The Vanishing Face of Gaia
“Lovelock is a plain and simple writer, and his prose has a natural grace that makes this book a pleasure to read despite its depressing thesis.”
Los Angeles Times
In The Vanishing Face of Gaia, British scientist James Lovelock predicts global warming will lead to a hot epoch. Lovelock is best known for formulating the controversial Gaia theory in the 1970s, with Ruth Margulis of the University of Massachusetts, which states that organisms interact with and regulate Earth’s surface and atmosphere. We ignore this interaction at our peril.
An “unwilling Cassandra,” he is nevertheless an “an optimistic pessimist” and thinks we will survive the coming hot epoch, but predicts climate change will reduce our population from nine billion to around one billion or less. If simple microbial life forms could effect such a change, why is it hard to believe that humans could do so, too? And we are, unwittingly at first, but many have recognized the danger for some time now, and time is running out.
There are factions at work today trying to convince the public that global warming is a leftwing conspiracy, a liberal hoax. They claim that scientists perpetuate this “myth” to obtain government grants, and point to “independent” scientists (usually funded by the oil industry) who refute climate change science. Dr. Lovelock may be the antidote to these claims, as he is a truly independent scientist. Lovelock, a chemist and inventor by profession and a climate activist, is not beholden to any government, university, or granting agency.
Praise