James Lovelock

I think this is the headline story that will dominate for years to come.

I recall the British scientist and inventor James Lovelock saying a few years ago that Britain, because it was sort of an island somewhat buffered by cooling seas, would become a climate lifeboat.

And his plan was that the UK should start building more hospitals and more schools just to be ready for those refugees.

But instead, what we've seen is the Brexit vote and a desire by many people to tighten the borders and keep everybody else out.

We are their habitat and therefore we live in a symbiotic relationship with them.

To the degree that an author whom I've been reading now with great, great attention and I'm enthralled by her work is the biologist Lynn Margulis, who at one stage was married to Carl Sagan and worked on the Gaia theory back in the 1960s with James Lovelock.

She explores microorganisms, bacteria and other tiny, tiny, tiny single cellular life forms.

And she sees that they are the ones who really are in control.

I hope I managed to keep, keep the thread going generally.

But do you know James Lovelock? I do not.

He's one of well, they sometimes call him one of the last genuine quote scientists in that he was a generalist.

He recently died.

We were imagining new possibilities together.

Inspired by ideas like James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, we imagined ourselves as neurons in a new global brain.

Anything was possible.

It was an intellectual and creative orgy.

But the whole Gaia theory, which I... explored um as i was deepening into your work tell tell our listeners what the gaia i mean paganism i don't want this to be what is paganism i don't want this conversation to be that but i think i i want it to be far broader i my my listeners know paganism i believe um so what is the gaia theory

okay um the gaia theory i think about 1974 thereabouts uh James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis.

Often Lynn Margulis, of course, is left in the background, but she was really important in the whole thing.

The Gaia theory, the theory that the planet is alive.

yeah yeah so we were talking a little bit about or I mentioned nature, and you do talk about it, speak to it in the book.

I think you quoted someone named James Lovelock,

who I never heard

of before, actually.

I'm trying to remember the name right now.

Um, Oh, the lady? Well, Lynn Margulis is in on it, but then there's a guy, James Lovelock, who is sort of one of the main proponents of the Gaia hypothesis.

So Florian picks this up kind of through a modern lens, very early surfaces, some of the controversy, but then starts to like remind us of some of the history, but then also kind of reimagine the Gaia hypothesis as, As we think about things like the climate change and a lot of habitat destruction, et cetera, are there sort of, you know, interesting ideas or concepts to surface and to put back into sort of the perspective of modern science? scientific practice.

And so the article or the perspective piece that Florian wrote is called Gaia with a Thousand Faces.

They don't carry some sort of, if there's an epigenetic culture, right, that gets passed down, that's sort of hardwired in us the day we're born, that's not what's being passed, but if it's got the ability to procreate, the ability to preserve itself, right, and to improve itself, for continuous self-improvement, right? Isn't that a life form? I mean, aren't we actually spawning a new life form, arguably? No,

I don't think so, although, what's his face, James Lovelock, who wrote Gaia Hypothesis, would agree with you.

He says we're moving into the nova scene, and that it is another form of life, and we need to recognize it as such.

And he believes that it will want to keep us around.

You hear the Gaia hypothesis.

And an interesting question is, you know, and this was co-authored kind of by James Lovelock and Len Margulies.

And as I said, it became kind of a big topic of discussion in the 80s.

And you hear about the Gaia hypothesis, but It's odd.

When you're just talking to people who have never heard about Gaia, what do you what do you say to explain it to them? And then maybe I'll drill down on the meaning of the hypothesis.

No, absolutely.

I mean, the hypothesis originated with Lovelock, although he started working with Margulis very early.

And Lovelock, James Lovelock was studying, I mean, if I have this right, he was essentially trying to figure out how would you know if another planet, he's working with NASA as a consultant, right? Thinking about how would you figure out from a distance if another planet has life on it? And he starts thinking, what would you be able to detect in that atmosphere of like, let's say, of Mars? And then once he starts thinking about it from this perspective, he kind of shifts his gaze back to Earth.

I

have to say that Mena is also, besides connecting to this term you mentioned, Gaia, from James Lovelock, the idea that the planet is a living organism.

For that reason, we avoid the word God.

We respect that word.