The Earth is alive! It is constantly moving and its parts cycling within each other.

Not only that but it is full of diverse life; from the smallest insect to the hugest elephant.
The oceans are swarmed with fish and mammals. The skies filled with all variety of
birds. The planet is covered with 70 percent water. It is also covered with every variety
of plants and trees. Lewis Thomas wrote in his essay The Lives of a Cell “Viewed from
the distance of the moon, the astonishing thing about the earth, catching the breath, is that
it is alive. The photographs show the dry, pounded surface of the moon in the foreground,
dry as an old bone. Aloft, floating free beneath the moist, gleaming, membrane of bright
blue sky is the rising earth, the only exuberant thing in this part of the cosmos. If you
could look long enough, you would see the swirling of the great drifts of white cloud,
covering and uncovering the half-hidden masses of land. If you had been looking for a
very long, geologic time, you could have seen the continents themselves in motion,
drifting apart on their crustal plates, held afloat by the fire beneath. It has the organized,
self-contained look of a live creature, full of information, marvelously skilled in handling
the sun.”
The idea that our planet functions as a single organism that maintains conditions
necessary for its survival has been called the Gaia hypothesis. Proposed by James
Lovelock in the mid 1960’s and explained in his book published in 1979 has caused
much controversy. But as we learn more about every aspect and piece of the earth and
how each piece fits into another, we detect the physical, chemical, geological, and
biological interaction within each other.
This is not a new concept. In almost every human culture, the idea of a living
entity symbolizing the earth is very prolific. The Hopi describe Tapuat; concentric
circles or squares that represent the cycle of life. The Hindu goddess Kali was an earth
deity. Gaia or Ge was an ancient Greek goddess who was gentle, feminine and nurturing
but also ruthlessly cruel. These may remind many of the Mother Nature concepts as well.
Scientist may debate the details and technicalities of calling the earth a living
organism. But most will agree that everything that happens has an affect on our planet.
There is a connectedness of all things on our world.
When, as humans, we destroy or pollute our air, land, and water, we are adversely
affecting the planet we live on. Human activity has deleted natural resources and
overfilled the planet with wastes from our production and consumption. We are
destroying the ozone layer, deforesting, and killing and mistreating each other. It is so
widespread and so severs that Martin Rees, England’s Astronomer Royal and professor at
Cambridge University, gives humankind 50/50 odds of making it to the year 2100. We
are killing our planet. And to say the least, if our planet dies so do we.
It is imperative we reconnect with nature. We humans are not apart from nature.
We are a part of nature. We are a part of a living planet.