The Revenge of Gaia Quotes

“Others consider us superior because of our cultured ways and intellectual tendencies; our technology lets us drive cars, use word processors and travel great distances by air. Some of us live in air-conditioned houses and we are entertained by the media. We think that we are more intelligent than stone-agers, yet how many modern humans could live successfully in caves, or would know how to light wood fires for cooking, or make clothes and shoes from animal skins or bows and arrows good enough to keep their families fed?”
― James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia

“The idea that humans are yet intelligent enough to serve as stewards of the Earth is among the most hubristic ever.”
― James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia

“I think that we reject the evidence that our world is changing because we are still, as that wonderfully wise biologist E. O. Wilson reminded us, tribal carnivores. We are programmed by our inheritance to see other living things as mainly something to eat, and we care more about our national tribe than anything else. We will even give our lives for it and are quite ready to kill other humans in the cruellest of ways for the good of our tribe. We still find alien the concept that we and the rest of life, from bacteria to whales, are parts of the much larger and diverse entity, the living Earth.”
― James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia

“When we burn fossil fuel for energy we are, in qualitative terms, doing nothing more wrong than burning wood. Our wrongdoing, if that is an appropriate term, is taking energy from Gaia hundreds of times faster than it is naturally made available. We are sinning in a quantitative not a qualitative way.”
― James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia

“The Earth has recovered after fevers like this, and there are no grounds for thinking that what we are doing will destroy Gaia, but if we continue business as usual, our species may never again enjoy the lush and verdant world we had only a hundred years ago. What is most in danger is civilization; humans are tough enough for breeding pairs to survive, and Gaia is toughest of all. What we are doing weakens her but is unlikely to destroy her. She has survived numerous catastrophes in her three billion years or more of life.”
― James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia

“only rarely do we see beyond the needs of humanity, and he linked this blindness to our Christian and humanist infrastructure. It arose 2,000 years ago and was then benign, and we were no significant threat to Gaia. Now that we are over six billion hungry and greedy individuals, all aspiring to a first-world lifestyle, our urban way of life encroaches upon the domain of the living Earth.”
― James E. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity

“One of the striking things about places heavily contaminated by radioactive nuclides is the richness of their wildlife. This is true of the land around Chernobyl, the bomb test sites of the Pacific, and areas near the United States’ Savannah River nuclear weapons plant of the Second World War. Wild plants and animals do not perceive radiation as dangerous, and any slight reduction it may cause in their lifespans is far less a hazard than is the presence of people and their pets.”
― James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia

“Unfortunately, we are a species with schizoid tendencies, and like an old lady who has to share her house with a growing and destructive group of teenagers, Gaia grows angry, and if they do not mend their ways she will evict them.”
― James E. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity

“Science is a cosy, friendly club of specialists who follow their numerous different stars; it is proud and wonderfully productive but never certain and always hampered by the persistence of incomplete world views.”
― James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia

“I know that to personalize the Earth System as Gaia, as I have often done and continue to do in this book, irritates the scientifically correct, but I am unrepentant because metaphors are more than ever needed for a widespread comprehension of the true nature of the Earth and an understanding of the lethal dangers that lie ahead.”
― James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia

“I speak as a planetary physician whose patient, the living Earth, complains of fever; I see the Earth's declining health as our most important concern, our very lives depending upon a healthy Earth. Our concern for it must come first, because the welfare of the burgeoning mass of humanity demands a healthy planet.”
― James E. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia

“We are no more qualified to be the stewards or developers of the Earth than are goats to be gardeners.”
― James E. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity

“I find it sad, but all too human, that there are vast bureaucracies concerned about nuclear waste, huge organizations devoted to decommissioning nuclear power stations, but nothing comparable to deal with that truly malign waste, carbon dioxide.”
― James E. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity

“Gaia is a thin spherical shell of matter that surrounds the incandescent interior; it begins where the crustal rocks meet the magma of the Earth’s hot interior, about 100 miles below the surface, and proceeds another 100 miles outwards through the ocean and air to the even hotter thermosphere at the edge of space. It includes the biosphere and is a dynamic physiological system that has kept our planet fit for life for over three billion years. I call Gaia a physiological system because it appears to have the unconscious goal of regulating the climate and the chemistry at a comfortable state for life. Its goals are not set points but adjustable for whatever is the current environment and adaptable to whatever forms of life it carries.”
― James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia

“Contact means the exchange of specific knowledge, ideas, or at least of findings, definite facts. But what if no exchange is possible? If an elephant is not a giant microbe, the ocean is not a giant brain.”
― James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia

“we live on a live planet that can respond to the changes we make, either by cancelling the changes or by cancelling us.”
― James E. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity

“Perhaps our and Gaia’s greatest error was the conscious abuse of fire. Cooking meat over a wood fire may have been acceptable, but the deliberate destruction of whole ecosystems by fire merely to drive out the animals within was surely our first great sin against the living Earth. It has haunted us ever since and combustion could now be our auto da fé, and the cause of our extinction.”
― James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia

“The difference between the long-term average of the graph and the ice age, 12,000 years ago, is just over 3°C. The IPCC 2001 report suggests that the line of the hockey stick graph might rise a further 5°C during this century. This is about twice as much as the temperature change from the ice age to pre-industrial times.”
― James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia

“Darwinists are right to say that selection favours the organisms that leave alive the most progeny, but vigorous growth takes place within a constrained space where feedback from the environment allows the emergence of natural self-regulation.”
― James Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia

“The environmental system of the Earth would collapse if the attempt were made to supply all human beings alive today with a European style of living. To suggest that such an increase in living standards is possible for a world population twice the present size by the early part of the next century is preposterous.”
― James E. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity

“The irony of it all is that we in the developed world are the prime polluters, the most destructive of people on the planet, yet although we have the money and the means to prevent the Earth crossing the deadly threshold that will make global change irreversible, we are hampered by fear.”
― James E. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Why the Earth is Fighting Back and How We Can Still Save Humanity

“dictum of Paracelsus, ‘The poison is the dose’,”
― James E. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity

“There were several interesting consequences of these vast explosions. They released into the global atmosphere radioactivity as great as that from two Chernobyl disasters every week for a whole year.”
― James E. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity

“our Queen”
― James E. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity

“jobsworths”
― James E. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity

“six
billion people.”
― James E. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity

“For the same energy output as from coal or oil, methane combustion releases only half as much carbon dioxide. This implies that powering a nation entirely by gas reduces emissions of carbon dioxide by half.”
― James E. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity

“but such is the inertia of industrial civilization that we are likely to go on using fossil fuel for a decade at least.”
― James E. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity

“Abundant life occurs where it is warm and wet on land and where it is quite cool, less then 12°C, in the ocean.”
― James E. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity

“We know that in the depth of the last glaciation carbon dioxide fell to 180 ppm, rose to 280 ppm after the ice age ended, and has risen now to 380 ppm as a result of our pollution.”
― James E. Lovelock, The Revenge of Gaia: Earth's Climate Crisis & The Fate of Humanity