The Gaia hypothesis (now often called the Gaia theory), was formulated by scientists James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis in the 1970s. It contends that all living organisms and the inorganic structure of the Earth are integrated in a single, self-regulating system that maintains the conditions for life on the planet. The system includes the biosphere, atmosphere, hydrospheres and pedosphere.
In short, the theory says the Earth acts as if it were a single organism. The hypothesis plays a role in today's ecological/environmental movements.
Edgar Allan Poe gave some thought to the ideas underlying the Gaia hypothesis more than a century before Lovelock and Margulis articulated them. Here are Poe's observations, incorporated into the short story "The Island of the Fay" (1841):
I love, indeed, to regard the dark valleys, and the gray rocks, and the waters that silently smile, and the forests that sigh in uneasy slumbers, and the proud watchful mountains that look down upon all,–I love to regard these as themselves but the colossal members of one vast animate and sentient whole–a whole whose form (that of the sphere) is the most perfect and most inclusive of all; whose path is among associate planets; whose meek handmaiden is the moon, whose mediate sovereign is the sun; whose life is eternity, whose thought is that of a God; whose enjoyment is knowledge; whose destinies are lost in immensity, whose cognizance of ourselves is akin with our own cognizance of the animalculae which infest the brain–a being which we, in consequence, regard as purely inanimate and material much in the same manner as these animalculae must thus regard us.
Poe, incidentally, wrote a major speculation on the universe called "Eureka," described as a prose poem or an essay on the material and spiritual worlds. It can be found here.
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