ABSTRACT
Gaia was the Greek god of the Earth who was viewed as the mother of everything, and this Earth Mother idea was widespread across the world’s cultures. James Lovelock developed this idea when proposing his Gaia hypothesis in the late 1960s: that the Earth’s living matter, air, oceans and land surface form part of a giant system which could be seen as a single organism. The hypothesis has given rise to many new areas of research about the Earth’s physical, chemical, geological and biological processes, and it still has a hold on the popular imagination. It is not, however, seen as an accurate picture of how the world actually functions.
