James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis: "A New Look at Life on Earth" ... for the Life and the Earth sciences
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1 juillet 2018
- handle: 10670/1.9v8v9n
- isbn: 9780226569901
- hal: hal-01863320
info:eu-repo/semantics/OpenAccess
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IGBP Daisyworld DMS Anthropocene History of the Earth sciences Gaia hypothesis James Lovelock Lynn Margulis Global environment environmental counterculture Earth system scienceSujets proches
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Sébastien Dutreuil, « James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis: "A New Look at Life on Earth" ... for the Life and the Earth sciences », HAL-SHS : histoire, philosophie et sociologie des sciences et des techniques, ID : 10670/1.9v8v9n
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After a career as a chemist and engineer, James Lovelock proposed the Gaia hypothesis in the 1970’s 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, and up to our very conception of nature. This chapter recalls the rich context in which the hypothesis was elaborated in the 1960’s and 1970’s. It then traces Gaia’s contrasted reception. Wheras evolutionary biologists ridiculed it as a pseudo-metaphor comparing the Earth with an organism, Gais 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.