“Gaia itself is not an organism,” she continued, “directly selected among many. It is an emergent property of interaction among organisms, the spherical planet on which they reside, and an energy source, the sun”

Gaia’s status, not as an “organism,” precisely, but as a body: “Gaia, the system, emerges from ten million or more connected living species that form its incessantly active body” (119).

living cells are autopoietic in that they produce their own production. The fundamental processes of living systems are recursive. Their operations are primordially self-referring. Living systems continuously select and transform the elements they take from their environmental mediums to produce their own continuation and transformation out of their own continuing production of selective transformations.

Gaia is a self-generating, self-maintaining planetary constellation emerging from the interactions of living and nonliving components—systems and structures, embodying their integrated intermodulations.

the concept of cybernetics goes beyond both technological systems as well as its nominal relations with later computational developments and their popularizations. Rather, it develops from its point of origin at the machine/ organism interface into a transdisciplinary discourse comprehending differentiated operational interrelations among Earth, life, mind, and society. 12

In What Is Life? Margulis and Sagan name this ubiquitous self-feeling of living systems sentience. Other authors call it “sense-making,” a mode of basic knowing placing any living system in enactive relation to its own communal and material environments.

prior to Margulis’s collaboration, no previous scientific argument had suggested the presence of a planetary “homeostat” composed of circular worldly mechanisms by which life modulated its own environment. Yet within a few years, this rangy and seemingly improbable biocybernetic concept began to infiltrate and provoke mainstream scientific discussion.

The rise of Gaia theory preceded and prepared for the current recognitions of a global climatic and environmental crisis. These trends have run together with the arrival of a discourse of the Anthropocene through which to acknowledge that the massive accumulation of humanity’s activities has now altered the functioning of the Earth system.

Gaia is systems thinking at and for the planetary level.

the domains of life have unfolded into five kingdoms interrelated by their origins in microbial mergers. When placed into planetary view, this phylogeny yields not a branching tree but a reticulated web, woven from strands composed by the prokaryotes, of interactive life coevolving with its abiotic and postbiotic environments: “Planetary physiology—Gaia . . . is symbiosis seen from space.”

When Gaia fell into place, a bacterial biosphere had already been interacting for hundreds of millions of years with a previously nonbiotic yet increasingly postbiotic milieu. Three billion years later, the forms of living organisms continue to find constitutive relations with both the abiotic and the biogenic factors of their environments, what Tyler Volk has felicitously named the gaian matrixes of air, ocean, and soil—the geobiological media of Gaia’s compounded processes.

Lovelock has recently restated this extended Gaian perspective: “When Darwin came upon the concept of evolution by natural selection he was almost wholly unaware that much of the environment, especially the atmosphere, was a direct product of living organisms. Had he been aware I think he would have realized that organisms and their environment form a coupled system . . . what evolved was this system, the one that we call Gaia. Organisms and their environment do not evolve separately.”

Proprioception, as self-awareness, evolved long before animals evolved, and long before their brains did. Sensitivity, awareness, and responses of plants, protoctists, fungi, bacteria and animals, each in its local environment, constitute the repeating pattern that ultimately underlies global sensitivity and the response of Gaia “herself.” (126)

the biosphere with or without its current abundance of modern humanity is equally involved in supplying the gaseous part of the planet.

what Lynn Margulis would bring to the development of Gaia—the energy budgets and metabolisms of the microbes and the rest of the biota—to complete the view of a planetary entity in which these gaseous fluxes attained an effective degree of operational closure as the “biological cybernetic system” of Lovelock’s initial formulations.

our atmosphere is in a cosmically improbable state of chemical disequilibrium. Rather than burning out, Earth’s highly combustible mixture of reactive gases has remained in a far-from-equilibrium state for hundreds or thousands of millions of years. The idea of Gaia as a planetary system responsible for maintaining and regulating such an energizing chemical imbalance over geological time ignites in the vessel of this conceptual conundrum over Earth’s atmospheric composition.

“a biological cybernetic system able to homeostat the planet for an optimum physical and chemical state appropriate to its current biosphere.” 10

his growing conviction that the primary components of Earth’s atmosphere are maintained biologically—in other words, produced and regulated in their proportions by living processes. 11

Microbes strongly interact (i.e. take up, give off) hydrogen, nitrogen, ammonia, methane, carbon dioxide, oxygen, hydrogen sulfide at least

The hypothesis hinged on what was then a heretical notion that life controls the environment: Gaia is a biological cybernetic system.

Gaia theory has also provoked a broader cultural rethinking of terrestrial security and viability, of the immunitary contingencies and biospheric services humans and other living organisms rely upon for the conditions of their being.

Lovelock’s conceptual breakthrough came straight from cybernetics, the scientific metadiscipline that began by coordinating artificial and natural “contrivances” for systemic operation and self-regulation.

the name “Gaia” has always been a magnet for the ambient bits of mythic response that circulate in modernity’s secular atmosphere. Diffuse notions of holistic totality verging on divine agency have been prone to stick to it.

according to his account, its image did come to him in the form of an “organism”: “It dawned on me that somehow life was regulating climate as well as chemistry. Suddenly the image of the Earth as a living organism able to regulate its temperature and chemistry at a comfortable steady state emerged in my mind. At such moments, there is not time or place for such niceties as the qualification ‘of course it is not alive—it merely behaves as if it were.’”

the hypothesis that the total ensemble of living organisms which constitute the biosphere can act as a single entity to regulate chemical composition, surface pH and possibly also climate. The notion of the biosphere as an active adaptive control system able to maintain the Earth in homeostasis we are calling the “Gaia” hypothesis. . . .

The Gaia concept first coalesced in the 1960s at the intersection of three streams of systems theory. These are the thermodynamics of mechanical and natural systems first developed in the mid-nineteenth century, the cybernetics of self-regulating control systems first developed in the mid-twentieth century, and its contemporaneous companion discourse of information theory derived by transposing statistical mechanics from matters of heat flow to matters of informatic transmission.

“The primary function of many cybernetic systems is to steer an optimum course through changing conditions towards a predetermined goal.”

Lovelock worked with this corporeal analogy to present Gaia as the proprioceptive or internal self-balancing feedback system of the biosphere as a planetary body.

Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis suggested the operation of planetary feedback regimes that hold certain climatic conditions, such as global temperature over geological time, within viable limits.

as biophysicist Harold Morowitz later stated in ratifying Lovelock’s idea of the Gaian system, “life is a property of planets rather than of individual organisms.” 49

in metabiotic Gaia the flux of matter couples abiotic portions of the Earth to living processes.

At first, as the accretion of a cosmic object coalescing to a semi-solid sphere 4.5 billion years ago, planet Earth is a scene of strictly abiotic physicochemical processes and nascent geological systems. At some point, living systems spring forth and proliferate. Earth transforms from a pre-living place with chemical potential into an environment coupled and looped into the evolutionary flux of microbial life. Biotic autopoiesis within the planetary microcosm proceeds to explore both its naturally recombinant possibilities and its coevolving niches while extending a microbial patina into the crust and mantle. Well before the appearance of eukaryotic organisms about 1.5 billion years ago, once the Archean microcosm had achieved planetary distribution, that biota looped itself all the way into geological processes it had already radically renovated.

in its headlong flight through the ranges of chemical and physical states, it entered a stage favorable for life. At some special time in that stage, the newly formed living cells grew until their presence so affected the Earth’s environment as to halt the headlong dive towards [thermodynamic] equilibrium. At that instant the living things, the rocks, the air, and the oceans merged to form the new entity, Gaia.

In due evolutionary time, however, the forms of distinction between nonautopoietic, physicochemical, and geological systems on the one hand and autopoietic, living systems on the other are reentered into Gaia to form the further reticulated metabiotic systems that now arise within Gaia’s geobiological matrix.

Language and meaning appear in their midst as metabiotic environmental mediations coupling minds and societies.

Gaia’s planetary cognition is thus an ur-medium of corporeal meaning awaiting adequate remediation.

We will always have to reckon with Gaia, to learn, like peoples of old, not to offend her.” 56 As we will contemplate later, Gaia can also bring Anthropocene humanity to recognize the limit of its capacity to order the environment at whim. Latour writes, echoing Sloterdijk, that the Crystal Palace of human immunity has now shattered from within: “No immunology—in Sloterdijk’s expansive sense—is possible unless we learn to become sensitive in turn to these multiple, controversial, mutually entangled loops. Those who are not capable of ‘detecting and responding rapidly to small changes’ are doomed.”

Here at the center of the universe constituted by our cosmic coupling to an animate but indifferent Gaia, we had better become biopolitical animals keenly sensitive to our systemic entanglements.

the nonlinear recursions of chaos theory were going mainstream alongside the explosion of personal computing, email, and the internet.

“Gaia is the name that James Lovelock gave . . . his hypothesis that the third planet from the sun, our home, is a ‘complex entity involving the Earth’s biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.’”

For Lovelock, Haraway writes, “the whole earth was a dynamic, self-regulating, homeostatic system; the earth, with all its interwoven layers and articulated parts, from the planet’s pulsating skin through its fulminating gaseous envelopes, was itself alive” (xiii).

“Lovelock’s earth—itself a cyborg, a complex auto-poietic system that terminally blurred the boundaries among the geological, the organic, and the technological—was the natural habitat, and the launching pad, of other cyborgs” (xiii).

As Lovelock realized, the cybernetic Gaia is, rather, what the earth looks like from the only vantage point from which she could be seen—from the outside, from above”

The people who built the semiotic and physical technology to see Gaia became the global species, in which they recognized themselves, through the concrete practices by which they built their knowledge.

Manfred Clynes and Nathan Kline, who coined the term cyborg in 1960 “to refer to the enhanced man who could survive in extra-terrestrial environments.

Haraway reads Gaia as an ideological figuration of cybernetic provenance,

Gaia is a sort of inspired cyborg hallucination induced by the addiction that had “technical and popular culture . . . shooting up with all things cybernetic in the 1950s and 60s in the U.S.”

the basic cybernetic qualifier Lovelock consistently uses for Gaia is homeostatic.

Margulis’s new account of cellular evolution based on symbiogenesis, the evolutionary assembly of different life-forms through permanent couplings of preexisting beings.

“From an evolutionary point of view,” Margulis and Sagan write there, “the first eukaryotes were loose confederacies of bacteria that, with continuing integration, became recognizable as protists, unicellular eukaryotic cells. . . . The earliest protists were likely to have been most like bacterial communities. . . . At first each autopoietic [self-maintaining] community member replicated its DNA, divided, and remained in contact with other members in a fairly informal manner.”

Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela originally presented that concept as a criterion by which to distinguish living systems—minimally, prokaryotic cells—as autopoietic or self-producing, as opposed to mechanical, technological, or designed systems as allopoietic or other-producing, that is, as having the events of their existence and maintenance in being outsourced to some external agency.

Gaia was “itself a cyborg, a complex auto-poietic system that terminally blurred the boundaries among the geological, the organic, and the technological”

Thinking with Whitehead then thinks Gaia in the terms of political ecology: “The new figure of Gaia indicates that it is becoming urgent to create a contrast between the earth valorized as a set of resources and the earth taken into account as a set of interdependent processes, capable of assemblages that are very different from the ones on which we depend”

the violence and destruction that Earth and its inhabitants have in store if the “Man” of the Anthropocene turns his technoscientific prowess to “saving the planet” simply for the sake of the continuation of capitalist regimes of extraction and private accumulation. But that is the future predictable from the course of globalization under capitalist expansion, the version of history that “has economic growth for its arrow of time” (17).

Stengers’s Gaia makes the epic versions of human history, in which Man, standing up on his hind legs and learning to decipher the laws of nature, understands that he is the master of his own fate, free of any transcendence, look rather old. Gaia is the name of an unprecedented or forgotten form of transcendence: a transcendence deprived of the noble qualities that would allow it to be invoked as an arbiter, guarantor, or resource; a ticklish assemblage of forces that are indifferent to our reasons and our projects. (47)

human presumption of a transcendent yet desublimated Gaia in order to demarcate its opponent, capitalism, as a different and opposed form of globalized transcendence, one that is all too human and yet, for the moment if not for all time, treated as a veritable force of nature beyond human controls: “Capitalism does, in effect, have something transcendent about it, but not in the sense of the laws of nature. Nor in the sense that I have associated with Gaia either, which is most certainly implacable, but in a mode that I would call properly materialist. . . . Capitalism’s mode of transcendence is not implacable, just radically irresponsible, incapable of answering for anything” (52–53).

Gaia is both commensurate in scale and comparable in its autonomous relation to the minutiae of its environment, such as individual living beings taken one by one, including us humans. Gaia transcends humanity in its planetary response to the environmental provocations produced by as-yet-unchecked human activities of industrial and extractive processes in the service of the amplification of capital:

“the paradox of the figure that we are attempting to confront is that the name of a proteiform, monstrous, shameless, primitive goddess has been given to what is probably the least religious entity produced by Western science.

For Lovelock, everything that is located between the top of the upper atmosphere and the bottom of the sedimentary rock formations—what biochemists aptly call the critical zone—turns out to be caught up in the same seething broth. The Earth’s behavior is inexplicable without the addition of the work accomplished by living organisms, just as fermentation, for Pasteur, cannot be started without yeast.

the incessant action of organisms succeeds in setting in motion air, water, soil, and, proceeding from one thing to another, the entire climate.

It was one of Margulis’s particular contributions to underscore how microbial mobility is Gaian “animation” at the primeval level of sheer living motions. The “new invisible characters” name the composite agency of the numberless infinitesimal microbes perfused through Gaia’s planetary envelope. These legions literally gather the clouds in the sky by the metabolic production of chemical products that, once airborne, seed cloud formation.

Stengers’s description of Gaia as “a ticklish assemblage of forces.”

In the previous chapter I suggested that the name of Gaia is a consequential rhetorical mediation rather than a concrete denotation.

Lovelock listened to the Sirens’ song of cybernetics and yet sailed on, fit for further battles with the dervishes of deep ecology and the gnomes of neo-Darwinism.

shall Gaia be described as an emergent system over and above the elements that it gathers together, or, on the contrary, as adhering to a relational ontology in which all “influences” in any direction are propagated on the same level?

“Whether we are considering a simple electric oven, a chain of retail shops monitored by a computer, a sleeping cat, an ecosystem, or Gaia herself, so long as we are considering something which is adaptive, capable of harvesting information and of storing experience and knowledge, then its study is a matter of cybernetics and what is studied can be called a ‘system.’ There is a very special attraction about the smooth running of a properly functioning control system.”

“Although there is an ineffable continuum between the living and the nonliving, we are beginning to understand the functions and organizations that are common to living entities. Living systems, from their smallest limits as bacterial cells to their largest extent as Gaia, are autopoietic: they self-maintain. As autopoietic systems they are bounded—they retain their recognizable features even while undergoing a dynamic interchange of parts.”

consider the role of the mitochondrion, the organelle or cellular subsystem that handles oxygen respiration for the entire eukaryotic cell. 41 When Lewis Thomas began popularizing Margulis’s Origin of Eukaryotic Cells in the 1970s, his surprise focused on the unexpected independence of the mitochondrion within its eukaryotic abode: “The RNA of mitochondria matches the organelles’ DNA, but not that of the nucleus. . . . The mitochondria do not arise de novo in cells; they are always there, replicating on their own, independently of the replication of the cell.” 42

“Mitochondrial ancestors came, probably polyphyletically, from the proteobacteria (or ‘purple bacteria’), a large group of eubacteria with many respiring and phototrophic members.” 43 Despite their assimilation into host cells, they have also maintained their own complex membranes, the semi-autonomy produced by distinct operational boundaries.

Mitochondria are now operationally integrated with their eukaryotic hosts; they are not viable in detachment from them. In their evolution into eukaryotic organelles, the proteobacterial precursors of the mitochondria lost autopoiesis while still maintaining formal and reproductive autonomy.

In Margulis’s account of the formation of the eukaryotic cell, then, the process of symbiogenesis coupled different free-living autopoietic systems, different kinds of prokaryotes, one of which became the host, the others endosymbionts. Once that association became permanent and obligatory, the endosymbionts relinquished autopoiesis to their now-nucleated host and coevolved into organelles, subsystems for which the cell is now the living environment.

Gaia is not an apex toward which life on Earth aspires or conspires. It is rather, just as Latour describes, “a small membrane, hardly more than a few kilometers thick, the delicate envelope of the critical zones” (140), upon which our very viability as a life-form depends and is currently precariously balanced.

a range of second-order cybernetic concepts—recursion, reentry, closure, autonomy, cognition, self-reference, and self-referential systems.

In cybernetics, cause and effect no longer apply; it is impossible to tell which comes first, and indeed the question has no relevance.” 2

biological systems’ self-referential maintenance of self-produced organizations and cognitive boundaries between internal operations and external environments received a formal blueprint in the theory of autopoiesis.

Von Foerster referred to first-order cybernetics as “the cybernetics of observed systems,” that is, the cybernetics of things, such as natural or technological systems, while second-order cybernetics is “the cybernetics of observing systems,” that is, the cybernetics of cognitive systems, those capable of producing observations in the first place.

In Autopoiesis and Cognition (1980), Maturana and Varela published their definitive case for considering autopoietic systems, such as living cells, as cognitive, or as restated in second-order cybernetic parlance, not merely as observed but more fundamentally as observing systems producing life-maintaining, self-making cognitions of their environments. 9 Maturana and Varela coined the term autopoiesis in 1971 to denote this group of interrelated concepts—circular organization, operational closure, and self-referring processes.

Biotic autopoiesis is recursive self-constitution applied to the observation of cells and organisms.

In the living cell, autopoietic recursion, systemic organization in circular operation, produces the self-binding of the system.

“Autopoiesis of the planet is the aggregate, emergent property of the many gas-trading, gene-exchanging, growing, and evolving organisms in it.”

Simply put, first-order cybernetics is about control, second-order cybernetics is about autonomy.

by the later 1980s, in the development of the hypothesis into a theory, Lovelock and Margulis both subdued the rhetoric of optimization and brought life and Earth back into realignment as a coupled metasystem distinct from non-Gaian environments above and below Gaia’s proper sphere. Gaia theory now integrated life with its terrestrial matrix into a geobiological system whose coevolution has been a composite phenomenon of co-emergence:

I see the Earth and the life it bears as a system, a system that has the capacity to regulate the temperature and the composition of the Earth’s surface and to keep it comfortable for living organisms. The self-regulation of the system is an active process driven by the free energy available from sunlight.” 14

The concept of autopoiesis is intriguing for its multifarious cultural history, itinerant discursive career, and contrarian stance, its persistent Continental and countercultural vogue and outsider status.

“Metabolism is none other than the biochemical instantiation of the autopoietic organization. That organization must remain invariant, otherwise the organism dies, but the only way autopoiesis can stay in place is through the incessant material flux of metabolism. In other words, the operational closure of autopoiesis demands that the organism be an open system.”

in autopoiesis proper, the system produces itself by producing the very elements that compose it as a system—“

the Gaian system arises from the co-operations of biotic and abiotic, living and nonliving, elements. In the Gaian instance, the systemic elements and processes standing apart from the living instance are not virtual or technical—that is, are not structurally or linguistically mediated (psychic or social) distinctions of (conscious or communicative) forms. Rather, they are the sheer (nonliving) material and energetic bases out of which biotic operations arise. 28 Some three or so billion years ago, when a critical mass of abiotic, biotic, and biogenic elements fell into a closed loop locking in an emergent level of metabiotic autopoiesis, self-producing life coupled together with its increasingly modulated environment to induce a primal regime of planetary cognition.

on the prosaic plane of systems theory, Gaia is a self-referential system of planetary cognition operating to produce globally regulative processes binding geological and biological processes and developments into a network of interdependent systems

The observation that living systems maintain and even increase the order of their organization led at first to speculations of a vitalistic nature that life somehow defies the second law. What this counterentropic outcome actually meant was that, thermodynamically considered, living systems are open systems using the uptake of free energy to decrease their entropy.

It is not so much the organism or the species that evolves, but the entire system, species and environment. The two are inseparable. 38

The abiding cultural effect of their work has been to detoxify the system concept of its military, industrial, and corporate connotations of command and control and to redeploy it in the pursuit of holistic ideals and ecological values.

the systems concept orients one to a synoptic view of things, presses one to a conceptual elevation from which the boundaries of complex entities show forth against their environments.

Brand nailed the schizophrenia of modern American society—split then as now between military and corporate technocracies in the ascendant and ecosystems, communities, and psyches in splinters—and supplied the spiritual rationale for a countercultural supplement to the powerful but restricted “intellectual clarity” of mainstream control theory.

the particular valences of Bateson’s cybernetic worldview. In that world, the notion of “circuit” is a prominent mental operator. Bateson’s “circuit” puns on the term’s electronic sense and resonates with the informatic sense of a communications system in which messages circulate. However, his cybernetics of “circuit” expand to concern the overall circularity of closed loops or cycles as these convey meaningful differences in systemic ensembles of any sort. This milieu of communicative loops is more or less what Bateson meant by his “ecology of mind.” Perhaps the best passage in Brand’s Bateson chapter wrestles precisely with Bateson’s idea of “circuit”: I’m still getting used to the way Gregory uses the term “circuit.” It’s appealing to me because it is at once more general than “feedback loops,” more accurate somehow, and more open-system . . . as if it can include cycles of interactive learning (student teaches the teacher to teach the student better), of material (flesh to ashes to flesh), of slow recurrence (every so often an ice age stresses the system), of standard homeostatic feedback (the chilled body shivers until warm), and of observer interference (the watched porpoise bedevils his observer). Without circuit, without continual self-corrective adjustment, is no life. (29)

“Since cybernetics was kidnapped by computer science a couple decades back, there have been few working applied cyberneticians loose in the world. Lovelock . . . is one.”

by 1983, Brand’s Batesonian CoEvolution Quarterly of the 1970s—the CoEvolution Quarterly of von Foerster, Lovelock, Margulis, and Varela—was already morphing into Kevin Kelly’s digitopian Whole Earth Review of the later 1980s and beyond.

there was an extended moment when organic cybernetics, or a cybernetics of natural as opposed to designed systems, teemed with fresh creations—most notably, the concept of autopoiesis and the Gaia hypothesis—and scattered these hardy spores across some receptive regions of the intellectual landscape. Particularly in the Batesonian milieu of the systems counterculture of the 1970s, a cybernetics “mostly to do with life” helped these neocybernetic productions to unfold.

While its point of self-reference remained the human observer, in this image the Earth seen from space has been exploded into a planetary or cosmic visage made up of microbes and galaxies and things in between.

his circumstantial Gaian claim that the presence of active life must leave a detectable signature in the atmosphere of a planet that possesses it:

And so began the history of cross-currents in the reception of Gaia between its authors’ quests for scientific bona fides and its lay enthusiasts’ desire for mythic resonances.

These early Gaia arguments do not bear on the biosphere as a whole or the planet altogether but specifically on the planetary atmosphere enveloping the biosphere as both source and sink for metabolic processes.

with the key biological elements (carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, hydrogen, sulphur, and phosphorus), cycling times must be short because biological growth is based on continual cell division that requires the doubling of cell masses in periods of time that are generally less than months and typically, days or hours. On lifeless planets there is no particular reason to expect this phenomenon of atmospheric cycling, nor on the Earth is it expected that gases of elements that do not enter metabolism as either metabolites or poisons will cycle rapidly. . . . Because biological solutions to problems tend to be varied, redundant, and complex, it is likely that all of the mechanisms of atmospheric homeostasis will involve complex feedback loops. 25

“We would like to discuss the Earth’s atmosphere from a new point of view—that it is an integral, regulated, and necessary part of the biosphere” (30). In the article proper, they restate the main point: “The purpose of this paper is simply to present our reasons for believing the atmosphere is actively controlled” (32).

The “control” of the atmosphere was the hypothesized emergent outcome of a closed loop of biogeochemical cycles held in homeostasis at the planetary level, that is, feedback-regulated throughout much of geological time.

the abiding picture here is that Earth’s atmosphere, the repository for the gaseous wastes circulating in and out of organic capture and use, has evolved along with the life that has pumped it up.

a systemic outcome operationally integrated with and regulated by the coupling of life and Earth. The stable persistence of these proportions over eons of fluctuations depends on living, largely microbial processes coupled to geological dynamics.

Its promissory countervision of life taking care of business in its own house put to shame the “selfish gene” of the same moment. 27

“The Gaia Hypothesis, as proposed by the British scientist James Lovelock, suggests that the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are maintained as highly sophisticated buffering devices by the totality of life on the planet. The whole Earth, in other words, may function as a single self-regulating organism.”

O’Neill’s speculative technological constructions presented images of environmental closure that translated Gaia’s terrestrial implications into idealized visions of sustainable habitats. 29

the tight conceptual coupling we have noted between ecosystem ecology and the Gaia hypothesis.

the range of knowledge needed to engineer materially closed ecologies making the proposed space colonies even temporarily habitable without constant resupply did not exist then, nor does it now.

In the early 1970s, with a strong push from the Whole Earth Catalog’s construction of the countercultural sensibility, key lines of cybernetic thought were morphing from grim control theory into playful explorations of the paradoxes of cognition.

Lovelock’s seminal innovation with regard to life detection at the planetary level: instead of going to great lengths to make contact with planetary surfaces, one could analyze their atmospheres at a distance for signs of an entropy reduction.

‘Life is one member of the class of phenomena which are open or continuous reaction systems able to decrease their entropy at the expense of free energy taken from the environment and subsequently rejected in a degraded form’”

The outgoing entropy flux from the Earth indeed from Gaia “if she exists,” is long wavelength infra-red radiation to space.

I would hope that we shall never tire of reminding ourselves and each other that “complexity,” “disorder,” “entropy,” “information,” “order,” “organization,” “simplicity,” etc., are not names for properties of things, but those for properties of descriptions, or—if you wish—are names reflecting properties of the observer (describer), his vocabulary, his natural or chosen limits of discrimination, etc., in short, his idiosyncrasies at the time of his observation. 44 This is a pure statement of neocybernetic epistemology.

von Foerster’s trademark epistemological themes and stock articulations of the distinction between first-and second-order cybernetics: “I share the opinion of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Gregory Bateson, G. Spencer Brown, Heinz von Foerster and others that failure to understand self-reference is the poison in the brain of most Western misbehavior, public and personal.

When you have a closed interaction of chemical productions, you can have a cell, and not before that. When you have a closed interaction of descriptions, you can have self-consciousness, and not before. When you have a closed interaction of species, you have an ecological system, and not before. That is, the closure, the self-referential-ness, seem to be the hinges upon which the emergent properties of a system turn.

autopoietic Gaia as “the organismal-environmental regulatory system at the Earth’s surface, comprised of more than thirty million extant species.” 50

the properties we discover in systems will depend on our own properties. In its purest form, that means that whatever description we do of the world will be based on the act of splitting it apart in different ways. And the way we see the world, therefore, reveals what is our choice of cleavage, as it were, and that there are many of them precisely because there are many observers.