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The global temperature is rising, the ice caps are melting, and levels of pollution across the world have reached unprecedented heights. According to eminent scientist James Lovelock, in order to survive an assault from her dependents, the Earth is lurching ever closer to a permanent “hot state.\" Within the next century, we will almost certainly be forced to give up many of the comforts of western living as supplies are threatened. Only the fittest—and the smartest—will survive. A reluctant jeremiad from one of the environmental movement's elder statesmen, The Vanishing Face of Gaia offers an essential wake-up call for the human race.

A numerical model is presented based on Alfred Lotka’s notion that the mathematics of evolutionary models would be simpler, not more complex, if the evolution of the organisms and of their physical environment was considered as a single process. The model is concerned with the climate and the com m unity ecology of an imaginary planet, Daisyworld, in orbit around a star like the Sun. The stabilizing influence of environmental feedback is used to enable experiments in community ecology that might otherwise be impossible. The model planetary ecosystem is populated with numerous types of organism distributed in up to three trophic levels. There follows a preliminary report of an exploration of this model planet and an account of its biodiversity and species richness.

In this classic work that continues to inspire its many readers, Jim Lovelock puts forward his idea that life on earth functions as a single organism. Written for non-scientists, Gaia is a journey through time and space in search of evidence with which to support a new and radically different model of our planet. In contrast to conventional belief that living matter is passive in the face of threats to its existence, the book explores the hypothesis that the earth's living matter air, ocean, and land surfaces forms a complex system that has the capacity to keep the Earth a fit place for life. Since Gaia was first published, many of Jim Lovelock's predictions have come true and his theory has become a hotly argued topic in scientific circles. In a new Preface to this reissued title, he outlines his present state of the debate.

A call to address a major threat to our collective future.

The concept of Gaia, a self-regulating Earth, excites both admiration and obloquy. Its inventor (or rather re-discoverer) describes the genesis and evolution of the hypothesis.

THERE has been much debate about how the Earth responds to changes in climate—specifically, how feedbacks involving the biota change with temperature. There is in particular an urgent need to understand the extent of coupling and feedback between plant growth, global temperature and enhanced atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. Here we present a simple, but we hope qualitatively realistic, analysis of the effects of temperature change on the feedbacks induced by changes in surface distribution of marine algae and land plants. We assume that algae affect climate primarily through their emission of dimethyl sulphide 1–8 (which may influence cloud albedo), and that land plants do so by fixation of atmospheric CO 2 (refs 9–12). When we consider how the planetary area occupied by these two ecosystems varies with temperature, we find that a simple model based on these ideas exhibits three feedback regimes. In glacial conditions, both marine and terrestrial ecosystems provide a negative feedback. As the temperature rises to present-day values, algae lose their strong climate influence, but terrestrial ecosystems continue to regulate the climate. But if global mean temperatures rise above about 20 °C, both terrestrial and marine ecosystems are in positive feedback, amplifying any further increase of temperature. As the latter conditions have existed in the past, we propose that other climate-regulating mechanisms must operate in this warm regime.

Lovelock responds to Kirchner and Volk's criticism of Earth System Science, or Gaia theory, which states that the Earth self regulates its climate and chemistry so as to keep itself habitable.