(1919-    ) UK environmentalist and author whose proposal of the Gaia (which see) hypothesis in Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979; rev 2000) has had considerable influence on sf and the old concept of Living Worlds. His early guarded optimism about Gaia's capacity to self-regulate against the effects of Climate Change is very much darkened in The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (2009), where he predicts the imminent overwhelming of the current Gaian balance due to greenhouse gases, resulting in a sudden climactic jump to a new equilibrium with a consequent increase in global surface temperature of approximately 9 degrees Celsius. With Michael Allaby he wrote The Greening of Mars (1984), a fictionalized Utopian discussion of how Mars might be settled (> Colonization of Other Worlds). [DRL/JC]

see also: Biology; Ecology.

James Ephraim Lovelock

born Letchworth Garden City, Hertfordshire: 26 July 1919

died

works

• The Greening of Mars (London: Andre Deutsch, 1984) with Michael Allaby [hb/Pat Fogarty]

nonfiction (selected)

• Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979) [nonfiction: hb/]
  • Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000) [rev of above: pb/]
• The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning (London: Allen Lane, 2009) [nonfiction: hb/]

links

Previous versions of this entry

• 27/08/2009