This is a great website with lots of images of Earth taken from satellite.  (04/17/02)

Building commUnity requires common unity. We must be together. We will have to find those groups of humans who share our concerns and vision of a positive future. They will have wake up. They will have grow up. “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” I Cor. xiii. 11. (04/17/02)
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Elisabet Sahtouris writes: The Gaia hypothesis is now recognized as Gaia theory, but it is still controversial among scientists. Lovelock, like his predecessor Hutton, calls Earth-as-Gaia an organism or superorganism and claims its proper study is physiology. Yet he also calls Gaia a self-stabilizing mechanism made of coupled living and nonliving parts — organisms and physical environments — which affect one another in ways that maintain Earth’s relatively constant temperature and chemical balance within limits favorable to life. Lovelock describes this mechanical system as a cybernetic device working by means of feedback among its coupled parts. Thus it maintains Earth’s stable conditions in the manner of a thermostat-controlled heating system that maintains house temperature, or an automatic pilot that keeps an airplane on course. This concept of Gaia as a cybernetic device has been far more acceptable within the mechanical worldview that is still strong among scientists than is the concept of Gaia as a live organism, though this is changing. For Lovelock, organism and mechanism are equally appropriate concepts, but in fact the two concepts contradict each other logically, and this causes confusion around the whole issue of Gaia theory. The concept of life, by any definition, including the autopoietic definition (of self-producing and self-renewing living systems, as introduced in Chapter 3), is not logically consistent with the concept and reality of mechanism. For one thing, life cannot be part of a living being; life is the essence or process of the whole living being. If Gaia is the name given to the living Earth, then it would be as meaningless to say that life creates its own environments or conditions on Earth as it would be to say that life creates its own environments or conditions in our bodies. Life is the process of bodies, not one of their parts, and in this book we maintain that the same is true for Gaia-Earth — that life is its process, its metabolic system, its particular kind of working organization, not one of its parts. (04/17/02)
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Wendell Berry writes: We live in a time when technologies and ideas (often the same thing) are adopted in response not to need but to advertising, salesmanship, and fashion.Salesmen and saleswomen now hover about us as persistently as angels, intent on “doing us good” according to instructions set forth by persons educated at great public expense in the arts of greed and prevarication. These salespeople are now with most of us, apparently, even in our dreams. The first duty of writers who wish to be of any use even to themselves is to resist the language, the ideas, and the categories of this ubiquitous sales talk, no matter from whose mouth it issues. But, then, this is also the first duty of everybody else. Nobody who is awake accepts the favors of these hawkers of guaranteed satisfactions, these escape artists, these institutional and commercial fanatics, whether politically correct or politically incorrect. Nobody who understands the history of justice or of the imagination (largely the same history) wants to be treated as a member of a category. (04/17/02)

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