James Lovelock - Life Quotes

13 Sourced Quotes

View all James Lovelock Quotes
We are the intelligent elite among animal life on earth and whatever our mistakes, [Earth] needs us. This may seem an odd statement after all that I have said about the way 20th century humans became almost a planetary disease organism. But it has taken [Earth] 2.5 billion years to evolve an animal that can think and communicate its thoughts. If we become extinct she has little chance of evolving another.

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

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

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

James Lovelock