Gaia contributions to agroecology by James Lovelock [1919-2022]

In writing about the history of agroecology we too often ignore the valuable contributions of British scientist James Lovelock who recently died on his 103 birthday. A prolific inventor and influential theorist, Lovelock is best known for the Gaia hypothesis first proposed during his innovative work in the 1960s with NASA. He suggested that ‘the biosphere has a regulatory effect on the Earth’s environment that acts to sustain life’ as written in Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (Lovelock 1979). Lovelock further proposed that humans have strongly impacted the planet’s capacity to maintain this vast, living, selfregulating system. Similar to our thinking in agroecology, Lovelock proposed that all things are connected, that there are cycles and feedback mechanisms, and that these multiple interactions serve to provide a certain stability to the global ecosystem. He further speculated that we threaten to interrupt the delicate balance with management of industrial agroecosystems designed to extract the maximum amount of production and profit, while ignoring the costs to the environment. In his work with NASA, Lovelock’s creativity with instruments allowed the search and potential measurement of conditions on Mars that would be conducive to life. His writings and speeches promoted a rich discussion of the interactions among biology, chemistry, climate, and how these were essential for understanding how life survives on our own planet. When we think about our evolving thinking in agroecology, it is clear that we embrace Lovelock’s insistence on multidisciplinary thinking that blends the science of climate and the biophysical environment with impacts of economic, social, and other political decisions. It is apparent that a balance among these is essential. When there is a dominating impact of a single species on the course of development, we run a great risk by ignoring his thesis that ‘all things are connected’ and that our fragile earth ecosystem can be easily upset by viewing everything through an anthropomorphic lens. To be sure, Lovelock’s ideas have been controversial, as he extended them to promotion of nuclear power and other technologies seen by many environmentalists as anathema to the future of the planet. Yet we must credit Lovelock for stimulating debate and his interpretation of science as essential to understanding the world, yet recognized as an evolving process rather than a method of reaching any ultimate truth about answers to complex challenges. AGROECOLOGY AND SUSTAINABLE FOOD SYSTEMS 2023, VOL. 47, NO. 1, 1–2 https://doi.org/10.1080/21683565.2023.2135244