Gaia: A New Look At Life on Earth.

LOVELOCK, James E.

Item Number: 125096

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979.

First edition of this classic work. Octavo, original cloth. Signed by James Lovelock on the title page. Fine in a fine price-clipped dust jacket. Cover illustration by Henri Rousseau.

The Gaia Hypothesis was first formulated during the 1960s as a result of Lovelock’s work for NASA concerned with detecting life on Mars, the hypothesis proposes that living and non-living parts of the Earth form a complex interacting system that can be thought of as a single organism. Named after the Greek goddess Gaia at the suggestion of novelist William Golding, the hypothesis postulates that the biosphere has a regulatory effect on the Earth's environment that acts to sustain life. Written for the non-scientist, Gaia is a journey through time and space in search of evidence with which to support a new and radically different model of our planet. In contrast to conventional belief that living matter is passive in the face of threats to its existence, the book explores the hypothesis that the earth's living matter-air, ocean, and land surfaces-forms a complex system that has the capacity to keep the Earth a fit place for life. " This may turn out to be one of the epochal insights of the 20th century" (CoEvolution Quarterly).