In her essay, "Gaia: Gender and Scientific Representations of the Earth," Marcia Bjornerud (1997) reports that, "Few ideas have provoked more rancorous debate within the modern scientific community than the Gaia hypothesis-the proposal that the Earth can be viewed as a superorganism with the capacity to regulate its "body" chemistry and temperature" (89). Although the concept of the Earth as a living being is ancient, the formal scientific development of that concept first began in the 1960s when an atmospheric chemist, James Lovelock and a philosopher, Dian Hitchcock and a molecular biologist, Lynn Margulis, investigated the anomalous composition of Earth's atmosphere compared to those of neighboring Mars and Venus. According to these three investigators, the unique mixture of gases that surrounds the Earth and supports life on the planet is the very essence of "Life," which is created and maintained by the global biosphere for its own unfathomable reasons and uses. "The composition of the atmosphere, in turn, profoundly affects Earth's climate," Bjornerud says, "which has remained favorable for life for at least 3.5 billion years. In other words, life on Earth has not merely adapted to a hostile environment, it has continuously modified that environment" (90). The Gaia hypothesis in sum, then, is that organisms have acted collectively (if unknowingly) throughout the history of the world to make the environment more favorable for the global ecosystem as a whole (Bjornerud 90). Mankind"s introduction of technological innovations into this carefully balanced and fine-tuned Gaiac system, though, have resulted in some predictable adverse outcomes, such as in the former Soviet Union where much of the country remains ravaged by the environmental impact of industries that have paid little attention to such controls in an effort to gain an edge on the West, to less predictable outcomes such as the growing hole in the ozone layer and acid rain.