Part III - 1980–1991

Summary

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.