The weirdness of Naming the Planet You Already Live on

Who might have knew that the exchange between William Golding and James Lovelock, which was a fascinating encounter of literary inspiration about exobiology and scientific inquiry about mezzo-biology where Golding's interest in the search for life on other planets, coupled with Lovelock's background in scientific research on earth habitability and led to a pivotal moment in the naming of the Earth systems as Gaia within a scientific context for the first time on this planet. It is also fascinating to know that the reference to Erwin Schrödinger's book What is Life? adds another layer of significance to this conversation (Clarke & Dutreuil 2022: xv). Schrödinger's exploration of the thermodynamic principles underlying life processes, particularly the concept of entropy reduction within living systems, likely resonated deeply with both Golding and Lovelock. The naming of the Earth as Gaia, inspired by Greek mythology and the concept of the Earth as a self-regulating, living system, marks a pivotal moment in the recognition of the Earth's interconnectedness and the need for a holistic approach to understanding planetary processes. The revival of interest in Gaia theory over the past two decades has led to renewed debates among scientists and scholars across various disciplines. In particular, social scientists and humanities scholars have been exploring new perspectives on Gaia in response to urgent challenges posed by climate change and the onset of the Anthropocene era (Gribbin & Gribbin 2009, Zalasiewicz 2012). Despite this growing interest, there remains a notable need for more historical research on this topic, leaving a gap in our understanding of Gaia's origins and the scientific and personal dynamics between Lovelock and Margulis. Obtaining a historical perspective on Gaia is crucial, especially in light of Bruno Latour's thought-provoking comparison between the scientific upheavals introduced by Galileo during the emergence of Western modernity and the paradigm shifts brought about by the concept of Gaia in our contemporary era (Ward, 2009). Understanding the historical context and development of Gaia theory can provide valuable insights into its significance and implications for our understanding of Earth's systems and humanity's relationship with the planet. The literature on Gaia encompasses a substantial debate regarding its status—is it to be regarded as a hypothetical entity, a confirmed scientific fact, a conceptual fiction, or a mythic reimagining? Within the scientific community, there has been an ongoing discussion about what constitutes evidence or proof for Gaia. Lovelock’s and Margulis’s correspondence (Clarke & Dutreuil 2022: 404) reveals valuable insights into the evolution of their internal discussions about Gaia's development, as well as the specific elements they considered crucial to its exploration. It also sheds light on how they navigated these ideas within their own scientific circles and how they perceived their own progress. However, for Lovelock and Margulis, Gaia was not solely a scientific hypothesis awaiting testing and potential confirmation; it also represented a worldview: a philosophy of nature encompassing ontology, epistemology, and politics. The historical trajectory of Gaian scientists mirrors the broader evolution of scientific thought, particularly in the context of cybernetics and complexity sciences. Lovelock, whose career began in the 1940s, was influenced by first-order cybernetics, focusing on self-organizing systems, self-regulation via negative feedback, and the interplay between thermodynamics and information theory. In contrast, Margulis, a generation younger and starting her career in the 1960s, embraced second-order cybernetics, particularly the concept of autopoiesis developed by Maturana and Varela. Autopoiesis provided Margulis with a framework for understanding the autonomous self-production of living systems, a concept that complemented her vision of Gaia as an autopoietic entity harnessing solar energy for continuous self-production and complexity. The transition to the complexity sciences, especially prominent in the 1980s with the work of the Santa Fe Institute, has influenced later Gaian scientists like Tim Lenton, who emerged in the late 1990s. Lenton approaches Gaia's ontology and regulatory mechanisms through the theoretical lenses of complexity science, which encompasses chaos theory and nonlinear dynamics (Lenton 2016). This shift reflects a broader trend in scientific inquiry toward understanding complex, dynamic systems and their emergent properties.

Stengers on Gaia

Isabelle Stengers’ intervention on Gaia can be read as a decisive reconfiguration of the relationship between ontology, politics, and scientific practice. Rather than treating Gaia as either a mythological figure or a purely scientific hypothesis, Stengers insists on its status as an intrusion: a mode of existence that disrupts established distinctions between nature and society, subject and object, science and politics. In this sense, Gaia names neither a deity nor a system, but a transformation in the conditions under which the Earth becomes thinkable.

Stengers emphasizes that Gaia operates through a double register. On the one hand, it refers to the scientific conception of the Earth as a self-regulating biosphere in which biological and geochemical processes are tightly coupled. On the other hand, it resonates with the pre-modern figure of Gaia as a divine power associated both with generation and destruction, with nurturing and indifferent force. This tension is not accidental: it expresses the fact that Gaia cannot be stabilized within the modern opposition between nature as resource and nature as transcendence. Instead, Gaia appears as a form of non-human agency that is neither benevolent nor intelligible according to human-centered categories.

The philosophical significance of this intrusion lies in its capacity to unsettle what Stengers calls the “epic” narrative of modernity. This narrative assumes that humanity progressively frees itself from natural constraints through scientific and technical mastery. Gaia interrupts this story by revealing that human action is always already embedded within a planetary field of processes that exceed intentional control. Human beings do not stand outside the Earth system; they are one mode of its ongoing individuation. From this perspective, the Anthropocene does not signify human mastery over the Earth but rather the exposure of human collectives to processes that no longer respond to the logic of domination.

Stengers therefore reorients the concept of agency. Agency is no longer attributed exclusively to human subjects but distributed across heterogeneous assemblages of human and nonhuman actors. The Earth is not a passive backdrop but a field of world-making processes in which geological, biological, chemical, and technological dynamics continuously interfere with one another. What emerges is not a unified system governed by equilibrium but a fragile and unstable constellation of interacting processes. Gaia is thus closer to a metastable milieu than to a harmonious organism.

This shift also redefines the political stakes of ecological thought. Stengers explicitly challenges the identification of emancipation with technological progress and industrial expansion, a narrative shared in different forms by nineteenth-century materialism and certain strands of Marxist thought. Against this “epic” conception of human mastery over nature, she calls for forms of collective practice that do not presuppose control, sovereignty, or universal legitimacy. Her emphasis on “slow science” and experimental alliances between heterogeneous actors—scientists, artists, activists—reflects an attempt to cultivate practices that remain responsive to the indeterminate and often irreversible transformations of planetary processes.

Importantly, these practices cannot be evaluated according to established criteria of scientific or political legitimacy, since they emerge precisely from the breakdown of those criteria. They belong to a situation in which no single perspective can claim epistemic or political superiority over others because the very conditions of collective existence are being transformed. In this sense, Stengers does not simply propose a new environmental ethics; she describes a situation in which the Earth itself forces a reconfiguration of epistemology and politics.

From a Simondonian perspective, Stengers’ Gaia can be read as a problem of co-individuation between heterogeneous processes. What she calls intrusion corresponds to the moment in which a metastable system can no longer maintain the illusion of separation between its components. Gaia is not a totality that contains relations; it is the ongoing individuation of relations themselves across multiple scales. The Earth appears as a field in which relations do not simply connect pre-existing entities but actively generate the conditions under which entities and environments emerge together.

In this sense, Gaia is neither a being nor a background of relations but a relation of relations—a transductive field in which political, scientific, and ecological processes continuously reshape one another. Stengers’ intervention thus converges with Simondon’s ontology: both displace the priority of stable individuals in favor of processes of individuation that remain open, contingent, and perpetually unfinished.