James Lovelock Quotes

31 Sourced Quotes

Life does more than adapt to the Earth. It changes the Earth to its own purposes.

James Lovelock
Humans on the Earth behave in some ways like a pathogenic micro-organism, or like the cells of a tumor.

James Lovelock
The unending death-roll of all creatures, including ourselves, is the essential complement to the unceasing renewal of life.

James Lovelock
When I first introduced Gaia [an ecological theory], I had vague hopes that it might be denounced from the pulpit and thus made acceptable to my scientific colleagues. As it was, Gaia was embraced by theologians and by a wide range of New Age writers and thinkers but denounced by biologists.

James Lovelock
Like a message passed by word of mouth, the chain of life back to the remote past carries precise but inaccurate information. But it is the only way we have to conjure up what the origin might have been.

James Lovelock
We have had a moon's-eye view of our home in space as it orbits the sun, and we are suddenly aware of being citizens of no mean planet, however mean and squalid the human contribution to this panorama may be in close-up.... We are... a living part of a strange and beautiful anomaly in our solar system.

James Lovelock
I know that to personalize the Earth System as Gaia, as I have often done and continue to do in this book, irritates the scientifically correct, but I am unrepentant because metaphors are more than ever needed for a widespread comprehension of the true nature of the Earth and an understanding of the lethal dangers that lie ahead.

James Lovelock
Our future is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.

James Lovelock
The Gaia hypothesis is for those who like to walk or simply stand and stare, to wonder about the Earth and the life it bears, and to speculate about the consequences of our own presence here.

James Lovelock
The clues to Gaia's existence are as transient as our sand-castle. If her partners in life were not there, continually repairing and recreating, as children build fresh castles on the beach, all Gaia's traces would soon vanish....

James Lovelock
There is no clear distinction anywhere on the Earth's surface between living and nonliving matter. There is merely a hierarchy of intensity going from the 'material' environment of the rocks and the atmosphere to the living cells.

James Lovelock
Only rarely do we see beyond the needs of humanity, and he linked this blindness to our Christian and humanist infrastructure. It arose 2,000 years ago and was then benign, and we were no significant threat to Gaia. Now that we are over six billion hungry and greedy individuals, all aspiring to a first-world lifestyle, our urban way of life encroaches upon the domain of the living Earth.

James Lovelock
The entire range of living matter on Earth from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae could be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of maintaining the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts.

James Lovelock
If you were an artist or novelist, or a poet or somebody like that, nobody would think it odd if you worked in your own home. In science there's none of this at all. I'm almost the only independent scientist in Britain. Everybody else works in large institutions, universities, or industrial labs. Why should one expect scientists to work that way?

James Lovelock
Bacteria... have been here for three and a half billion years, and without them we have no chance whatsoever of survival. Humans are something very recent, like the froth on top of a glass of beer.

James Lovelock
Neither Lynn Margulis nor I have ever proposed a teleological hypothesis. Nowhere in our writing do we express the idea that planetary self-regulation is purposeful, or involves planetary foresight or planning by the biota.... Yet we met persistent, almost dogmatic, criticism that our hypothesis is teleological.

James Lovelock
Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science... I'm not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It's the one thing you do not ever do. You've got to have standards.

James Lovelock
Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.

James Lovelock
In Gaia, there's no such thing as pollution. The rules of the game are that any species that produces something noxious that affects the environment, is doomed. Imagine there's some green bug... that decides it would be a neat trick to make chlorine. That bug is not going to succeed. If it doesn't kill itself off, it will certainly kill off its progeny, and destroy the environment around it and have no food to eat.

James Lovelock
Life has to be a planetary phenomenon. You could no more have a partially occupied planet than you could half a cat or half a dog.

James Lovelock
Life has to take charge of its environment and evolve with it.

James Lovelock
Our planet... consists largely of lumps of fall-out from a star-sized hydrogen bomb... Within our bodies, no less than three million atoms rendered unstable in that event still erupt every minute, releasing a tiny fraction of the energy stored from that fierce fire of long ago.

James Lovelock
The climate and the chemical properties of the Earth now and throughout its history seem always to have been optimal for life. For this to have happened by chance is as unlikely as to survive unscathed a drive blindfold through rush hour traffic.

James Lovelock
We have since defined Gaia as a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.

James Lovelock
We live at a time when emotions and feelings count more than truth, and there is a vast ignorance of science

James Lovelock
In the current fashionable denigration of technology, it is easy to forget that nuclear fission is a natural process. If something as intricate as life can assemble by accident, we need not marvel at the fission reactor, a relatively simple contraption, doing likewise.

James Lovelock
If there were a billion people living on the planet, we could do whatever we please. But there are nearly seven billion. At this scale, life as we know it today is not sustainable.

James Lovelock
Curiously, aerosol pollution of the northern hemisphere reduces global warming by reflecting sunlight back to space. This "global dimming" is transient and could disappear in a few days like the smoke that it is, leaving us fully exposed to the heat of the global greenhouse. We are in a fool's climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.

James Lovelock
I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change... The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful.

James Lovelock
No one who has experienced the intense involvement of computer modeling would deny that the temptation exists to use any data input that will enable one to continue playing what is perhaps the ultimate game of solitaire.

James Lovelock