earth described as a living being

I was watching some geographic program and they mentioned that our(earths) wetlands like the florida everglades are earths kidneys then i remember hearing that the rainforests are earths lungs.

So were this is going is i was wondering what other of natures/earths features could be desribed in bodily metaphore. Could oil for instance be thought of as earths blood or would water be a better substitute for that. What about the savana or desert what would be its brain.any thoughts, I wanted to post this with you guys because i respect the intelligence and WIDE array of views/thoughts on this board.

Also if we do think of earth in this manner how far can we push the body and system before it either tries to pull a cold turkey healing/purifying manuver i.e. volcano eruptions hurricances tornadoes earthquakes.

This is called the gaia hypothesis.

Gaiaism had its fifteen minutes of fame back in the 1980's. It is now generally rejected by most of mainstream science as a workable ecological paradigm. The few remaining adherents have added spiritual values and morphed it into a religion of sorts, intermingled with deep ecology and ecosophy.

Hello very intereasting question. Or should i say questions!.

Well the way i see and feel about this, is that yes the earth is alive just like you and me.

Lets see.

Rock, The skeeltal system.
Dirt/sand. Skin
Blood. That is a tough one, could either be Liquid rock or water.( i lean more to water my self, as it is one of the bases of all life(thats we know of))
Earths core, The heart.

Just like the human body we have lots of things living on us. Fungi, mold Mites, ect.

I see oil like being a glad secreation of some kind. Seeing they use oil in major electrical transformers is could be a coolent also.

Lava and vucalisins (SP) could be a way for mother earth to vent, more like the Bowls.

Granted you could probely come up with 100's of these, but here are mine.

Zintac

Gaia theory huh i looked it up and well the purley earth'liing organism part makes sense. thanks a lot i have a new interest that will take me into the new years.

this stuff is great much thanks dave, maybe if more ppl viewed our planet in this manner our treatment of it would be much better. then again there are a lot of obese unhealthy people out there so who knows

While the Gaia theory might have turned new age the premise is still interesting. I don't buy into the earth wills itself to change idea.

However the simple fact of natural selection adapting to changes in the enviorment due to global warming, changes in the sea, more vulcanism ect seems to make sense. If the earth were to heat up or cool down rather dramatically, would the life on earth (primarily plant life, mainly ocean life I would think) adapt fast enough to either effect changes on a global climate level.

It's the Daisyworld simulation that part of the Gaia Hypo is based on. It seems like the abundance of life on a planet might have an effect that keeps the planet from swinging too far from the norms that support the life itself.
Bunch of Daisyworld Simulators

Don't know enough about it, but parts of it seem to make sense.

It looks to me more like all of the life on earth working in conjunction is more likely why the earth would be considered alive. If every soul on the Earth is connected, which I believe, then the connections would criss-cross the earth like a rubber band ball. Maybe Gaia keeps her soul on the outside.

That one species will take advantage of the vacuum created by the failure of another species does not imply there is a central plan or communal intelligence.

Let's make an analogy appropriate for the season.

You go to the mall Christmas shopping. As you approach the gridlocked parking lot you groan and begin the ritual of continually driving the lanes looking for a spot to park. On your first pass someone backs out a space directly in front of the main mall entrance and directly in front of you. You of course immediately pull into that most excellent parking space. If you believe in the Gaia hypothesis, you give credit to the combined goodwill and communal thought sharing of every driver and shopper in the mall for giving you that parking space. If you are more scientifically literate you simply acknowledge that a random event by a stranger (who did not even know of your existence) was fortuitous to you. If you had merely stopped to tie your shoe before entering your car you would have missed the opportunity. No central planning. The entire incident was just a series of unrelated random events.

Your reasoning sounds more like chaos theory (butterfly flapping its wings in china causing a series of events concluding with that person leaving the parking space at the same moment as you were pulling in). But I thought with gaia theory its more about that the earth is a finite living organism so if we were to have all out nuclear war. After the ashes settle the planet would reshuffle itself to breed knew life. I might be wrong in this assesment about gaia theory though.

No. The butterfly analogy assumes all subsequent events are connected, that each incident is a cause and effect of the next. The interactions are so complex, though, that we do not understand them and consider them random. The same way it is possible to predict the toss of a dice or the dealing of a deck of cards if we could account for all the variables involved. 200 years ago weather was considered random. Now measuring and monitoring tens of thousands of data points in the atmosphere allow forecasters to make reasonably accurate predictions a week in advance. Weather forecasting is not 100% reliable, suggesting that as much as we understand about atmospherics and weather, there is still a lot yet to be learned and there are still variables unaccounted for.

My analogy assumes the events are unconnected and there is no nexus. The departing driver was going to pull out of the parking spot at that exact time whether you were approaching or not, and you would be passing that exact spot at that time whether the other driver was leaving or not. Two events occurring in a sequence advantageous to one does not imply the events were connected nor there is a communal intelligence regulating the events.

In many biological systems (or any complex system) there is some 'six degrees of separation' linking events, but certainly not in every case. True randomness does exist. Gaiaism assumes all events are linked at some level and all components of of an ecosystem are interconnected. We know this is not true in the real world, although the expression is in common usage.