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from Part I - 1970–1972
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2022
When her first letter arrived in 1970, Lovelock’s personal research program on planetary atmospheres, then developing through a concept he has privately named “Gaia,” had already taken on a fair amount of definition. He informed her, “I am in the course of writing a paper on the Earth’s atmosphere as a biological cybernetic system” (Letter 1). This striking formulation of a biological cybernetic system is the curt technical description for which “Gaia” will become the shorthand trademark. This phrase was already present in a paper written on behalf of NASA, delivered in 1968 at a meeting of the American Astronautical Society and published in 1969, “Planetary atmospheres: compositional and other changes associated with the presence of life” (see Letter 9).
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