OUR LIVING EARTH

To the ancient Greeks, she was Gaia; to the ancient Romans, Tellus; to Hindus, she is Bhoomi. Several ancient civilisations have personified the Earth as a mother or goddess figure. She is depicted as the source of all life.

- Francesca Cotta

Mother Earth

In fact, she is as much a symbol for life as she is for our planet. This prevalence of the ‘Mother Earth’ deity across cultures and throughout history suggests that our ancestors in their wisdom, recognised that the Earth itself was alive. Modern science took some time to catch on, probably thanks to how heavily it had been influenced by the ideas of the 17th century French philosopher and scientist, Rene Descartes. According to his mechanistic idea of the world, all of nature obeyed fixed laws and everything in the universe could be explained by studying the arrangement and movement of the smallest constituting parts of matter. In this worldview, the Earth functioned as a large mechanical system, following fixed, universal laws.

Gaia hypothesis