Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth (The Commonwealth Fund Book Program) [Hardcover]

James Lovelock (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 1988 | ISBN-10: 0393025837 | ISBN-13: 978-0393025835 | Edition: 1st

Lovelock elaborates on his startling theory of life proposed in 1979 called Gaia. Much scientific work has confirmed Lovelock's theory that Earth is a single organism controlling its own environment, its life sustained by life. Drawings.

Editorial Reviews

Review

This book describes a set of observations about the life of our planet which may, one day, be recognized as one of the major discontinuities in human thought. If Lovelock turns out to be as right in his view of things as I believe he is, we will be viewing the Earth as a coherent system of life, self-regulating and self-changing, a sort of immense living organism.--Lewis Thomas --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

James Lovelock is an independent scientist, inventor, and author. He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974 and in 1990 was awarded the first Amsterdam Prize for the Environment by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. One of his inventions is the electron capture detector, which was important in the development of environmental awareness. It revealed for the first time the ubiquitous distribution of pesticide residues. He co-operated with NASA and some of his inventions were adopted in their programme of planetary exploration. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 252 pages
• Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc; 1st edition (August 1988)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0393025837
• ISBN-13: 978-0393025835
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.7 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,226,974 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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101 of 110 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Reviewing Lovelock's second book on the Gaia Hypothesis, December 5, 1996

By A Customer

This review is from: The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth (Commonwealth Fund Book Program) (Paperback)

"The Ages of Gaia" by James Lovelock

What is the Gaia Hypothesis? Stated simply,
the idea is that we may have discovered a living being bigger, more
ancient, and more complex than anything from our wildest dreams. That
being, called Gaia, is the Earth.

More precisely: that about one billion years after it's formation, our
planet was occupied by a meta-life form which began an ongoing process of
transforming this planet into its own substance. All the life forms of
the planet are part of Gaia. In a way analogous to the myriad different
cell colonies which make up our organs and bodies, the life forms of
earth in their diversity coevolve and contribute interactively to produce
and sustain the optimal conditions for the growth and prosperity not of
themselves, but of the larger whole, Gaia. That the very makeup of the atmosphere, seas,
and terrestrial crust is the result of radical interventions carried out
by Gaia through the evolving diversity of living creatures.

Encountering the Earth from space, a witness would know immediately that the planet was alive. The atmosphere would give it away. The atmospheric compositions of our sister planets, venus and mars, are: 95-96% carbon dioxide, 3-4% nitrogen, with traces of oxygen, argon and methane. The earth's atmosphere at present is 79% nitrogen, 21% oxygen with traces of carbon dioxide, methane and argon. The difference is Gaia, which transforms the outer layer of the planet into environments suitable to its further growth. For example, bacteria and photosynthetic algae began some 2.8 billions of years ago extracting the carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen into the atmosphere, setting the stage for larger and more energetic creatures powered by combustion, including, ultimately, ourselves.

That is how James Lovelock discovered Gaia; from outer space.In the
1960's, during the space race which followed the launching of Sputnik,
he was asked by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Nasa to help design
experiments to detect life on Mars.The Viking lander gathered and tested
some Martian soil for life with no results. Lovelock had predicted as
much, by analyzing the atmosphere of Mars: it is in a dead equilibrium.
By contrast, the atmosphere of Earth is in a "far from equilib
rium" state- meaning that there was some other complex process going on which maintained such an unlikely balance. It occurred to him that if
the Viking lander had landed on the frozen waste of antarctica, it might
not have found any trace of life on Earth either. But a sure giveaway
would be a complete atmospheric analysis... which the Viking lander was
not equipped to do. Lovelock's approach was not popular at Nasa because
Nasa needed a good reason to <I> land </I> on Mars, and the best was to look for life. Viking found nothing on Mars, but Lovelock had seen the Earth from the perspective of an ET looking for evidence of life. And he began thinking that what he was seeing was not so much a planet adorned with diverse life forms, but a planet transfigured and transformed by a self-evolving and self-regulating living system.By the nature of its activity it seemed to qualify as a living being. He named that being Gaia, after the Greek goddess which drew the living world forth from Chaos.

"The name of the living planet, Gaia, is not a synonym for the
biosphere-that part of the Earth where living things are seen normally to
exist. Still less is Gaia the same as the biota, which is simply the
collection of all individual living organisms. The biota and the
biosphere taken together form a part but not all of Gaia. Just as the
shell is part of the snail, so the rocks, the air, and the oceans are
part of Gaia. Gaia, as we shall see, has continuity with the past back to
the origins of life, and in the future as long as life persists. Gaia, as
a total planetary being, has properties that are not necesarily
discernable by just knowing individual species or populations of
organisms living together...Specifically, the Gaia hypothesis says that
the temperature,oxidation, state, acidity, and certain aspects of the
rocks and waters are kept constant, and that this homeostasis is
maintained by active feedback processes operated automatically and unconsciously by the biota."

Even the shifting of the tectonic plates, resulting in the changing
shapes of the continents, may result from the massive limestone deposits left in the earth by bioforms eons ago.

"You may find it hard to swallow the notion that anything as large
and apparently inanimate as the Earth is alive. Surely, you may say, the
Earth is almost wholly rock, and nearly all incandescent with heat. The
difficulty can be lessened if you let the image of a giant redwood tree
enter your mind.The tree undoubtedly is alive, yet 99% of it is dead.The
great tree is an ancient spire of dead wood,made of lignin and cellulose
by the ancestors of the thin layer of living cells which constitute its
bark. How like the Earth, and more so when we realize that many of the
atoms of the rocks far down into the magma were once part of the
ancestral life of which we all have come."

The root question of Gaia's critics, and a central point in his theory concerns the difference between a planetary environment which might only be the aggregate result of myriad independent life forms coevolving and sharing the same host, and one which is ultimately created by life forms deployed, so to speak, to accomplish the purpose of the larger being. Is the idea of Gaia only a romantic and dramatized description of the terrestrial biosphere and its effects, or is there a planetary being,
whose life cycle must be counted in the billions of years, which spawns
these evolving life forms to suit the purpose of its being. Do our kidney
cells ask each other these sorts of questions? While your white blood cells thrive and reproduce, going about their business,they are indisputably serving the life of the larger body which you use, though whatever consciousness they experience in their realm is certainly far from that which you, the larger being, the whole, experience.

Recent scientific work, such as in the field of complex systems, have begun to give us the impression that this opposition of terms, the larger caused by its constituents, or the costituents created by the larger, may be one of those oppositions which are the constructs of our own minds, and must be dropped if we are to understand the truth,
which is neither the one nor the other, but more difficult to comprehend
and more fascinating to behold. Perhaps there is awareness appropriate at every level.Perhaps that is a property of life.

And what might be the nature of its evolution, this planetary
being called Gaia? Anthropocentrists to the last, we might assume that
the production of the human species is a great step upward for Gaia, a
sort of rapidly evolving brain tissue. Or that she prepares the earth as a
cradle and crucible of consciousness evolving. Other analogies come to
mind: are we part of her arsenal of interplanetary spores?

And what might constitute a life cycle for such a being- might it be as
strange as that of the slime mold? What stage would Gaia be in now? Is
our species part of her maturity or an incubation period? Is Gaia
herself somehow part of a larger living being, perhaps on a galactic
scale? If so how do the cells of this larger being remain in communication? Will we eventually be able to experience something of the awareness which Gaia has?

Lovelock points out that Gaia, being ancient and resourceful
enough to have carried out these successive changes of the planet in
spite of asteroid collisions and other setbacks, is herself probably not
endangered by the relatively momentary depradations of the human species, as it befouls and cripples the bio-dynamics of its environment. Rather,the danger is to the human rac

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Look Into The Past Can Insure Our Future, June 2, 2000

By 

Paul Schicke "Sundance" (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth (Commonwealth Fund Book Program) (Paperback)

Imagine living in Europe during the Dark Ages, when everyone thought the world was flat, and having someone demonstrate to you that the world is a sphere. In our modern version of the Dark Ages of the environment we are under the delusion that our Earth is lump of rock inhabited by life. Lovelock shows that the Earth is a living, self-regulating system comprised of all of life tightly coupled with its environment. He traces the 3.5 billion year life of the Earth as a living entity in an easy and enjoyable to read fashion. If we as a species are fortunate enough to survive the next 1000 years it will be because this book was recognized as the most important ever written in the 20th century. For you Gaia theory buffs out there: The Gaia theory dawned on Lovelock when he was having a conversation with Carl Sagan and some other colleagues.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Delightful Little Book, October 9, 2007

By 

Individual Investor - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth (Commonwealth Fund Book Program) (Paperback)

The Ages of Gaia is not just the story of Gaia and how she was discovered, but also the adventures of an individual scientist vs. the scientific establishment and the adventures of a British land-lover vs. the political establishment. It also is a gentle warning to the passengers on spaceship Earth, a.k.a. Gaia, that the spaceship is not in danger, the passengers are!

Gaia is not a living creature. Gaia is a self regulating habitat that favors denizens that manage to get along harmoniously and hinders those that don't. There are no reasons or theologies given for this behavior. As Ayn Rand might have said: it is the nature of Gaia to be like she is. Gaia is what our senses perceive and what our reason understands. Gaia does not play favorites.

The only chapter that put me to sleep was the one about god and Gaia. Maybe you'll find it interesting. I tried twice to read it but to no avail.