In the early 1800s, animal owners and local healers provided most veterinary care, and indigenous healing methods thrived around the world. Colonialism, global trade networks, and other circulations of animals led to disease outbreaks (epizootics). Rinderpest, imported by Europeans, destroyed about 90 percent of all wild and domesticated bovines in sub-Saharan Africa, causing devastating famines. European-model veterinary schools continued to spread around the world. Their graduates worked to reduce competition by developing laws and regulations that forbade non-graduates from practicing animal healing. Veterinary leaders envisioned "scientific" veterinary medicine, using microscopes and other tools. By working to establish microbiology, comparative pathology, and "one medicine," veterinarians were important co-creators of modern medicine and public health as we know them today. Ideas about disease causation included the roles of the environment and insects in spreading disease; the contagium vivum; parasitism; toxins; and several germ theories. Some veterinarians treated companion (pet) animals, whose owners valued them for emotional reasons. Associations for the humane treatment of dogs and other animals were established. Pet owners increasingly expected scientifically trained veterinarians to provide the same services for pets that their owner could expect at a hospital for humans.

During the 1980s, Gaia was perhaps the hottest topic in the Earth sciences. Lovelock and his colleagues published ground-breaking scientific papers. A 1985 TV documentary was dedicated to the story of Gaia, including interviews with Margulis, Lovelock, Richard Dawkins, and others. In March 1988, the American Geophysical Union sponsored a Chapman conference on the Gaia hypothesis. This major scientific decade for Gaia also saw the start of a wide-ranging reconfiguration of the Earth sciences, leading in coming decades to the constitution of the IGBP and NASA’s promotion of Earth system science. However, the correspondence for this decade records the first appreciable rifts in their working relationship. Lovelock’s Daisyworld project for a computer model of Gaian self-regulation, intensively developed in collaboration with Andrew Watson, marked the first significant divergence in effort between Gaia’s primary collaborators. Lovelock and Margulis effectively repaired their collaboration not with a renewed research effort but rather with a new book project developing Lovelock’s second book, The Ages of Gaia.

I want to write to you immediately before you leave for your trip around the world.

The Tyler Prize discomfort has just reached my pain threshold.506 It happened when I received a letter from Teddy Goldsmith who wrote to say that he had just proposed me as a candidate for the award. We sure could do with the cash for such things as another Gaia meeting or to support students like Tim [Lenton]. But the continuing round of proposal and rejection has all the obscenity of a Victorian melodrama and with no prospect of a happy ending.

My first wide-eyed jolt from a comment by Lynn Margulis came in a 1977 issue of CoEvolution Quarterly on space exploration. Given a question about whether we should be trying to establish colonies in space, she cut to the chase: when a biological species is able to move into a new environment, it will do so. End of debate! Margulis appeared in those pages often, as professional biologist and big thinker. I read her book, Origin of Eukaryotic Cells, several years prior to entering graduate school. Two decades later, I was able to refer to her pioneering work on the evolution of the eukaryotic cell in my first book, Metapatterns: Across Space, Time, and Mind (Volk 1995). A nexus of ideas for the community that Bruce Clarke felicitously calls the systems counterculture, CoEvolution Quarterly also introduced me to James Lovelock and the Gaia hypothesis. Furthermore, both Lovelock and Margulis became Fellows of the Lindisfarne Association. While working as a carpenter and plumber and writing unpublished books on patterns, I regularly attended mind-opening lectures, notably by Gregory Bateson and Francisco Varela, among many others, at Lindisfarne’s downtown Manhattan campus. In 1979, I heard Lovelock speak at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine in upper Manhattan, a dramatic event that Lovelock discusses in his autobiography, his initiation into what was, for a hardcore scientist, a shockingly non-traditional setting and audience. I recall the moment as a victory for bold, big thinking. So Lovelock and Margulis were individually operating on my mental screen, although not via their peer-reviewed papers, which at that time I would have been too unschooled to tackle. But their technical works would enter my life after I completed my PhD thesis at New York University in 1984, modeling the role of life in the global ocean’s carbon cycle. Thereafter, my entanglement with Gaia grew to an intensity I would never have imagined a few years before.

During the 1980s, Gaia was perhaps the hottest topic in the Earth sciences. Lovelock and his colleagues published ground-breaking scientific papers. A 1985 TV documentary was dedicated to the story of Gaia, including interviews with Margulis, Lovelock, Richard Dawkins, and others. In March 1988, the American Geophysical Union sponsored a Chapman conference on the Gaia hypothesis. This major scientific decade for Gaia also saw the start of a wide-ranging reconfiguration of the Earth sciences, leading in coming decades to the constitution of the IGBP and NASA’s promotion of Earth system science. However, the correspondence for this decade records the first appreciable rifts in their working relationship. Lovelock’s Daisyworld project for a computer model of Gaian self-regulation, intensively developed in collaboration with Andrew Watson, marked the first significant divergence in effort between Gaia’s primary collaborators. Lovelock and Margulis effectively repaired their collaboration not with a renewed research effort but rather with a new book project developing Lovelock’s second book, The Ages of Gaia.

My first reaction on starting to read your new book was that it was important and was your testament. It is full of interest and excitement and it conveys a clear account of your credible view of evolution. The good feeling lasted throughout the book but I do have some reservations about Chapter 8. It could be the best of your books and I am glad to have had the chance to read it. I have written a ‘buddy blurb’ as follows.

We so greatly enjoyed, indeed loved, your wise and witty “book for all seasons” piece in Science.512 Thank you for your clear and unambiguous observations. Perhaps all to whom you so appropriately preach are not yet converted.

Email from Steve Schneider reminded me that we have not exchanged letters for a long time. I had hoped to see you and Ricardo in Oxford in two weeks’ time but Phil George tells me that you cannot make it.517 I see the Oxford conference as the last scientific conference I will attend. You know how much I hate and fear lecturing so you will understand when I say enough is enough. There are still things left to be written rather than said. I will concentrate on them.

In March 1988, thanks to the initiative of climatologist Stephen Schneider, the American Geophysical Union sponsored a Chapman Conference on the Gaia hypothesis in San Diego, California. This weeklong meeting gathered a wide array of Earth scientists – climatologists, Earth historians, oceanographers, and atmospheric chemists, including Ann Henderson-Sellers, Ken Caldeira, Lee Kump, Tyler Volk, David Schwartzman, Meinrat Andreae, Andrew Watson, James Walker, Bob Berner, Raymond Siever, Manfred Schidlowski, and H. D. Holland – as well as a few scholars from ecology (Paul Ehrlich) and other disciplines, such as philosophy (David Abram). Yet soon after the meeting, Lovelock expressed to Margulis a sense of disappointment over the event: “Did you find the AGU meeting odd? It left me with a sense of having watched it on a VDU rather than having been a participant. Everyone was so well behaved and respectable. Where was the passion, the arguments, the fire?” (Letter 179). His account of the same meeting in Homage to Gaia is similarly depressed (Lovelock 2000: 271). However, his downbeat verdict was a minority view. The larger consensus was that the meeting was successful both on its own terms as an honest examination of Gaia’s status as science and as a milestone in the dissemination of Gaia within the professional academy, also abetted by the fine publication drawn from the event, Scientists on Gaia (Schneider and Boston 1991). A decidedly positive eyewitness account of this meeting noted plenty of passion: “Extended debates that followed generally strong presentations were lively, argumentative, and remarkably civil despite widely held views. The grace with which Jim Lovelock moved between his strongest critics and supporters set high standards for the debates. Everybody acknowledged a high learning curve” (Kauffman 1988: 763). Tyler Volk has also contributed a favorable memoir of the San Diego meeting in his contribution to this volume.

The 1980s witnessed a significant renewal of interest in Vladimir Vernadsky’s concept of the biosphere (Polunin and Grinevald 1988). Save within the ecosystem ecology transmitted through G. Evelyn Hutchinson (Grinevald 1998), Vernadsky had been largely forgotten. Likely due to her original work recovering the Russian thinker’s standing behind her theory of symbiogenesis, Margulis herself was happy to see Vernadsky take a bow as a valuable precursor of the Gaia concept.371 However, on more than one occasion in the correspondence, Lovelock informed Margulis that upon consideration, he found Vernadsky’s importance in this regard to be minor at best. We think that an important component of the general revival of interest in Vernadsky at that moment is that the wider calls in the Earth sciences for a grand new research program also required a “great” precursor on which to stand. And after Lovelock’s numerous controversial positions on CFCs, ozone, and other environmental issues, it was not possible for a program tackling global change to acknowledge a direct line of inheritance from Gaia.372

Margulis apparently considered Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth insufficiently robust in the cause of Gaia’s scientific defense. She now took a more proactive role in sponsoring a book by Lovelock that would meet her own standards. Around June 1983, Lovelock began a letter to Margulis: “Here is a copy of my formal letter to the Commonwealth Fund. Whether or not anything comes of it I am so grateful to you for bringing it to my attention. It is just what I need to keep out of mischief next year” (Letter 152). Recorded here is the inception of what is often considered Lovelock’s best concerted presentation of Gaian science. Not coincidentally, The Ages of Gaia (Lovelock 1988) developed under Margulis’s editorial eye.

I’m scurrying about unsuccessfully trying to find a new telephone number for you. Perhaps the buzz I receive on this line is a fax noise. I’ve just seen the new Joss Pearson Gaia bookplan and have reservations. I’d love to talk to you about it. Furthermore I need some information from you for various confidential reasons. Our new fax number is the same as the UMass tel. number but has a three rather than a four as the final digit.

In 1972 and 1973 Lovelock and Margulis composed and circulated their first Gaia articles. After initial rejections at the end of 1972, they published three co-authored Gaia papers in 1974 and a fourth in 1975, lead-authored by Margulis. After this set of original Gaia articles was published, the immediate response was muted at best. Margulis continued to work on her reconstructions of Gaia’s early evolution. However, at mid-decade, Lovelock was embroiled in the ozone controversy, putting their joint efforts on hiatus. Around 1977, Margulis revived their collaboration with a Gaian consideration of planetary atmospheres in light of data from the 1976 Viking mission to Mars. After a decade of Gaia writing in the professional article format appropriate to the introduction of a new concept, they now proceeded to book projects. As the 1970s closed, Margulis was working on her next major book, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, while Lovelock was putting finishing touches on his first book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth.

Toward the end of the 1970s, Lovelock brings his student, Andrew Watson, into the work on Gaia. He added him as coauthor to an earlier paper begun with Margulis, “Methanogenesis, fires and the regulation of atmospheric oxygen.”300 By the early 1980s, Lovelock and Watson were deep into the initial programming of Daisyworld and so moving away from Margulis’s own Gaian expertise and, one must also think, away from her professional preferences. It would appear that she made some draft contributions to the first fully developed professional essay on Daisyworld, “Biological homeostasis of the global environment: the parable of Daisyworld.”301 However, despite occasional expressions of encouragement, her enthusiasm for this turn of Gaian affairs was muted, as may be discerned in her candid Letter 133, in a less-than-complimentary comparison of Daisyworld to a heavily mathematical, implicitly neo-Darwinian formalization of population genetics known as the Hardy–Weinberg principle: “I think what you are doing for Gaia is exactly analogous to what Hardy and Weinberg did for population genetics. I suppose it will have the same bad effect too of generating the usual academic garbage.”302