The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth

by James E. Lovelock

Book Overview

Lovelock argues that such things as the level of oxygen, the formation of clouds, and the saltiness of the oceans may all be controlled by biological processes. He believes that "living organisms... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0553348167
• ISBN13: 9780553348163
• Release Date: March 1990
• Publisher: Bantam
• Length: 276 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.0" x 0.8" x 6.0"

Customer Reviews

What an awesome concept

Everyone should be enlightened about the idea of Gaia, the earth and the life on it are all part of one greater living organism. Pretty cool.

A Delightful Little Book

The Ages of Gaia is not just the story of Gaia and how she was discovered, but also the adventures of an individual scientist vs. the scientific establishment and the adventures of a British land-lover vs. the political establishment. It also is a gentle warning to the passengers on spaceship Earth, a.k.a. Gaia, that the spaceship is not in danger, the passengers are! Gaia is not a living creature. Gaia is a self regulating habitat that favors denizens that manage to get along harmoniously and hinders those that don't. There are no reasons or theologies given for this behavior. As Ayn Rand might have said: it is the nature of Gaia to be like she is. Gaia is what our senses perceive and what our reason understands. Gaia does not play favorites. The only chapter that put me to sleep was the one about god and Gaia. Maybe you'll find it interesting. I tried twice to read it but to no avail.

Living Earth

A fabulous look at why the planet Earth is alive and how she helps sustain life. Without Life existing on Earth Gaia would not exist, and if Gaia did not present the proper conditions, nothing on planet earth would be alive. Mr Lovelock does a great job of presenting the information to us and gives us a great deal about which to comtemplate!

This Look Into The Past Can Insure Our Future

Imagine living in Europe during the Dark Ages, when everyone thought the world was flat, and having someone demonstrate to you that the world is a sphere. In our modern version of the Dark Ages of the environment we are under the delusion that our Earth is lump of rock inhabited by life. Lovelock shows that the Earth is a living, self-regulating system comprised of all of life tightly coupled with its environment. He traces the 3.5 billion year life of the Earth as a living entity in an easy and enjoyable to read fashion. If we as a species are fortunate enough to survive the next 1000 years it will be because this book was recognized as the most important ever written in the 20th century. For you Gaia theory buffs out there: The Gaia theory dawned on Lovelock when he was having a conversation with Carl Sagan and some other colleagues.

Reviewing Lovelock's second book on the Gaia Hypothesis

"The Ages of Gaia" by James Lovelock What is the Gaia Hypothesis? Stated simply, the idea is that we may have discovered a living being bigger, more ancient, and more complex than anything from our wildest dreams. That being, called Gaia, is the Earth. More precisely: that about one billion years after it's formation, our planet was occupied by a meta-life form which began an ongoing process of transforming this planet into its own substance. All the life forms of the planet are part of Gaia. In a way analogous to the myriad different cell colonies which make up our organs and bodies, the life forms of earth in their diversity coevolve and contribute interactively to produce and sustain the optimal conditions for the growth and prosperity not of themselves, but of the larger whole, Gaia. That the very makeup of the atmosphere, seas, and terrestrial crust is the result of radical interventions carried out by Gaia through the evolving diversity of living creatures. Encountering the Earth from space, a witness would know immediately that the planet was alive. The atmosphere would give it away. The atmospheric compositions of our sister planets, venus and mars, are: 95-96% carbon dioxide, 3-4% nitrogen, with traces of oxygen, argon and methane. The earth's atmosphere at present is 79% nitrogen, 21% oxygen with traces of carbon dioxide, methane and argon. The difference is Gaia, which transforms the outer layer of the planet into environments suitable to its further growth. For example, bacteria and photosynthetic algae began some 2.8 billions of years ago extracting the carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen into the atmosphere, setting the stage for larger and more energetic creatures powered by combustion, including, ultimately, ourselves. That is how James Lovelock discovered Gaia; from outer space.In the 1960's, during the space race which followed the launching of Sputnik, he was asked by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Nasa to help design experiments to detect life on Mars.The Viking lander gathered and tested some Martian soil for life with no results. Lovelock had predicted as much, by analyzing the atmosphere of Mars: it is in a dead equilibrium. By contrast, the atmosphere of Earth is in a "far from equilib rium" state- meaning that there was some other complex process going on which maintained such an unlikely balance. It occurred to him that if the Viking lander had landed on the frozen waste of antarctica, it might not have found any trace of life on Earth either. But a sure giveaway would be a complete atmospheric analysis... which the Viking lander was not equipped to do. Lovelock's approach was not popular at Nasa because Nasa needed a good reason to land on Mars, and the best was to look for life. Viking found nothing on Mars, but Lovelock had seen the Earth from the perspective of an ET looking for evidence of life. And he began thinking that wha