Agronomy and Horticulture Department

 

Date of this Version

2022

Citation

Published in Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems 2023, Vol. 47, No. 1, pp. 1–2

doi:10.1080/21683565.2023.2135244

Comments

Copyright © 2022 Taylor & Francis. Used by permission.

Abstract

In writing about the history of agroecology we too often ignore the valuable contributions of British scientist James Lovelock who recently died on his 103rd 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, self-regulating system.

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