If we open ourselves to a vision of the "sacredness of life," we can broaden our horizons and grasp the vastness and complexity of the world around us. Starting from this holistic vision of reality, it becomes possible to bring all the different sciences together to develop ever better ways of "being" and of living on this Earth.

As early as the early 1960s, people of great sensitivity proposed experiences in which the way of living and communicating with others was reformulated, thus becoming cultural experiences useful for a re-reading of the way we inhabit space. We can recall "Dropo City," "Lindisfarne," "Arcosanti," the "New Alchemy Institute," the experiences of "Gaia," "Findhorn," "Auroville" and, going even further back, the community of "Monte Verità": at their root lay a new conception of an Earth no longer regarded as an inanimate place, but rather as a being filled with life, vibrations and energy.

The English scientist James Lovelock — researcher, chemist and inventor — formulated a new hypothesis on the development of life at the end of the 1960s: the Gaia Hypothesis (named after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth), in which he described our planet as a superorganism capable of actively creating the most favourable conditions for the perpetuation of life, in which humankind was an insignificant "accident." And the scientific community was, to say the least, perplexed! Today, more than thirty years on, this revolutionary hypothesis is received by scientists with careful interest, and the quantity of books, articles, conferences and seminars in which it is discussed suggests that "Gaia" is becoming the new paradigm for the study of the life sciences.

During an interview about how he had come to formulate this Hypothesis, Lovelock said: "When I was doing research on Mars, I realised that the first thing one could study, looking at the planet from the outside, was its atmosphere, in order to compare it with that of the Earth. While the atmosphere of Mars is close to equilibrium, the atmosphere of the Earth — a planet on which life is present — is very far from equilibrium. It contains gases that are incompatible with one another, such as oxygen and methane, in a proportion that violates the laws of chemistry. I began to believe that the entire complex of living matter on Earth, from whales to plants to viruses, was a single entity capable of manipulating the environment in order to meet its own needs."

This also brings to mind the "Living Earth" of which the geologist James Hutton spoke during his address to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, back in 1785, in these terms: "The Earth is a superorganism that must be studied using the methods of physiology."
We thus move from a principle of "adaptive evolution of life to the environment" to an idea of "systemic co-evolution of the environment."

Gigi Capriolo