1987

Summary

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.