In respect to Gaia: Kenneth Cukier celebrates the life of James Lovelock
‘Lovelock’s Quakerism was not straightforward.’
Gaia is the Greek goddess of Earth, the mother of life. It was thus a suitable name for a theory that the planet’s natural systems, from air and water currents to wetlands and volcanos, are not discrete phenomena but act as a self-regulating system, like a living organism. When James Lovelock conjured up the idea in the 1960s, it was far off mainstream scientific thinking. But the Gaia hypothesis influenced the green movement and today is the standard way that people think about the environment.
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