We Belong to Gaia Quotes

“Even now, when the bell has started tolling to mark our ending, we still talk of sustainable development and renewable energy as if these feeble offerings would be accepted by Gaia as an appropriate and affordable sacrifice.”
― James Lovelock, We Belong to Gaia

“What we need is a book of knowledge written so well as to constitute literature in its own right. Something for anyone interested in the state of the Earth and of us - a manual for living well and for survival. The quality of its writing must be such that it would serve for pleasure, for devotional reading, as a source of facts and even as a primary school text. It would range from simple things such as how to light a fire, to our place in the solar system and the universe. It would be a primer of philosophy and science - it would provide a top-down look at the Earth and us. It would explain the natural selection of all living things, and give the key facts of medicine, including the ciculation of the blood, the role of the organs. The discovery that bacteria and viruses caused infectious diseases is relatively recent; imagine the consequences if such knowledge was lost. In its time the Bible set the constraints for behaviour and for health. WE need a new book like the Bible that would serve in the same way but acknowledge science. It would explain properties like temperature, the meaning of their scales of measurement and how to measure them. It would list the periodic table of the elements. It would give an account of the air, the rocks, and the oceans. It would give schoolchildren of today a proper understanding of our civilization and of the planet it occupies. It would inform them at an age when their minds were most receptive and give them facts they would remember for a lifetime. It would also be the survival manual for our successors. A book that was readily available should disaster happen. It would help bring science back as part of our culture and be an inheritance. Whatever else may be wrong with science, it still provides the best explanation we have of the material world.”
― James Lovelock, We Belong to Gaia

“Over half the Earth's people live in cities, and they hardly ever see, feel or hear the natural world. Therefore our first duty should be to convince them that the real world is the living Earth and that they and their city lives are part of it and wholly dependent on it for their existence.”
― James Lovelock, We Belong to Gaia

“It is foolish to think that we can explain science as it evolves, rationally and consciously. We have to use the crude tool of metaphor to translate conscious ideas into unconscious understanding.”
― James Lovelock, We Belong to Gaia

“We are interfering with temperature regulation by turning up the heat and then simultaneously removing the natural systems that help to regulate it.”
― James Lovelock, We Belong to Gaia

“The Earth System behaves as a single, self-regulating system comprised of physical, chemical, biological and human components.'
These words marked an abrupt transition from a previously solid conventional wisdom in which biologists held that organisms adapt to, but do not change, their environments and in which Earth scientists held that geological forces alone could explain the evolution of the atmosphere, crust and oceans.”
― James Lovelock, We Belong to Gaia

“We need the people of the world to sense the real and present danger so that they will spontaneously mobilize and unstintingly bring about an orderly and sustainable withdrawal to a world where we try to live in harmony with Gaia.”
― James E. Lovelock, We Belong to Gaia

“The humanist concept of sustainable development and the Christian concept of stewardship are flawed by unconscious hubris. We have neither the knowledge nor the capacity to achieve them. We are no more qualified to the be stewards or developers of the Earth than are goats to be gardeners.”
― James E. Lovelock, We Belong to Gaia

“The Earth was never seen as a whole until astronauts viewed it for us from outside, and then we saw something very different from our expectation of a mere planet-sized ball of rock existing within a thin layer of air and water. Some astronauts, especially those who travelled as far as the moon, were deeply moved and saw the Earth itself as their home. Somehow we have to think like them and expand our instinctive recognition of life to include the Earth.”
― James E. Lovelock, We Belong to Gaia

“This false belief that we own the Earth, or are its stewards, allow us to pay lip service to environmental to environmental policies and programmes but to continue with business as usual.”
― James E. Lovelock, We Belong to Gaia

“Metaphor is important because to deal with, understand, and even ameliorite the fix we are now in over global change requires us to know the true nature of the Earth and imagine it as the largest living thing in the solar system, not something inanimate like that disreputable contraption 'spaceship Earth”
― James E. Lovelock, We Belong to Gaia

“An inefficient virus kills its host. A clever virus stays with it. James Lovelock”
― James Lovelock, We Belong to Gaia