelock is highly critical of "cosmic-scale exaggeration" and "distortions of the truth about the health risks of nuclear energy", which he holds responsible environmental activists and a credulous media too ready to accept their bona fides.

But he sticks it to the wealthy and affluent environmentalists as being unrealistic and uncaring:

Lovelock is critical of environmentalism more generally, referring to it as a movement of "affluent radicals in the first world" and points out ill-conceived solutions such as the banning of the pesticide DDT, which condemned millions in poor tropical countries to fatal mosquito-borne malaria.

When every human chooses to stop breeding, Earth's biosphere will be allowed to return to its former glory, and all remaining creatures will be free to live, die, evolve (if they believe in evolution), and will perhaps pass away, as so many of Mother Nature's "experiments" have done throughout the eons. Good health will be restored to the Earth's ecology... to the "life form" known by many as Gaia.

I have to think that whatever Lovelock's shortcomings, he never wished for his ideas to be used for this.