28 July

James Lovelock died on Tuesday, on his 103rd birthday. People may have heard of Gaia, the idea he developed together with Lynn Margulis. Often misunderstood as saying the Earth is alive, a superorganism. What they were really saying is that living things don’t exist in an ‘environment’, but instead create the environment itself. Oxygen for example began as pollution by certain microbes, a result of photosynthesis, that poisoned much of the life around at that time. Lovelock was an independent scholar, he refused all academic jobs and funded his own independent research, often from inventions. I’m an independent scholar, one of the ways Lovelock inspires me. Rest in Peace.