ABSTRACT
James E. Lovelock, the author of Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979), was born in 1919 in the southeast of England into a working-class family. Lovelock eventually went to the University of Manchester with a scholarship and graduated in chemistry in 1941. Because of his simple writing style, shortage of evidence, and his use of myth and poetry, the book received very harsh reviews within the scientific community when it was first published in 1979. Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis continues to be relevant in the scientific arena because of its relationship to the ongoing discussion and controversy about climate change-the large-scale, long-term shift in the planet's weather patterns or average temperatures that, according to the consensus, human action has provoked. Despite the widespread criticism, many scientists thought the idea was worth discussing further, and Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis started to receive more favorable attention in the late 1980s.
