Lovelock was fond of going on walks with the novelist William Golding, who lived in the same village. On one of these perambulations he shared his hypothesis with his friend, who, after mulling it over, “suggested that anything alive deserves a name”, and promptly came up with one: Gaia, Greek Goddess of the Earth.
Lovelock published his ideas in 1979, with Gaia in the title: Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. Some scientists ridiculed its ideas by saying: how could tiny single-celled microbes act with a sense of moral agency and “decide” to create conditions to support life?
Lovelock was stung by the criticism. In The Ages of Gaia (1988)” he countered by claiming that Life – as it began steadily and inevitably to evolve – began naturally to create conditions for Life to flourish. It just happened that way: there was no agency involved.
The scientific community was broadly satisfied, but in other circles it was the very notion that the Earth was alive in a holistic sense that interested them. Gaia was enthusiastically taken up by New Agers, Pagans and Pantheists, many of whom came to believe in Gaia as a spiritual entity. It was also adopted by Deep Ecologists, who incorporated it into their philosophy.
Did choosing a name from Greek mythology make it appear less credible as a scientific theory? Lovelock was merely following the scientific convention used to name new planetary bodies: for example, when a dwarf planet was discovered in 2003 it was named Sedna, after the Inuit goddess of the sea and marine mammals.
Yet, nowadays, it gets barely a mention in either scientific papers or popular science programmes. Why is this? I think the main reason is that its ideas have been absorbed into the rapidly expanding field of Earth System Science, and “Earth System Science” sounds a lot more scientific than “Gaia”.
In contrast, if we look at what has happened to Gaia in other areas of our culture, it is becoming more and more popular, being applied to alternative therapies and practices, to Green businesses and foundations, and is even being chosen as a girl’s name.
Undeterred, Lovelock continued to publish books on Gaia, which were read by both scientists and non-scientists, and in doing so created new allies and new critics, including Environmentalists, as we shall see in the next post.
bioregioning 