I hope your silence means you are too busy to write. Selenium, it seems to me, will be a winner. See enclosed. The enzyme is required for glycine reduction to NH4 and the organisms he has listed here are extremely primitive on other grounds. I will monitor the selenium biochemistry paper when it comes out and keep you posted. What actually have been your ecological observations re dimethyl selenide?

Lovelock’s next letter to Margulis in our record, dated New Year’s Day, 1971, refers again to the draft beginnings of a professional paper: “The paper is by no means finished but I enclose for your interest the section dealing with the state of oxidation, which should indicate the way of thought” (Letter 2). However, his correspondence with Margulis did not mention “Gaia” by name until a year later (Letter 11). He seems to have waited for her to confirm her willingness to join him in co-writing a paper, “if it turns out,” she replied, “we have something to say after our talks” (Letter 8). Fully developed papers “on the Earth’s atmosphere as a biological cybernetic system” become the project of their first collaborative writings.

A letter arrived this morning from James Strick of Arizona asking to see my autobiography in connection with his history of space research.530 He mentioned that he had talked with you on this. Is he a good and fair historian?

I am probably the only contributor in this volume who has been attracted to Gaia not as question of natural science but as a solution to a problem of social theory! Trained in philosophy and later in anthropology, I have always been struck by the excessive influence of sociological models in biology. The idea of the Body Politic infects everything it touches.573

Jim Lovelock was an unusual PhD supervisor. He was listed as a “visiting professor” at the Department of Engineering and Cybernetics in Reading. In truth, however, he never actually visited, so during the three years from 1975 to 1978 when I was his only student, it was I who visited him, usually once or twice in a semester. This involved a four-hour drive to Cornwall, so I would stay overnight with Jim and Helen at Coombe Mill. That meant that I would have Jim’s attention for a full afternoon and evening, which was an intensity of interaction that few PhD students are lucky enough to have with their supervisor. On these trips we would discuss not only what I was doing, but everything else that interested us and especially everything about Gaia – he was writing the first book at the time.

“Chris, I think you will enjoy this.” It was December 1986, and those were the prophetic words of a colleague as he passed me the latest copy of New Scientist magazine. We academics read countless articles, most of which are of fleeting interest. But every so often a piece hits the “Aha” button and changes the way one thinks. So it was with the article; “Gaia: the world as living organism” (Lovelock 1986a). It was my first encounter with the mind of Jim Lovelock. At the time I was leading a rapidly growing research group dedicated to the study of the Earth from space. Using instruments on polar orbiting spacecraft, we were opening up new windows on the planet, revealing how the ice, oceans, atmosphere, and land interact. It was a thrilling time – an Aladdin’s cave of new opportunities to piece together a picture of the Earth system as an integrated whole. But as a physical scientist, with limited knowledge of biology, my focus on the biosphere was minimal. Jim’s paper argued that living organisms play an active – even dominant – role in keeping the planet fit for life. He presented his Daisyworld model to demonstrate that homeostasis through biological cybernetic feedbacks can be an emergent property. The study of the Earth system could as much ignore the role of life as it could deny the influence of atmospheric chemistry or the Sun. I was shaken. I prided myself on spotting and developing fertile connections across academic silos. It was disturbing to realize that my “biological blind spot” was a significant gap. I very much wanted to meet Jim, to explore his ideas further, but could think of only flimsy excuses. The task of developing and exploiting the early series of European polar orbiting satellites kept us busy, and so the prospect slipped to the back of my mind.

How nice to be in touch again! We’ll send you “Origins of Species” (i.e. Acquiring Genomes: A Theory of the Origins of Species) within 3 weeks for extended comment (probably needed in March).534 MS is now w/ typist.

The correspondence commences in the summer of 1970, when a still untenured Margulis sends Lovelock a request for information along with offprints of her own work. The scientific collaboration of Lovelock and Margulis launched in earnest in January 1972, a year and a half after their first exchange of letters. The opening chapters of their correspondence document Margulis’s importance for both the construction and the communication of Gaian ideas. Their collaboration develops precisely as a writing partnership, with Margulis in the de facto role of in-house editor as well as co-author of their early papers. The letters exchanged in 1972 show them meticulously working through the host of technical matters intrinsic to their bold project until an initial manuscript is ready for submission. These early letters are also the most minutely specialized, as they are both still teaching the other what they need to learn in order to bring their respective specializations together.

Margo and Ian Baldwin (Chelsea Green) are the publishers (White River Junction, Vermont) we always wished we had.555 PLEASE help them obtain an answer from Penguin UK as soon as possible: they have requested US distribution rights for Revenge of Gaia.556 (None of us have seen it; we await it with interest. I’m particularly curious about your current stand on nuclear power.)557 I chuckled upon noticing that Julia Ponsonby’s Gaia’s Kitchen was published by them (Chelsea Green) too!!558 And that Stephan [Harding]’s publisher Green Books had been working with them (Chelsea Green) for years. Penguin seems to have entirely ignored their several requests. Please inform your personal contacts there for us so that we can help distribute the book over here.

When her first letter arrived in 1970, Lovelock’s personal research program on planetary atmospheres, then developing through a concept he has privately named “Gaia,” had already taken on a fair amount of definition. He informed her, “I am in the course of writing a paper on the Earth’s atmosphere as a biological cybernetic system” (Letter 1). This striking formulation of a biological cybernetic system is the curt technical description for which “Gaia” will become the shorthand trademark. This phrase was already present in a paper written on behalf of NASA, delivered in 1968 at a meeting of the American Astronautical Society and published in 1969, “Planetary atmospheres: compositional and other changes associated with the presence of life” (see Letter 9).

In Letter 109, Lovelock responded to Margulis’s invitation to join her team on a field excursion to Baja California: “An expedition to Baja sounds marvellous. But when? and from whence could come some funds?” A year later, Margulis used her selection as a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow to support a research group studying early life on Earth at Laguna Figueroa, Baja California Norte, Mexico. Letter 115 indicates that Lovelock joined the party that spring, after which Margulis expressed her delight with Lovelock’s participation in this recent excursion: “It was a pleasure to see you so healthy. The trip was a highlight for me of my career.” This allows us to put a date on the trip he recounts in Homage to Gaia: A high spot of this period was an expedition organised by Lynn, who gathered the funds to enable a party of scientists to visit Baja California and do research on the algal mats there … I watched as Lynn cut out with a small spade a cube of the mat four inches in size. We looked at its banded structure: each band was a different community of micro-organisms segregated according to the flow of nutrients and oxygen. Lynn showed how similar was this banded structure to that of the fossil mats over two billion years ago. I was convinced by her lucid explanations that micro-organisms are the heart of Gaia and always have been.

I received a copy of your student’s letter to Ed Barber about the “egregious error” in the Ages of Gaia. I am grateful to you both for letting me know about errors but unhappy about the way it was done.

Crispin has just invited us to your lecture at Green College later this month.482 I wish that we could come but the date clashes with an entirely unavoidable meeting in London. I wanted you to know that we will be there with you in thought if not in the flesh.

It’s common knowledge that there could be no life as we know it on our planet without the presence of water. Its chemical properties make it the ideal solvent for myriads of biomolecules as well as the source of electrons in oxygenic photosynthesis. These are just a few of the many properties that render water essential for our kind of life. Evidence of extensive aqueous landscapes on our immediate planetary neighbors, Venus and Mars, shows that both planets had abundant water thousands of millions of years ago, probably in part thanks to heavy bombardment by water-bearing comets. However, even if life happened to begin on these planets, this water was lost due to various abiotic processes, whereupon any early life there became extinct. Mars and Venus settled into the extreme dryness that physics and chance have imposed on them. And yet, thanks to Gaia, our planet has successfully retained much of the water she received long ago contemporaneously with Venus and Mars.

In 1993, against Margulis’s residually biocentric orientation, Lovelock affirmed the need to conceive of Gaia in a way that gives the geosphere and the biosphere equal importance while also overriding their conceptual separation: “I think it best to look on Gaia as a coupled system involving both the biota and the material world. Something that cannot usefully be separated into parts” (Letter 227). It is ironic, then, that during this same period Margulis was almost completely unsuccessful in persuading Lovelock to join her in a line of enquiry that did precisely that. She gave it the name “Water Gaia.” As we noted in the preface, in 1990 she informed Lovelock, “Our first job is to rename the planet” (Letter 202). Her immediate meaning was that this planet in its Gaian specificity should be called Water instead of Earth. This is because the water that has been necessary for all life on Earth for all time is in no way an eternal fixture of the planet but, quite plausibly, a condition of habitability that Gaia itself has preserved since its inception. In any event, that is the theory that Margulis repeatedly asked Lovelock to pursue with her: “is water retention itself a Gaian phenomenon?” (Letter 202). She posed this issue again in Letters 208 and 210, without any immediate response from Lovelock that we have found. In 1995, this time in the context of soliciting his preference with regard to the topic she should present at the 1996 Gaia in Oxford gathering, she rehearsed some corollary implications of the Water Gaia thesis: “Would the rain cycle be sustained on a lifeless planet? I recently saw a Science News item entitled ‘No Ocean, No Motion’ arguing that oceans are necessary for plate tectonics” (Letter 248).

Lynn Margulis’s scientific relationship and friendship with Jim Lovelock began and increased in the way that most of her close relationships did, especially those involving some sort of edgy, unconventional science. Knowing Lynn, I suspect it was love at first sight with Jim’s ideas about Gaia. Although I was not there at the beginning of the 1970s, I did witness similar first encounters during my graduate school years in Lynn’s lab from 1977 to 1984. I attended lab meetings and research talks in her lab as soon as I took her Symbiosis course in the fall of 1977. Encouraged by her to switch my focus to termite research – it turns out their hindguts are entire symbiotic worlds in themselves – I began PhD work with Lynn in January 1979.