Ever Gaia

There is no creation of the future if we do not sustain, at root, an intuition for invention. No one understood this better than James Lovelock, the most significant scientific thinker since Charles Darwin. Over the course of his career, Lovelock set the terms by which we''ve come to understand life - biologically, societally, poetically - in the twenty-first century. He helped NASA complete missions to Mars and the moon; he invented devices that revealed the presence of harmful chemicals in the Earth''s atmosphere, inspiring Rachel Carson to write Silent Spring; and he formulated the Gaia hypothesis, the deceptively simple idea that our planet could be viewed as a single self-regulating organism - everything entangled, everything acting upon everything else. In September 2015, Hans Ulrich Obrist travelled to Dorset to visit Lovelock at his seaside cottage, where they spent nine hours discussing garden cities, frozen hamsters, rising temperatures, tiny widgets, the Space Age, the birth of modern science, the agonies of institutions, and the future of humanity. EVER GAIA presents this conversation as a celebration of Lovelock, who died this past year at 103, alongside contributions from two future pioneers of Gaia: Daisy Hildyard and Precious Okoyomon. The second volume in a trilogy that began with THE ARCHIPELAGO CONVERSATIONS, EVER GAIA is a handbook for weathering the ''polycrisis'' and the perfect distillation of the life and ideas of Lovelock, whose way of seeing - ''perhaps his greatest legacy,'' Obrist writes - will continue to shape our world and our place within it for decades to come.