Based on over eighty hours of interviews with Lovelock and unprecedented access to his personal papers and scientific archive, Jonathan Watts has written a definitive and revelatory biography of a fascinating, sometimes contradictory man. James Lovelock is best known as the father of Gaia Theory, the idea that life on Earth is a self-sustaining system in which organisms interact with their environments to maintain a habitable ecosystem. Lovelock’s life was a chronicle of twentieth-century science, and somehow he seemed to have a hand in much of it. During the Second World War he worked at the National Medical Research Institute, where his life-long interest in chemical tracing began. In the 1960s he worked at NASA. He worked for MI5 and MI6 during the Cold War. He was a science advisor to the oil giant Shell, who he warned as early as 1966 that fossil fuels were causing serious harm to the environment. He invented the technology that found the hole in the Ozone layer. And all of this shaped Gaia Theory – a theory that could not have been developed without the collaboration of two important women in his life. Drawing together the many influences which shaped his life and thinking, The Many Lives of James Lovelock is a unique biography of one of the most fascinating scientists of the modern age.

Jim Lovelock (1919-2022) was an iconic figure in British science, a prophet whose prophecies are coming true. This is his definitive authorised biography. Lovelock is best known as the 'father' of Gaia theory, which is now established as the most useful way of understanding the dramatic changes happening to the environment of the Earth. But few people know about his early work as a chemist and inventor - work which included inventing the detectors used to search for life on Mars, and blowing the whistle on the depletion of ozone layer. In his personal life, he was a Quaker and conscientious objector in World War Two (later changing his mind in view of the evils of Nazism), supported his family for a time by selling his own blood, and gave up a salary and security to become an independent scientist based in an English village - from which all his best known work emerged. In the wake of his death on 26th July 2022, his 103rd birthday, this book truly reveals an independent, original and inspiring life.

One of today's most influential environmentalists tells the fascinating storyof his life as a self-made inventor and scientist.

Gaia: A New Look At Life on Earth may continue to divide opinion, but nobody can deny that the book offers a powerful insight into the creative thinking of its author, James E. Lovelock. Published in 1979, Gaia offered a radically new hypothesis: the Earth, Lovelock argued, is a living entity. Together, the planet and all its separate living organisms form a single self-regulating body, sustaining life and helping it evolve through time. Lovelock sees humans as no more special than other elements of the planet, railing against the once widely-held belief that the good of mankind is the only thing that matters. Despite being seen as radical, and even idiotic on its publication, a version of Lovelock’s viewpoint has found resonance in contemporary debates about the environment and climate, and has now broadly come to be accepted by modern thinkers. As man’s effects on the climate become increasingly extreme, more and more elements of the Earth’s self-regulation seem to be unveiled – forcing scientists to ask how far the planet might be able to go in order self-regulate effectively. Indeed, despite its far-fetched elements, Lovelock’s Gaia thesis seems to ring more convincingly today than ever before; that it does is largely a result of the critical thinking skills that allowed Lovelock to produce novel explanations for existing evidence and, above all, to connect existing fragments of evidence together in new ways.

In 1972, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis began collaborating on the Gaia hypothesis. They suggested that over geological time, life on Earth has had a major role in both producing and regulating its own environment. Gaia is now an ecological and environmental worldview underpinning vital scientific and cultural debates over environmental issues. Their ideas have transformed the Earth and life sciences, as well as contemporary conceptions of nature. Their correspondence describes these crucial developments from the inside, showing how their partnership proved decisive for the development of the Gaia hypothesis. Clarke and Dutreuil provide historical background and explain the concepts and references introduced throughout the Lovelock-Margulis correspondence, while highlighting the major landmarks of their collaboration within the sequence of almost 300 letters written between 1970 and 2007. This book will be of interest to researchers in ecology, history of science, environmental history and climate change, and cultural science studies.

During the 2010s, science fiction's immortal adversaries King Kong and Godzilla, representing our conflicts per Carl Sagan's "dream dragons" analogy, made comebacks in American cinema. The blockbuster Kaiju resurged onto the screen, depicting these protectors of an Earth plagued by mankind's hubris and folly. With Earth's future hanging in the balance, their climactic 2021 staging settled a score between the two giant monsters, resolving Toho's classic 1963 film King Kong vs. Godzilla. As formidable creatures emerging from Time's Tomb on Mother Earth, metaphorical Kong and Godzilla are considered here in light of new millennial environmentalism's stark reality. This book, nostalgic in tone, explores the meaning of Kong and Godzilla as planetary saviors--titanic protectors of a theoretical "living Earth" Gaia--defending the globe from a prehistoric plague of adversaries.

Al Gore leads the charge against climate change, the world's greatest threat, in an incendiary new foreword to this timeless classic that launched his environmental career. If you want to know Gore, you need this book!

In A Rough Ride to the Future, James Lovelock - the great scientific visionary of our age - presents a radical vision of humanity's future as the thinking brain of our Earth-system James Lovelock, who has been hailed as 'the man who conceived the first wholly new way of looking at life on earth since Charles Darwin' (Independent) and 'the most profound scientific thinker of our time' (Literary Review) continues, in his 95th year, to be the great scientific visionary of our age. This book introduces two new Lovelockian ideas. The first is that three hundred years ago, when Thomas Newcomen invented the steam engine, he was unknowingly beginning what Lovelock calls 'accelerated evolution', a process which is bringing about change on our planet roughly a million times faster than Darwinian evolution. The second is that as part of this process, humanity has the capacity to become the intelligent part of Gaia, the self-regulating Earth system whose discovery Lovelock first announced nearly 50 years ago. In addition, Lovelock gives his reflections on how scientific advances are made, and his own remarkable life as a lone scientist. The contribution of human beings to our planet is, Lovelock contends, similar to that of the early photosynthesisers around 3.4 billion years ago, which made the Earth's atmosphere what it was until very recently. By our domination and our invention, we are now changing the atmosphere again. There is little that can be done about this, but instead of feeling guilty about it we should recognise what is happening, prepare for change, and ensure that we survive as a species so we can contribute to - perhaps even guide - the next evolution of Gaia. The road will be rough, but if we are smart enough life will continue on Earth in some form far into the future. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974, JAMES LOVELOCK is the author of more than 200 scientific papers and the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis (now Gaia Theory). His many books on the subject include Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), The Revenge of Gaia (2006), and The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009). In 2003 he was made a Companion of Honour by Her Majesty the Queen, in 2005 Prospect magazine named him one of the world's top 100 public intellectuals, and in 2006 he received the Wollaston Medal, the highest Award of the UK Geological Society.

What are the conditions that foster true novelty and allow visionaries to set their eyes on unknown horizons? What have been the challenges that have spawned new innovations, and how have they shaped modern biology? In Dreamers, Visionaries, and Revolutionaries in the Life Sciences, editors Oren Harman and Michael R. Dietrich explore these questions through the lives of eighteen exemplary biologists who had grand and often radical ideas that went far beyond the run-of-the-mill science of their peers. From the Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who coined the word “biology” in the early nineteenth century, to the American James Lovelock, for whom the Earth is a living, breathing organism, these dreamers innovated in ways that forced their contemporaries to reexamine comfortable truths. With this collection readers will follow Jane Goodall into the hidden world of apes in African jungles and Francis Crick as he attacks the problem of consciousness. Join Mary Lasker on her campaign to conquer cancer and follow geneticist George Church as he dreams of bringing back woolly mammoths and Neanderthals. In these lives and the many others featured in these pages, we discover visions that were sometimes fantastical, quixotic, and even threatening and destabilizing, but always a challenge to the status quo.