With Lovelock’s Gaia published and circulated at the end of the 1970s, the early 1980s see the onset of specialized critiques of Gaia in print. One of the first salvos against the Gaia hypothesis arrived with the publication of biologist W. Ford Doolittle’s skeptical review, “Is nature really motherly?” (Doolittle 1981a), accompanied by defenses of Gaia from both Lovelock (1981b) and Margulis (1981b). Letter 121 states the rushed circumstances putatively accounting for the brusqueness of Lovelock’s response, while summarizing two key premises regarding Gaia’s relation to the principle of natural selection. Later in 1981, Lovelock recounted an encounter with H. D. Holland at a professional meeting: “I was inclined to forget Doolittle but at Hamburg was maddened again by Dick Holland who in response to my talk prattled on about Gaia being Panglossian” (Letter 126), a dismissive trope previously purveyed by Doolittle.277 This current irritation evoked a passionate defense of Gaia and a call to arms: Gaia is in fact well and flourishing. It is just about time that you and I wrote a definite piece to summarise the ten years we have worked on the topic. I’ll be sending you a draft of what I have in mind shortly but briefly it will include: A definition of what we mean by Gaia and the disposal of Mother Earth notions for which I admit some guilt. Something about the consequences of evolution of species by natural selection in an environment which is changed by the evolution. Biogeochemical recursion if you need an academic “bon mot.” (Letter 126)

The Ozone War breaks out in the same year that the Gaia concept ventures beyond scientific circles.209 The first of these more general appearances took place in two very different venues. Lovelock and Margulis seem to have made a concerted decision around this time to launch the Gaia hypothesis toward science periodicals rather than academic journals. Lovelock targeted the British weekly magazine New Scientist, while Margulis planned to take a second shot at the illustrated bi-monthly magazine American Scientist. “Enclosed is a copy of the Gaia for New Scientist article,” Lovelock wrote at the end of 1974: “It will probably make you wince but it might serve as a model for the American Scientist version” (Letter 69). Perhaps Lovelock was thinking about Margulis’s likely response to the teaser introducing the New Scientist article: “Do the Earth’s living matter, air, oceans and land surface form part of a giant system which could be seen as a single organism?” (Lovelock and Epton 1975: 304).

Between 1967 and 1970, NASA funded four annual conferences, organized through the New York Academy of Sciences, on the Origins of Life. Their format was conversational, reflecting the eminence of the central attendees, including Frank Fremont-Smith, Norman Horowitz, William McElroy, Philip Abelson, Sidney W. Fox, Leslie Orgel, and Stanley Miller.1 A number of those present were already professional mentors or colleagues of Lynn Margulis, or would soon become so – Cyril Ponnamperuma, Elso Barghoorn, J. William Schopf, Joan Oró, and Philip Morrison. Margulis participated in all four meetings and was tasked to edit their transcripts into volumes (published between 1970 and 1973). The co-chair of these gatherings, Norman Horowitz, also happened to be Lovelock’s colleague as the director of the biology section at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). This relationship likely had some role in Lovelock’s invitation to the second Origins of Life meeting in May 1968. His attendance brought about his first encounter with Margulis: “Margulis, as the youngest member present, had the job of rapporteur. … Perhaps the task of reporting everything we said was onerous and she had no time or opportunity to think about it. Certainly, I had no contact or discussion with her at the meeting. My fruitful collaboration with Lynn was not to begin until some time later” (Lovelock 2000: 254).

The introduction offers an original discussion of the emergence of Gaia, informed by the extant literature while centered on the letters exchanged in their working relationship, drawing new connections and insights from these previously unpublished materials. It highlights a range of themes that animate their conversations and the history of Gaia as a scientific and philosophical idea. The introduction treats the first encounter of Lovelock and Margulis; their individual careers and professional personae; material and social aspects of their collaboration; questions of authorship; the range of scientific disciplines necessary to Gaia's elaboration; matters of geography and institutions; the significance of the occasional disagreements between Lovelock and Margulis over how best to characterize Gaia; Gaia's reception within different disciplinary and social contexts, including evolutionary biology, Earth sciences, systems sciences, exo- and astrobiology, and a range of political and environmental cultures. The introduction concludes with a chronological outline of the correspondence.

After more than two decades of somewhat precarious efforts, by the 1990s Lovelock’s mostly self-funded investments in Gaia theory begin to pay substantial dividends. A case in point is the £75,000 gift he received in 1992 from Knut Kloster, a Norwegian shipping magnate who studied marine engineering at MIT and then made a massive fortune reinventing the modern cruise industry. Lovelock gives the conclusion of that story in the front matter of Homage to Gaia: He was what my mental model of a Viking told me he should be … I said, “We have a charity, Gaia.” Knut broke in at once and said, “To me, charity is a dirty word. What can I do for you?” I replied, “Give me a contract to work to make Gaia scientifically acceptable. I can’t promise success but I would guess that a three-year contract at £25,000 per year would go far to achieve this objective.” And he did.

In collaboration with Margulis, Lovelock began work on a professional talk as the basis for a new Gaia essay. Its publication was assured when Tellus collected “Atmospheric homeostasis by and for the biosphere: the Gaia hypothesis” (Lovelock and Margulis 1974a). Margulis took on the overhaul of their first paper, which she referred to in Letter 43 as “Gaia I”: “I will rewrite Gaia I into the style appropriate for the Proc Natl Acad of Sci. For example, the title will be ‘Homeostatic Tendencies of the Earth’s Atmosphere’” (the title of Lovelock and Margulis 1974b). By February, both drafts were reaching completion: “The end would appear to be in sight at least so far as the preparation of these drafts goes. I think that they are great,” Lovelock wrote, acknowledging Margulis’s lead efforts: “Lynn you have done the writing and the organization of the papers” (Letter 47). These two essays became three as Margulis developed a separate article, “Biological modulation in the Earth’s atmosphere” (Margulis and Lovelock 1974), repurposing draft materials and diagrams while putting the biology of Gaia front and center.

I hope these are of some use for January 12. My feeling about UV is that like strong sunlight, it can be handled. As for medicine, I know nothing of course. Do you know the (rather poor) pamphlet on UV dangers put out by the National Academy of Science?

Letter 119 provides some insight into Margulis’s tenure from 1977 to 1980 as the Chairman [sic] of the Committee on Planetary Biology and Chemical Evolution (PBCE) of the Space Science Board, an organ of the National Research Council in connection with the National Academy of Sciences. This activity was a direct continuation of her professional involvement with NASA’s exobiology initiatives of the 1970s. In the Committee’s report Origin and Evolution of Life: Implications for the Planets, a Scientific Strategy for the 1980s (National Research Council 1981), Lovelock was listed as a consultant to the Committee under Margulis’s chairmanship. The head of the Space Science Board, A. G. W. Cameron, noted in the report’s foreword: This document describes the emerging science of life as a planetary phenomenon. It assesses the status of our knowledge of the origin of life on Earth and of the precursors of life elsewhere in the Galaxy. It also outlines ways in which we can use the capacity that space technology provides to study the biological processes that are important on a global scale in shaping the surface of the Earth and the composition of the atmosphere.

It appears that Lovelock and Margulis determined during their first in-person meeting in December 1971 that they had “something to say” about, as Lovelock puts it in Letter 11, “the notion of a living planet.” Here again is the “planetary ecosystem” of Lovelock and Giffin 1969, for which the atmosphere is not merely an abiological medium but rather one that is biologically maintained. Lovelock now informed Margulis that his neighborhood acquaintance in the south of England, the prominent British novelist William Golding, suggested “Gaia” as a name for the living planet so described. Setting to work on the first co-authored essay with Margulis, Lovelock began to transmit the finer details of the geochemistry informing his hypothesis. Letters 12 and 13 confirm that Margulis was currently tasked to transform Lovelock’s data into a collaborative prose narrative, and that she was quickly sending him drafts of her work. It would seem that, under his guidance, she was doing the major part of the composition of the text. Letter 14 documents the event of Margulis’s taking full grasp of the notion of Gaia as a biological cybernetic system. Gaia is described as a system built up from negative-feedback cycles that control molecular variables in the environment. In this instance, methanogenic microbes are seen as being successively turned on and off by their own environmental consequences, forming a biogeochemical cycle that “homeostats,” or self-regulates, the level of atmospheric methane.55

I am very sorry you turned down Joe Coulson’s invitation to write the foreword for the Great Books Environmental Science text. Might you reconsider if I ghost write, fewer than two pages, or even better, write it with you?

It is curious that the Lovelock–Margulis correspondence for this year contains no mention of the first of the three public Gaia symposia organized by Peter Bunyard and Edward Goldsmith, held at the Wadebridge Ecological Center in Cornwall between 1987 and 1989. Letters 154 and 155 indicate that Bunyard established contact with Margulis as early as 1983 and that she anticipated “joint future projects” with Bunyard’s journal The Ecologist. Presumably some of these projects then took the form of this series of broad-based meetings on “Gaia and its implications.” The first one took place in October 1987, attended by an international and multidisciplinary set of speakers, including, in addition to the organizers and Lovelock, Margulis, and Dorion Sagan, Margulis’s student, Gregory Hinkle, Swiss historian of science Jacques Grinevald, Lovelock’s colleagues at the Marine Biological Association in Plymouth, Andrew Watson and Michael Whitfield, Dutch geologist Peter Westbroek, American philosopher David Abram, and the controversial geneticist Mae-Wan Ho of the Open University, London. The published proceedings (Bunyard and Goldsmith 1988) transcribe numerous post-presentation roundtables on Gaia and its plausible consequences, conversations that remain fresh and pertinent over 30 years later.

My first interaction with Lynn was when I took her Evolution course in the spring of 1978. I had started graduate school in the biology department at Boston University the previous fall, as a master’s student. The department had listed my field of interest as “Exobiology,” as I had used the term in my application essay. It was taken from the title of Cyril Ponnamperuma’s edited volume (Ponnamperuma 1972), that I had fortuitously discovered in the biology department library of my alma mater, Fordham University. But I honestly had no idea that Lynn was involved with NASA. When we met in her office to talk about my interests, I told her I wanted to look for evidence of life in meteorites. She responded that I needed to go work with Bart Nagy, who was then at the University of Arizona. Seeing as I had just moved to Boston, I wasn’t too keen on going anywhere else. Thankfully, Lynn took me on and I was accepted into the PhD program.

By the mid 1990s, convinced that the Gaia concept was making inroads with the scientific establishment in England, including the bastion of British neo-Darwinist opposition, Lovelock was increasingly sanguine about Gaia’s prospects for full scientific recognition. Writing to Margulis in May 1995, he described his encounter with a formidable evolutionary theorist, famous for his work on kin selection (the “gene-eyed view” of altruism): I had a meeting with W. D. Hamilton last week – one of the fringe benefits of the Oxford connection. Although he was a kindly and thoughtful man, the meeting was what might have been expected between a geophysiologist and a neodarwinist; we agreed to disagree. Two days later I had a letter from him. In it he said that after much thought it seemed to him that Gaia was after all not inconsistent with Darwin. Where organisms affected their personal environment then the tendency could be inherited and could become extensive, even global. Things move, we have won over Maynard Smith and now perhaps Oxford’s leading neodarwinist also.

I am sending this nomination form to ask if you would nominate Lynn for the Blue Planet Prize which is due on October 15, 2007? I will be glad to help gather anything else you may need to submit this nomination. Realistically, this is the only prize that Lynn might have a chance at receiving. We are hurting for funds to pay students properly that are associated with Lynn’s lab.

Dismayed by the news of Greg Hinkle’s rejection by BU. Please give him my condolences and offer to help in any way I can.