Hailed as ‘the most profound scientific thinker of our time’ (Literary Review) and ‘the man who conceived the first wholly new way of looking at life on earth since Charles Darwin’ (Independent), James Lovelock was still reshaping our understanding of the planet in his 95th year. A Rough Ride to the Future sets out two bold new ideas from one of science’s great independent minds. The first concerns Thomas Newcomen’s invention of the steam engine three hundred years ago — an act that, Lovelock argues, unwittingly triggered what he terms ‘accelerated evolution’: a rate of planetary change roughly a million times faster than Darwinian evolution. The second is that humanity now has the capacity to become the intelligent, thinking component of Gaia — the self-regulating Earth system whose existence Lovelock first proposed nearly 50 years ago. Alongside these landmark ideas, Lovelock reflects on his own extraordinary career as a lone scientist and shares his insights into how genuine scientific breakthroughs come about. Our species, he suggests, plays a role comparable to that of the early photosynthesisers 3.4 billion years ago, which transformed the Earth’s atmosphere into the one we have known until now. Through domination and invention, we are changing that atmosphere once more. Rather than treating this as cause for guilt, Lovelock urges us to recognise what is happening, prepare for the changes ahead, and focus above all on our survival as a species — because it is only by surviving that we can hope to guide the next stage of Gaia’s evolution. The road ahead will be rough, but with sufficient intelligence, life on Earth can continue far into the future. Elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974, JAMES LOVELOCK is the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis (now Gaia Theory) and the author of more than 200 scientific papers. His books on the subject include Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), The Revenge of Gaia (2006), and The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009). In 2003 he was made a Companion of Honour by Her Majesty the Queen; in 2005 Prospect magazine named him one of the world’s top 100 public intellectuals; and in 2006 he received the Wollaston Medal, the highest award of the UK Geological Society.
ISBN 13: 9780241961414
Author: James Lovelock
