James Lovelock - Living Quotes

5 Sourced Quotes

View all James Lovelock Quotes
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
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
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
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
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