The Gaia letters

摘要

Wriling Gaia, edited by Bruce Clarke and Sebastien Dutreuil, is a fascinating read that reproduces and contextualizes a four-decade-long conversation between environmental scientist James Lovelock and evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis from which emerged the provocative Gaia hypothesis, which posits that Earth and all its inhabitants can be thought of as a single, synergistic, self-regulating system. The book opens with a foreword by the late Lovelock, in which he discusses a conversation he had in 1967 with William Golding-the Nobel Prize-winning author of Lord of the Flies-about Erwin Schroedinger's book What Is Life? "According to this book," observes Lovelock, "life was a process that reduced the entropy of a system while excreting entropy to the en- vironment." Lovelock wanted to understand how Mars, with an atmosphere composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide, is of "high entropy" and therefore probably lifeless, whereas Earth, containing both methane and oxygen, is of "low entropy" and sustains life. "If you intend to put forward an idea like that," Golding replied, "you had better give the low-entropy system that is our planet a proper name, and I suggest the name Gaia."