ABSTRACT
WHY ‘GAIA’? One of these areas that has been made artificially difficult – the connection between scientific thought and the rest of life – comes out quaintly in the sharp debate about the implications of the name Gaia itself. That name arose when Lovelock told his friend, the novelist William Golding, that people found it hard to grasp his idea, and Golding promptly replied ‘Why don’t you call it Gaia?’, which is the name of the Greek earth-goddess, mother of gods and men. That name, when he used it, did indeed rouse much more interest in the theory. Many people who had not previously understood it now grasped it and thought it useful. Others, however, particularly in the scientific establishment, now rejected it so violently that they refused to attend to the details of it altogether. In our culture at present, people find it somewhat surprising that an idea can be large enough to have both a scientific and a religious aspect. This is because, during the last century, our ideas of religion, of science and indeed of life have all become narrowed in a way that makes it difficult to get these topics into the same perspective. (Here our window has become a good deal narrower than it was when Galileo and Newton and Faraday used it. They never doubted that these things belonged together.1) To get round this difficulty, Lovelock used a different image. He launched the medical model of Gaia – the idea of the damaged earth as a patient for whom we humans are the only available doctor, even though (as he points out) we lack the long experience of other sick planets which a doctor attending such a case
really ought to have. So he invented the name geophysiology to cover the skills needed by such a physician.2
