Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth

James Lovelock's Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth is the founding statement of the Gaia hypothesis, published by Oxford University Press, proposing that Earth's biosphere, atmosphere and oceans function as a single self regulating system. Lovelock was a working scientist, and the book presents Gaia as an earth system science proposal grounded in atmospheric chemistry, not as a religious or spiritual claim, though it has since been widely taken up in exactly that spiritual sense by movements outside the scientific literature that produced it. Its authority rests on its recognized founding role in earth system science, later developed further by Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. Its limit is that the strong original version of the hypothesis, implying deliberate planetary self regulation, has been refined by subsequent scientific debate into a more modest systems account, so a claim resting on the book's strongest original language should be checked against that later scientific discussion.