Other Environmental Sciences Commons^™

Gaia Contributions To Agroecology By James Lovelock (1919-2022), Steve Gliessman, Charles A. Francis

Department of Agronomy and Horticulture: Faculty Publications

In writing about the history of agroecology we too often ignore the valuable contributions of British scientist James Lovelock who recently died on his 103rd birthday. A prolific inventor and influential theorist, Lovelock is best known for the Gaia hypothesis first proposed during his innovative work in the 1960s with the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration. He suggested that ‘the biosphere has a regulatory effect on the Earth’s environment that acts to sustain life’ as written in Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Lovelock 1979). Lovelock further proposed that humans have strongly impacted the planet’s capacity …