This is perhaps not surprising when you consider that the earth (with the help of the sun) provides everything needed to sustain life.

But what if the earth itself was an organism?

Although this may seem a fanciful proposition, the fact is that the earth is a self-regulating entity that is able to repair itself of injury and respond to external influences such as cosmic rays, being hit by meteorites and fluctuations in the sun's energy.

During the 1960s, the eminent scientist James Lovelock developed the 'Gaia Hypothesis', which put forward the idea that the earth behaved as if it were a "super-organism".

Gaia is the Ancient Greek name for the Earth, and it is from this route that modern words such as geology were developed.

Lovelock described Gaia "as 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."

Simply put, this means that all of the components that make up the earth, i.e., life, the physical environment and weather all interact in a way that maintains a balance for itself.

If you take a brief look through geological history, many of the major events that have happened can be explained using the Gaia Hypothesis.

While there have been major extinctions caused by external factors such as meteorites, the balance has been restored over time by other species adapting to fill the niche vacated by the extinct organisms.

Ice ages are balanced by periods of warm, fluctuations in atmospheric carbon are balanced by geological storage (formation of coal and oil).

If you accept the Gaia hypothesis, then where do humans fit into the equation and how do they affect the stasis of the planet? You could argue that humans are the latest pressure to be put on the environment and that in the fullness of time, the damage inflicted on the planet by humans will repair itself.

What cannot necessarily be predicted is how the damage will right itself.

Will it be at the expense of humans?

One of the biggest disruptions to the environment caused by humans is the burning of fossil fuels.

Oil and coalfields were possibly the result of an earlier attempt by the planet to deal with excessive amounts of carbon in the atmosphere by rendering it unreachable in geological formations.

Now the carbon is being released back into the atmosphere, with consequences we can only currently guess at.

In order to restore the balance, the earth's environment may temporarily become intolerable for many species (including us).

It's a pretty scary thought, but the question is, will we be able to do something about it before it's too late?

James Lovelock has published three books on Gaia, all of which are readily available if you would like to learn more.