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Academic & Professional Books  History & Other Humanities  History of Science & Nature

Writing Gaia The Scientific Correspondence of James Lovelock & Lynn Margulis

By: James Lovelock(Author), Lynn Margulis(Author), Bruce Clarke(Editor), Sébastien Dutreuil(Editor)
484 pages, b/w illustrations
Writing Gaia
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  • Writing Gaia ISBN: 9781108833097 Hardback Aug 2022 In stock
    £39.99
    #257053
Price: £39.99
About this book Contents Customer reviews Biography Related titles

About this book

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. Writing Gaia will be of interest to researchers in ecology, history of science, environmental history and climate change, and cultural science studies.

Contents

Preface

Part I. 1970-1972:
1970
1971
1972

Part II. 1973-1979:
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979

Part III. 1980-1991:
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991

Part IV. 1992-2007:
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007

Part V. Commentaries on Lovelock and Margulis: Darwinizing Gaia / W. Ford Doolittle
Gaia at the Margulis lab / Betsey Dexter Dyer
Gaia and the water of life / Stephan Harding
Gaia as a problem of social theory / Bruno Latour
Befriending Gaia: My early correspondence with Jim Lovelock / Tim Lenton
Gaia's pervasive influence / Chris Rapley
Gaia's microbiome / John F. Stolz
Tangled up in Gaia / Tyler Volk Lovelock and Margulis Andrew Watson
Discovering geology, discovering Gaia / Peter Westbroek

Glossary of names
Glossary of terms
Bibliography
Index

Customer Reviews

Biography

James Lovelock, who was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974, 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), The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009) and A Rough Ride to the Future (2014). 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.


Contributors:
- James Lovelock
- W. Ford Doolittle
- Betsey Dexter Dyer
- Stephan Harding
- Bruno Latour
- Tim Lenton
- Chris Rapley
- John F. Stolz
- Tyler Volk
- Andrew Watson
- Peter Westbroek

By: James Lovelock(Author), Lynn Margulis(Author), Bruce Clarke(Editor), Sébastien Dutreuil(Editor)
484 pages, b/w illustrations
Media reviews

"Gaia – a hypothesis, a theory, a research program, a philosophy of nature. For the last half century, the astonishing work of James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis has cast and recast again a concept with implications for the atmosphere, Earth history, ecology, and exobiology. Both of them would have already stood as major figures in modern science; together, they gave us a concept that remains generative across fields. In this vital, remarkable volume of their letters, one can see the origin and development of Gaia, in the complementarity of their interventions, in their mutual support, in their occasional substantive disagreement. Bruce Clarke and Sébastien Dutreuil bring us a volume that will be read for decades across the very wide range of the environmental sciences."
– Peter Galison, Joseph Pellegrino University Professor, Harvard University, USA

"Indeed, Lovelock and Margulis found that they 'had something to say' together, a question they ask in 1971 in a letter! What they had to say changed my life and the lives of many people. Gaia is a polymorphous concept, hypothesis, planet, boundary object in conflict, and collaboration among scientists of different disciplines and persuasions, Earth systems' conceptual foundation, popular passion, and much more. Gaia matters, and Lovelock and Margulis gave us this generative formulation of the living Earth as a complex dynamic, self-organizing system. This collection – with its sober, extensive, enticing scholarly apparatus – makes the hairs of my arms stand up with pleasure and excitement. Here the reader will find unadorned letters between two very different kinds of professional scientist over many years of a complex personal and intellectual relationship. I am deeply grateful to the scholarship and passion of Bruce Clarke and Sébastien Dutreuil for this book."
– Donna Haraway, University of California at Santa Cruz, author of Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene

"Writing Gaia offers a fascinating window on the meeting of two great minds. This insightful set of correspondence and commentaries provides an unprecedented resource on the history of the Gaia concept."
– Michael R. Dietrich, University of Pittsburgh, USA

"Writing Gaia is a revealing and surprisingly entertaining record of the long intellectual and personal relationship between two idiosyncratic scientific geniuses and rebels from whose cerebral symbiosis and complex friendship was born the Gaia hypothesis, which profoundly changed how we think about Earth and life. The collected letters of Lovelock and Margulis, along with accompanying essays by some of their key collaborators, have been skillfully assembled with insightful commentary by Clarke and Dutreuil. The result is a riveting intellectual journey, spiced with gossip, intellectual feuds, and occasional moments of touching intimacy. This book will be required reading for students of Earth's biosphere and of modern history of science."
– David Grinspoon, astrobiologist and author of Earth in Human Hands

"It is not hyperbole to say that microbiologist and cell biologist Lynn Margulis and atmospheric chemist James Lovelock were two giants of twentieth-century science. Margulis's serial endosymbiosis theory resolved the riddle of the origin of the eukaryotic cell, forever changing biology. Lovelock developed the Gaia hypothesis, a radically synthetic vision of life on Earth, in which Margulis became his chief collaborator. Published here for the first time, their correspondence provides a fascinating window into the lively interaction of two extraordinary minds and personalities, while also showing the evolution of the Gaia idea and its cultural and scientific reception. This is captivating reading, and I could not put it down!"
– James Strick, Professor and Chair of Program in Science, Technology and Society, Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, USA

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