Product Description

For millennia, humankind has exploited the Earth without counting the cost. Now, as the world warms and weather patterns dramatically change, the Earth is beginning to fight back. James Lovelock, one of the giants of environmental thinking, argues passionately and poetically that, although global warming is now inevitable, we are not yet too late to save at least part of human civilization. This short book, written at the age of eighty-six after a lifetime engaged in the science of the earth, is his testament.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #15471 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-15
• Released on: 2007-03-27
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 240 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. The end is all but nigh for Mother Earth's inhabitants unless drastic measures are soon taken: that's the rueful prognostication delivered by Lovelock (Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth), intuitive originator of the theory that the world is a self-regulating system that, over the eons, has been able to sustain an equilibrium between hot and cold so as to support life. Now, propelled by global warming, Lovelock says, a tipping point has almost been reached beyond which the Earth will not recover sufficiently to sustain human life comfortably. Lovelock dismisses biomass fuels, wind farms, solar energy and fuel cell innovations as technologies unlikely to mitigate greenhouse gases in time to save the planet. Instead he sees nuclear energy as the only energy source that can meet our needs in time to prevent catastrophe. Chernobyl was a calamity, he notes, but nuclear power's danger is "insignificant compared with the real threat of intolerable and lethal heatwaves" and rising sea levels that could "threaten every coastal city of the world." Lovelock's pro-nuke enthusiasm, unexpected from one of the mid-20th century's most ardent environmental thinkers, is the well-reasoned core of this urgent call for braking at the brink of global catastrophe. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
British geophysicist Lovelock introduced the Gaia theory in the early 1970s, envisioning the biosphere as "an active, adaptive control system able to maintain the earth in homeostasis." Since then, Lovelock has expanded the Gaia concept to embrace "physical, chemical, biological, and human components," recognizing that organisms do change the environment, none more radically than humanity. Lovelock now describes Gaia as fighting for its very existence as a rapidly increasing human population threatens to upset the precise balance of forces the make the earth conducive to life. Lovelock looks beyond biodiversity (see E. O. Wilson's The Creation, p.19) to elucidate the functions of the polar ice caps, Amazon rain forests, and ocean currents, and then explains the causes and consequences of global warming. This is solid science, a practice Lovelock seems to abandon in his strangely irresponsible arguments for nuclear energy and against sustainable energy sources (see Helen Caldicott, p.15). In spite of its flaws, Lovelock's tough-minded presentation is a valuable contribution to the urgent debate over humankind's future. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
James Lovelock is the author of more than 200 scientific papers and the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis (now Gaia Theory). He has written three books on the subject: Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, The Ages of Gaia and Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine, as well as an autobiography, Homage to Gaia. In 2003 he was made a Companion of Honour by Her Majesty the Queen, and in September 2005 Prospect magazine named him as one of the world's top 100 global public intellectuals. In April 2006 he was awarded the Edinburgh Medal at the Edinburgh International Science Festival.

Customer Reviews

A Must Read
Revenge of Gaia

By James Lovelock
Reviewed by Dashiell

In his latest book James Lovelock reviews the history of his theory of Gaia, brings it up to date, and describes the terrible difficulties Gaia will undergo if the Earth continues to heat up. Can Gaia continue to manage the atmosphere with Man, a loose cannon on the deck, releasing carbon dioxide at the rate we do?
The idea that life at the Earth's surface somehow regulated the chemistry of the atmosphere had been with him for a long time, when one day in the 1960s while looking at photographs from space, Lovelock realized that the planet Earth, unlike other planets, was alive, and that life on the surface could be considered one creature. Not long after, walking into his local village from his house in the English countryside, he fell in with his friend and neighbor, the novelist, William Golding, and outlined his hypothesis. Golding suggested that he call it Gaia, after the ancient Greek goddess of the Earth.
Gaia was taken up by New Agers, who saw her as the great Earth mother, embodiment of eastern religions, and comforter of feminists. Sir James - he has been knighted by the Queen for his many accomplishments and inventions - does not object to this as long as they make an effort to understand the theory; he believes there can be consilience between faith and Gaia.
The oneness of life on Earth, the essence of the theory, can be explained by the concept of symbiosis, defined by the Oxford dictionary in1979 as "an association of two different organisms living attached to each other, or one with the other, to the advantage of both". Working with other scientists, Sir James has established that all life is in symbiosis. He gives an amusing example: If we were concerned only with our individual well being, the most efficient way for animals such as us to expel the nitrogen we ingest and cannot use, would be to exhale it. But instead we benefit Gaia by converting it into ammonia and peeing it out in a form that plants can use. The Gaia theory, for it has been accepted by the scientific community and is no longer merely a hypothesis, is now seen to embrace the Earth's surface minerals and the atmosphere as well as living things.
But Gaia is about to make a radical adjustment to eliminate Man and most other forms of life will go with us. The sun is getting hotter and, left to itself, Gaia has another two billion years to go, but the process is being speeded up by the greenhouses gases, carbon dioxide and methane, which are being released in increasing quantity by our activities and we may have less than a hundred. Sir James considers the situation critical.
He is a Green despite his dislike of environmentalism for its anthropocentricism, which makes Man, rather than Gaia, its focus. He is unpopular with many Greens for his support of nuclear power which he considers less dangerous than other sources of electric power (including hydro), and vastly preferable to burning hydrocarbons. As for the waste, he is confident that nuclear fusion will be the power source of the future and the waste from nuclear fission plants can be used as fuel. In the meantime he suggests storing it in ecologically sensitive areas to keep developers out! He says nature thrives in its vicinity and has pictures to prove it. He is opposed to windmills.
He is unpopular with many greens for favoring genetically engineered crops. His position is that unless the world's human population is drastically reduced we must go with GE crops because they yield more food per acre. We already use half the Earth's land surface for agriculture.
This reviewer finds his arguments convincing. The Guardian reported in April 2006 that with the aid of the World Bank, the Cargill Grain Company, and a number of European fast food chicken outlets including Macdonald's, some 40 square miles of Brazilian rain forest is currently being cleared for the express reason of growing non-genetically modified soy beans to be fed to squeamish Europeans who refuse to eat chickens that have been fed GE soy beans! O tempora, O mores. It seems that Man the predator has advanced beyond simply hunting animals to making Gaia herself his prey. One is tempted to sympathize with the protagonist of the recent novel, Ayesha, My Queendom Come, who believes in protecting Gaia by reverting to war, murder, even infanticide and cannibalism. Surely if people cared for Gaia they would simply eat the soy protein and skip the chicken stage? Lovelock says nothing about vegetarianism.
But could the great man have underestimated his own discovery? For example, he explains how aerosols, the tiny particles that are mostly products of man's combustion of hydrocarbons, form a protective cover that reflects the sun's heat rays back into space, and points out that if we stop burning fossil fuels, these particles will not be replaced when they drop to Earth. Could not this be Gaia taking care of itself? And with global warming will there not be more evaporation from the world's oceans and lakes and hence more cloud cover?
This is a thought-provoking book by a great scientist.

The Earth needs this book to shout the alarm
At last a book about the Earth written so that the general public can understand the state the world is in. How many books have been written by the scientific community that people buy, read the first few pages find that it is completely beyond them, and then place it on a shelf where it is dusted for a few years before being given away? There are only 176 pages and it has been written as a book on how to survive and live on this planet.
I would love to meet James Lovelock and shake him by the hand for having the courage to write this book and hope one day he will read my novel The House of Stones also about the environment but written in a lighter vein.
The only problem I can see is that it is too late, I doubt whether China, India and other countries that were once poor or are still poor and are now becoming prosperous manufacturing cheap products for the rest of the world will back down from their lucrative market. Plus religious sects that believe in very large families will they quickly do a U turn and reduce the size of their families? The world will not work together for the good of the whole. England now has far too many people on it to survive without outside help. A world that should keep its people down to 1.5 billion now has 6.5billion and rising. The book is brilliant but when will the people wake up to just what is happening around them and start doing something about it before it is too late.

Important and thought-provoking.
While the title of this book sounds like a sensationalist doomsday tale, this book is instead a factual and mostly objective (though not entirely) discussion about our Earth's current climatic trajectory. James Lovelock is an excellent author and I'll compare him to Stephen Hawking: both are brilliant scientists and both have an ability to explain mind-numbingly complex concepts with eloquence. In it, James Lovelock discusses Gaia which is, as he says, "a self-regulating system made up from the totality of organisms, the surface rocks, the ocean and the atmosphere tightly coupled as an evolving system" (Page 162). He speaks in detail about Gaia's history and her tendency to regulate her environment and he proposes many logical and sometimes astounding ways that humanity might prepare for impending catastrophe (global warming in this case). Lovelock also makes some rough predictions about how humanity might fare in the coming century and beyond as Gaia makes much-needed adjustments to the type and distribution of life on Earth.

Mr. Lovelock speaks of Gaia with affection and concern; and it so happens he's very concerned now about Gaia's health and, like a physician discussing a patient, explains that Gaia is currently suffering the early symptoms of a terrible fever. This analogy is a logical one if you accept Gaian theory - the notion of a single Earth-system wherein all the living and non-living things are interconnected like the individual cells within our own bodies. This fever, Lovelock explains, will last a long time and Gaia might pull through it and recover; but we may not.

Perhaps it is the language and tone which Lovelock writes or perhaps the simple ways he explains then illustrates the large-scale and scientific study of the global climate but after reading this text I am sufficiently convinced that this may be the most accurate of "predictions" yet to be published.

(This brief review is a shortened version of this article at my website: http://www.davesabine.com/Thoughts/TheRevengeofGaia/tabid/184/Default.aspx)