James Lovelock

Martin Rees, the former Astronomer Royal of Britain, puts our chances of survival into the next century at about 50%, a prediction he made about 12 years ago before some of the more bad news came in.

So, you know, my personal definition of Doomer follows very closely with man named warren hearn who was the first abortion doctor in this country when it was legalized in the 1970s and he wrote a book called homoecophagous which was published just three or four years ago now which um essentially talks about humans on the planet being similar to a cancer to the planet that, you know, James Lovelock with his Gaia philosophy that the Earth is self-regulating and will will heal itself and of the planetary disease of humans.

So that's sort of the area that I focus on personally when I think about this is this idea that there is there is nothing inherently possible that humans can change into that will keep them from being what they are.

I might have some philosophical bones to pick with the, you know, the analogy there of, you know, something like the earth has a fever and we're the virus and it's just working to rid ourselves of it.

With CFCs being used around the globe, a crucial question remained unanswered: What happened to all these chemicals once they were released into the atmosphere? It was this question that professor of chemistry Frank Sherwood Rowland began to ask himself.

In 1972, Rowland attended a presentation by British scientist James Lovelock, in which he suggested that practically all of the trichlorofluoromethane, or CFC-11, ever manufactured was still present in the atmosphere to this day.

The notion stunned Rowland.

If this truly was the case, what effect could this be having on the planet's atmosphere? Rowland joined forces with a postdoc in his lab named Mario Molina to find out.

I think that we are part of a planetary system, though we don't behave that way.

It's been well described by James Lovelock as... an interconnected and balancing system that he gave the name Gaia theory to and as I see it humans are just part of that interconnected web and I think that what happens when One, one, one aspect of anything that's trying to say imbalance gets too heavy.

Yeah.

You have to make adjustments on the other side.

Vernadsky had a sort of secular version of that.

I've always interpreted James Lovelock's concept of Gaia as being a little bit in the same vein.

You presented another concept, which you called holos.

Are these all the same intuition arriving at the same point, or is yours a different thing from these other ones? Well, tell us what HOLUS is and tell us the

For a long time, it was poorly understood how the conditions for life on Earth are absolutely dependent on this complex and delicate interplay.

The program reaches a crescendo as the academics have a vigorous exchange, well, a bit of an argy-bargy really, about the validity of James Lovelock's Gaia theory.

By then, I was so engaged in listening, my coffee had gone stone cold.

I guarantee you'll find this a classic In Our Time.

By indirections, yes.

The-- Can you t-tell us, um, then how th-this might tie in with...

I'm sure people are thinking about, um, James Lovelock and the Gaia theory, which came out in '69, around about the same time as, uh, near enough.

Can you tell how and if it ties in with that theory of plate tectonics?

And, and, and I want people to be careful.

There was a man named James Lovelock, and he came up with this idea called the Gaia hypothesis with Lynn Margulis.

Oh, yeah.

And, and that can be taken too far.