James Lovelock

Foreword

By Edo Segal

The temperature held. That is the detail I cannot stop thinking about.

Thirty percent. The sun has grown thirty percent more luminous since life first appeared on Earth. Thirty percent more energy hammering the same rock for four billion years. And the surface temperature barely moved. Not because the planet got lucky. Because something was regulating it. Something with no brain, no plan, no central command. Billions of organisms metabolizing, competing, dying, and the aggregate effect was a thermostat so precise it makes our best engineering look like a child's sketch.

James Lovelock spent six decades making that argument, and most of the scientific establishment spent the first three decades telling him he was wrong. He was not wrong. He was early. The man who invented the