James Lovelock draws on decades of wisdom to lay out the history of our remarkable planet, to show that it is not ours to be exploited – and warns us that it is fighting back. The four chapters here were first published in The Revenge of Gaia (2006).
This book is part of Green Ideas, a series of twenty short books from Penguin Classics that brings you the ideas that have changed the way we think and talk about the living Earth.
James Lovelock, who was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1974, is the author of more than 200 scientific papers and the originator of the Gaia Hypothesis (now Gaia Theory). His many books on the subject include Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), The Revenge of Gaia (2006), The Vanishing Face of Gaia (2009) and A Rough Ride to the Future (2014). 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.