Earth is a living organism

It is difficult not to admire Mary Midgley. At 86 and white-haired, she is still going strong: cogent, vigorous and impassioned. Clad in brilliant fuchsia jacket, she shone the beam of her moral philosopher's intellect on how the perception of (her contemporary) James Lovelock's concept of Gaia has evolved. It is no longer, she said, "a Californian fancy", the plaything of well-meaning eco-cranks.

The instrumental idea that, at bottom, only the economy is "real", and the rest of human affairs just window-dressing, has been exploded, she argued. Faced with the evidence of climate change, few people in public life can now maintain that we can go on treating the planet as a bottomless pit of inert resources, rather than a systemic whole of interdependent ecologies and living organisms.

The earth, as a whole, is a self-organizing, self-correcting, vastly interconnected system. As such it is useful to view it in the same way we view other self-organizing, self-correcting, vastly interconnected systems, such as organisms. As such the analogy of the earth as a organism is a good and very useful one. Weather the earth is actually an organism or not depends entirely on your definition of the word "organism" and is really a semantic debate of no really substance.