Thinking about the earth

by D. R. Oldroyd

Thinking about the Earth is a history from Antiquity to the present of ideas about the planet on which we live. Not a history of geology, it instead recounts the geological tradition of Western science, beginning with the organic earth-views of the earliest cultures and ending with the Gaia hypothesis advanced by Lovelock. After a survey of topics ranging from the mythopoetic, mechanical, and historicist views of the earth - from early maps and other representations of the earth to modern seismology and geochemistry - Oldroyd returns us to the idea that our water planet may in a sense be regarded as a living entity, or at least that life is an essential feature of its behavior. If the history of ideas about the earth can teach us one thing, Oldroyd argues, it is that interpretations are constantly changing. To suppose that interpretations currently in favor will stand for all time is, he says, an act of hubris.