Sébastien Dutreuil
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- January 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780226569871
- eISBN:
- 9780226570075
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226570075.003.0018
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
After a career as a chemist and engineer, James Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s with Lynn Margulis, a biologist. The hypothesis highlights the important influence that living ...
More
After a career as a chemist and engineer, James Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s with Lynn Margulis, a biologist. The hypothesis highlights the important influence that living beings have on their geological environment to speculate about the possibility of a regulation of the planetary environment. From the beginning Lovelock saw Gaia as a grand idea, challenging the way biology and geology should be carried out, up to our very conception of nature. This chapter recalls the rich context in which the hypothesis was elaborated in the 1960s and 1970s. It then traces Gaia’s contrasted reception. Whereas evolutionary biologists ridiculed it as a pseudo-metaphor comparing the earth with an organism, Gaia has generated new research programs in the earth sciences and has been embraced by the environmental counterculture as a new conception of nature and of our relationships with the earth.Less
After a career as a chemist and engineer, James Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis in the 1970s with Lynn Margulis, a biologist. The hypothesis highlights the important influence that living beings have on their geological environment to speculate about the possibility of a regulation of the planetary environment. From the beginning Lovelock saw Gaia as a grand idea, challenging the way biology and geology should be carried out, up to our very conception of nature. This chapter recalls the rich context in which the hypothesis was elaborated in the 1960s and 1970s. It then traces Gaia’s contrasted reception. Whereas evolutionary biologists ridiculed it as a pseudo-metaphor comparing the earth with an organism, Gaia has generated new research programs in the earth sciences and has been embraced by the environmental counterculture as a new conception of nature and of our relationships with the earth.
