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“... of account should be given of the shaping of the conditions of life by life itself? In the 1970s James Lovelock, independent scientist and inventor, proposed the Gaia hypothesis. He argued that the Earth regulates itself, and responds to change, in the same sort of way that a single living organism does. The Earth acts to keep itself alive. ...”

“... ensure its own survival. This idea has new resonance in a time of climate crisis, and in Novacene, James Lovelock, the man who proposed the Gaia hypothesis (and who turned a hundred in 2019), has set down some thoughts about the possible future of life on this rapidly warming planet.Lovelock, a prolific inventor and ...”

“... against pessimism he is sceptical about massive geo-engineering schemes of the kind put forward by James Lovelock and the eccentric Stewart Brand. Can-do projects on a grand scale have been dreamed up before: draining the Mediterranean into the Sahara, for instance, or diverting warm Pacific water into the Arctic Sea and turning Siberia into a vast ...”

“... town off the Norfolk coast. UEA’s neighbouring ziggurats. Space colonies. Arctic cities. James Stirling’s particularly daft proposal to link Derby’s new civic centre to the town’s past by propping up the façade of the old Assembly Rooms at 45 degrees. Every week brought forth a blinding new notion. Murphy’s catholic survey has a straitened ...”

“... because we’re worried that if we start we will have no choice but to think about nothing else. James Lovelock, in his powerful and extremely depressing book The Revenge of Gaia, says this: I am old enough to notice a marked similarity between attitudes over sixty years ago towards the threat of war and those now towards the threat of global ...”

“... agricultural labourers, fantasist and (in Mount’s semi-serious conceit) a 19th-century avatar of James Lovelock and his Gaia hypothesis. One of Jefferies’s favourite haunts was Liddington Hill (now within the official town boundary of Swindon), with its remains of an Iron Age hill-fort and famous clump of beech trees, Liddington Clump. Visiting ...”

“... contrast between Appleyard and two men who say kind things in the advance publicity for the book: James Lovelock and Oliver Sacks. Be as cynical as you please about Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis or Sacks’s romanticised neurology – they are writers whose best books deserve their enormous readership. They have changed ...”

“... deferred that we must act decisively now. Are these demands reasonable? They might be if – as James Hansen, one of the founders of climate science, has claimed – it is ‘our last chance to save humanity’. But is it? Any change in temperature will inevitably benefit some species and harm others, so it probably is the last chance to save those adapted ...”

“... sense of complexity, a bit like Gaia itself. (ANT, too, seems analogous to the complex system that James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis intuited as they built out their hypothesis in the early 1970s.) The days of the garrulous sciences returning from the field, or the lab, to announce their findings about objects unable to speak for themselves were over. So ...”

“... Of how polar bears drown, hundreds of miles from land, as ice floes under them melt. I think of James Lovelock’s face, after he’d given his lecture explaining that most of this planet, fifty years from now, will be underwater beginning with Bangladesh, at the top of the Bay of Bengal. Those tangled mangrove swamps of Sundarbans, paradise for ...”

“... words of Gerry Canavan, who in 2013 became the first scholar to open them. Butler had been reading James Lovelock and thinking about what would happen if humans migrated to other worlds while continuing to be ‘part of an earth organism in some literal way’: ‘phantom-limb pain’ was a phrase she used in the notes in the boxes. ‘A somehow ...”

“... and literature. She was influenced by the work of Walter Pater, and by her friendships with Henry James, Robert Browning and John Singer Sargent. But she was never swayed to the extent that she relinquished her intellectual independence. An atheist and materialist, she had no time for contemporary flirtations with the occult. In 1885 she attended a meeting of ...”

“... shield against ultraviolet light, be quite as dangerous as hydrogen bombs? Dyson points to James Lovelock’s Gaia, the notion that ‘the chemistry and ecology of Earth are linked in a single system that keeps the environment of the planet within limits tolerable to life.’ ‘I find the Gaia theory plausible,’ he comments, adding that ‘we ...”