Gaia Hypothesis
The Gaia hypothesis, also known as the Gaia theory, Gaia paradigm, or the Gaia principle, proposes that living organisms interact with their inorganic surroundings on Earth to form a synergistic and self-regulating complex system that helps to maintain and perpetuate the conditions for life on the planet.
The Gaia hypothesis was formulated by the chemist James Lovelock and co-developed by the microbiologist Lynn Margulis in the 1970s.
The Gaia hypothesis posits that the Earth is a self-regulating complex system involving the biosphere, the atmosphere, the hydrospheres and the pedosphere, tightly coupled as an evolving system. The hypothesis contends that this system as a whole, called Gaia, seeks a physical and chemical environment optimal for contemporary life.
Gaia evolves through a cybernetic feedback system operated by the biota, leading to broad stabilization of the conditions of habitability in a full homeostasis. Many processes in the Earth's surface, essential for the conditions of life, depend on the interaction of living forms, especially microorganisms, with inorganic elements. These processes establish a global control system that regulates Earth's surface temperature, atmosphere composition and ocean salinity, powered by the global thermodynamic disequilibrium state of the Earth system.
Interbeing and Alterlife: Toward Decolonizing the Shared Environment
In the context of decolonizing the shared environment, Interbeing and Alterlife offer vital frameworks for reimagining ecological, political, and relational futures beyond extractive colonial systems.
Interbeing, drawn from Buddhist philosophy and expanded through ecological and Indigenous thought, speaks to the radical interdependence of all living and nonliving entities. It resists Western ontologies that separate humans from nature, instead foregrounding relationality, reciprocity, and kinship across species, elements, and temporalities. Interbeing is an ethic of co-existence and co-creation, of listening to land, fungi, air and microbial life as co-agents in shaping shared realities.
Alterlife, as theorized by Michelle Murphy, builds on this interrelational approach by addressing how life continues amid and through colonial toxicity. It recognizes that colonialism’s chemical afterlives; poisoned waters, hormonally disrupted bodies, carcinogenic air, persist in the very tissues of living beings.
Alterlife asks: How do we live with and through the ongoing molecular violence of colonial modernity? It is not about returning to a pre-colonial past but about generating life otherwise {a non-Western future, a non-Western past} amid damaged ecologies, metabolizing contamination, and enacting resistance and care within chemically altered landscapes.
Together, Interbeing and Alterlife propose a decolonial ecological practice: one that refuses purity narratives, centers entangled survival, and challenges the illusion of separability. They call for art, science, and culture to engage with the complexities of living in relation, not only with what was once “natural,” but with the altered, haunted, and unruly ecologies shaped by empire. Decolonizing the shared environment, then, is not about extraction or control, but about restoring relations, acknowledging chemical inheritances, and co-creating futures grounded in interdependence, justice, and mutual flourishing.
We begin with decolonizing ourselves.