Gaia Community

compassion, collaboration & cooperation iN transistion

 

and STILL ...

learning to learn

to nurture the natural way

of the TAO

that which heaven has granted

as the LAW of NATURE

 

Nature of Love

 

as the NATURE of LOVE

 

 

James Lovelock, however, defines life as a self-preserving, self-similar system

of feedback loops like Humberto Maturana's • autopoiesis; as a self-similar system. 

LIFE could be a cell as well as an organ embedded into a larger organism as well as an individual in a larger inter-dependent social context. 

The biggest context of interacting inter-dependent living entities is the Earth. The problematic empirical definition is getting “fuzzy on the edges”: Why are highly specialized bacteria like E. coli that are unable to thrive outside their habitat considered “life”, while mitochondria, which have evolved independently from the rest of the cell, are not?

In other words Lovelock dealt with them holistically, naming this self-regulating living system [which we refer to as nature] after the Greek goddess GAIA.

 

NO RESPECT for your environment - NO RESPECT for YOURSELF 

 

We assume that algae affect climate primarily through their emission of dimethyl sulphide (which may influence cloud albedo), and that land plants do so by fixation of atmospheric CO2 (refs 9–12). When we consider how the planetary area occupied by these two ecosystems varies with temperature, we find that a simple model based on these ideas exhibits three feedback regimes. In glacial conditions, both marine and terrestrial ecosystems provide a negative feedback. As the temperature rises to present-day values, algae lose their strong climate influence, but terrestrial ecosystems continue to regulate the climate. But if global mean temperatures rise above about 20 °C, both terrestrial and marine ecosystems are in positive feedback, amplifying any further increase of temperature. As the latter conditions have existed in the past, we propose that other climate-regulating mechanisms must operate in this warm regime.

 

 

 

Access_public Access: Public 2 Comments Print views (183)
5 months later

Michael said

“In the doomsday scenarios we are so often invited to contemplate,
the ultimate tragedy is that a material world capable of being a
manifestation in human hands of divine love is left to itself
, as
humanity is gradually choked, drowned or starved by its own stupidity.”

Dr Rowan Williams

 

 

Leave Your Wise and Insightful Comment

 

Views: 212

Comment by Michael Grove on July 16, 2013 at 12:29

What’s especially remarkable - the close parallels between ant

colonies’ networks and human-engineered ones. One example is

Anternet”, where we, a group of researchers at Stanford, found that

the algorithm desert ants use to regulate foraging is like the Traffic

Control Protocol (TCP) [updated with correct spelling] used to regulate

data traffic on the internet. Both ant and human networks use

positive feedback: either from acknowledgements that trigger the

transmission of the next data packet, or from food-laden returning

foragers that trigger the exit of another outgoing forager. This research

led some to marvel at the ingenuity of ants, able to invent systems

familiar to us: wow, ants have been using internet algorithms for millions of years!

WIRED, too, flirted with the concept of “anternet” in its Jargon Watch column last year.)

Comment by Michael Grove on November 1, 2013 at 7:54

The emergence of an efficiency led full circle evolution IS NOW on the horizon.


Comment by Michael Grove on January 5, 2023 at 11:14

AS I have previously posted elsewhere... 

"we're obviously already embedded in a complex web of

relationships, both with our own kind and with many entities very

different from us. How then is it that we don’t notice them, don’t

honour our relationships with the plants and animals and all

the other elemental presences (soils, rainclouds, rivers...) who

support and nourish us? It can only be because somehow we're

oblivious to that direct, unmediated layer of carnal exchange which

is always already going on - because we're oblivious to the bodily

level of our existence. It is my body that steadily drinks of the

oxygen breathed out by all the green and growing plants, and

my body that breathes out the carbon dioxide these plants

steadily draw upon in order to photosynthesise and flourish.

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