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The purpose of this article is to present an alternative theory to why publicly‐traded physician practice management companies in the US were popular and successful for a limited number of years and then essentially self‐destructed.

The short history of publicly‐traded practice management companies suggests that they had limited value and utility in the US healthcare industry. It is the premise of the paper that the sudden appearance these for‐profit companies upset the natural order within the healthcare industry and created a disequilibria which ultimately resulted in their demise. While Gaia theory is most commonly applied to the natural sciences, it has been applied to a number of interdisciplinary issues.

Physicians gravitated to these for‐profit companies either out of fear of encroaching managed care or out a desire to sell their practice to the highest bidder. Physician practice management companies, on the other hand, saw a way to entice stockholders to invest in a growth industry. The paper suggests that the physician practice management companies added little new value to the health care industry and applies Gaia theory as a possible explanation for this phenomena. Gaia theory was first postulated in 1979 to address the evolution of the material environment and corresponding organisms as a tightly coupled system which attempt to manipulate the environment for the purpose of creating biologically favorable conditions.

The paper is one of the first to suggest that the laws of nature, as understood from the perspective of Gaia theory, may have applicability to the US health care industry.

In accordance with Latour, this paper aims to respond to the call for a “down-to-earth” post-learning organization approach to sustainability, which is critical of Senge’s conception of learning organization (LO).

“Gaia storytelling” is used to define a LO that is “down-to-earth”.

Gaia is understood through the notion of a critical zone, which foregrounds the local and differentiated terrestrial conditions in which life on Earth is embedded.

Gaia storytelling implies perceiving LO as a network of storytelling practices enacted and told by unique creative citizens. Such an organization sustains and grows through several entangled storytelling cycles that allow Gaia to shape learning.

The article distinguishes five different storytelling cycles as a way to explore how the Gaia theater cycle connects to other cycles. The four other cycles are: Gaia thinking, explorative, creative and Gaia truth-telling.

A Gaian LO is a new beginning for LO.

This chapter examines the historical development of different conceptions of health among environmental activists in the postwar United States.

The historical analysis combines archival research with oral history interviews.

This study argues that applications of “health” to describe the environment are more diverse than generally acknowledged, and that environmental activists were at the forefront of connecting the two terms within broader public discourse.

This study provides a historical context for understanding the contemporary diversity of perspectives on the links between ecology and health. It illustrates the cross-fertilization between scientists, philosophers, and environmental activists in the 1970s that led to this contemporary diversity.

The general problems of cybernetics were considered from an educational point of view in an address to the Convegno de Cibernetica Scolastica, in Messina, Sicily. To do this satisfactorily the meaning of cybernetics should be discussed and the history of the emergence of the subject area reviewed with special reference to the future. Important implications for education are presented.

The purpose of this paper is to mention a set of suggestions for analysing the current financial crisis, but with reservations about the usefulness of one based on Ashby's principle of requisite variety. The reservations are supported by reference to a mechanism of chemotaxis in bacteria. A recent publication concerning the Gaia hypothesis and global warming is reviewed.

The aim is to review developments on the internet, especially those of general cybernetic interest.

The significance of complexity, in government and management, is not disputed, but doubts are expressed about validity of laws that are purported to treat it quantitatively. A pessimistic view of world future is due to James Lovelock, the originator of the Gaia hypothesis, though there is some reason to believe he is more hopeful than is suggested in an interview.

The reservations about Ashby's treatment of complexity are essentially theoretical and do not negate findings based on its robust and imprecise application. Lovelock indicates a means of saving the Earth from disastrous climate change but has little hope that it will be implemented.

It is hoped this is a valuable periodic review.

Considers that in ecosystem, landscape and global ecology, an energetics reading of ecological systems is an expression of a cybernetic, systemic and holistic approach. In ecosystem ecology, the Odumian paradigm emphasizes the concept of emergence, but it has not been accompanied by the creation of a method that fully respects the complexity of the objects studied. In landscape ecology, although the emergentist, multi‐level, triadic methodology of J.K. Feibleman and D.T. Campbell has gained acceptance, the importance of emergent properties is still undervalued. In global ecology, the Gaia hypothesis is an expression of an organicist metaphor, while the emergentist terminology used is incongruent with the underlying physicalist cybernetics. More generally, an analytico‐additional methodology and the reduction of the properties of ecosystems to the laws of physical chemistry render purely formal any assertion about the emergentist and holistic nature of the ecological systems studied.

Reviews considerations of information theory and feedback control as applied to biological systems, and particularly their impact on the early development of cybernetics. Also reviews Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and its extension to account for the emergence of global homeostatis using the Daisyworld model. The latter provides a compelling view of the origin of biological regulation, but one that is difficult to reconcile with the neural and hormonal regulatory processes in modern plants and animals.