Life as a planetary process: the Earth Systems Science perspective

Earth Systems Science (ESS) has emerged over the last decades as a new interdisciplinary field of research. It is inspired by proposals that emphasized the systemic nature of the Earth (such as Vernadsky's, Lovelock and Margulis), and motivated by the need to understand and react to the global changes in the planet. Studies in ESS underline the planetary dimension of living processes, and in doing so pose specific challenges to biology, understood in its most general terms as the science of life. 
What are the philosophical implications of understanding life as intrinsically intertwined with planetary dynamics? What is the current state of debates concerning planetary evolution, adaptation, homeostasis, homeorhesis, self-regulation, etc? Can the cell, the organism, the ecosystem and the biosphere be considered as different aspects of the same phenomenon (‘Life’) or are they different (though interlinked) phenomena, taking place at different levels or scales? What is the status of the autopoietic organism within a sympoietic interdependent environment? What are the main conceptual challenges to the advancement of ESS research? How does this perspective affect our understanding of what is life?
Interdisciplinary contributions that discuss the Gaia hypothesis, issues related to planetary evolution, autopoietic conceptions of the Earth as a living system, thermodynamic accounts of the Earth system, large-scale ecological conceptions of life, and any other theoretical, philosophical and scientific contribution to the understanding of life in relation to ESS could come together in this session. 
 

Greetings--this is a midnight hour check-in, but I would be interested in knowing if this session got off the ground. My research is on early 20th c. studies of fossilization, including articulations of this process with earth sciences. Would be great to know if this is gained some responses!