R2metoo: intro to autopoiety, outro to anthropocentrism

We hear much of the drastic effects of human development, however little is discussed on the balance of prosperity between economics and a healthy environment. In fact, once could consider that a healthy human existence is wholly supplement by the land, offering us land, food and remedies. How much do we focus on conservation and preservation of our life sustaining planet? Could it be the result of a society that continuously perceives their surrounding environment as nothing more than mere resources? Perhaps this misconceived notion could be a result of a continuously classified distinction of the human and the nonhuman interaction, rather then a balanced community of life. This anthropocentric view becomes rooted into our perception to the world around us and the influence that we have upon it; and reflects in the Earth's deterioration in unison with mankind's prosperity.

In the book Sacred Gaia, author Anne Primavesi discuses the concept of Autopoiesis, the abstract organization of systematic functions within living organisms. Through a network with other antipoetic entities, these synergetic systems regulate and sustain independently from the living organism that embodies it. We unknowingly rely on these autopoietic entities in every measure of human action, through muscle movement, metabolism, and every sensory perception that we experience. Primavesi states that the "minimal autopoietic entity is a bacterial cell…the largest, probably the system Lovelock calls Gaia." (Primavesi, 5)

Lovelock's classification of Gaia is the collaboration of self-regulating systems that sustained life on Earth, thus classifying planet Earth as a living organism itself through these perceivable concepts. To view planet Earth as a living organism is a difficult concept to grasp, however comparing its inhabitants and relationships in contrast to the autopoietic exchanges within the human body, the analogous processes explain themselves.