The news that James Lovelock has died has reverberated around the media. This is no surprise, since the importance of his life’s work has been compared to that of Charles Darwin or Galileo. He invented a number of important scientific instruments, but his most widely acknowledged contribution was revealed in his book Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, published in 1979. He boldly stated that life on Earth is a ‘superorganism’ that creates the very conditions for its own wellbeing. The Gaian view is that cooperation between living organisms and their environment is the organising principle that ...

 

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