During the 1980s, Gaia was perhaps the hottest topic in the Earth sciences. Lovelock and his colleagues published ground-breaking scientific papers. A 1985 TV documentary was dedicated to the story of Gaia, including interviews with Margulis, Lovelock, Richard Dawkins, and others. In March 1988, the American Geophysical Union sponsored a Chapman conference on the Gaia hypothesis. This major scientific decade for Gaia also saw the start of a wide-ranging reconfiguration of the Earth sciences, leading in coming decades to the constitution of the IGBP and NASA’s promotion of Earth system science. However, the correspondence for this decade records the first appreciable rifts in their working relationship. Lovelock’s Daisyworld project for a computer model of Gaian self-regulation, intensively developed in collaboration with Andrew Watson, marked the first significant divergence in effort between Gaia’s primary collaborators. Lovelock and Margulis effectively repaired their collaboration not with a renewed research effort but rather with a new book project developing Lovelock’s second book, The Ages of Gaia.

During the 1980s, Gaia was perhaps the hottest topic in the Earth sciences. Lovelock and his colleagues published ground-breaking scientific papers. A 1985 TV documentary was dedicated to the story of Gaia, including interviews with Margulis, Lovelock, Richard Dawkins, and others. In March 1988, the American Geophysical Union sponsored a Chapman conference on the Gaia hypothesis. This major scientific decade for Gaia also saw the start of a wide-ranging reconfiguration of the Earth sciences, leading in coming decades to the constitution of the IGBP and NASA’s promotion of Earth system science. However, the correspondence for this decade records the first appreciable rifts in their working relationship. Lovelock’s Daisyworld project for a computer model of Gaian self-regulation, intensively developed in collaboration with Andrew Watson, marked the first significant divergence in effort between Gaia’s primary collaborators. Lovelock and Margulis effectively repaired their collaboration not with a renewed research effort but rather with a new book project developing Lovelock’s second book, The Ages of Gaia.

In 1972 and 1973 Lovelock and Margulis composed and circulated their first Gaia articles. After initial rejections at the end of 1972, they published three co-authored Gaia papers in 1974 and a fourth in 1975, lead-authored by Margulis. After this set of original Gaia articles was published, the immediate response was muted at best. Margulis continued to work on her reconstructions of Gaia’s early evolution. However, at mid-decade, Lovelock was embroiled in the ozone controversy, putting their joint efforts on hiatus. Around 1977, Margulis revived their collaboration with a Gaian consideration of planetary atmospheres in light of data from the 1976 Viking mission to Mars. After a decade of Gaia writing in the professional article format appropriate to the introduction of a new concept, they now proceeded to book projects. As the 1970s closed, Margulis was working on her next major book, Symbiosis in Cell Evolution, while Lovelock was putting finishing touches on his first book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth.

The correspondence commences in the summer of 1970, when a still untenured Margulis sends Lovelock a request for information along with offprints of her own work. The scientific collaboration of Lovelock and Margulis launched in earnest in January 1972, a year and a half after their first exchange of letters. The opening chapters of their correspondence document Margulis’s importance for both the construction and the communication of Gaian ideas. Their collaboration develops precisely as a writing partnership, with Margulis in the de facto role of in-house editor as well as co-author of their early papers. The letters exchanged in 1972 show them meticulously working through the host of technical matters intrinsic to their bold project until an initial manuscript is ready for submission. These early letters are also the most minutely specialized, as they are both still teaching the other what they need to learn in order to bring their respective specializations together.

The most dramatic environmental debate in Norway in the late 1970s was whether to build a hydroelectric dam at the Alta-Kautokeino River. It was a debate the Deep Ecologists lost with a Supreme Court verdict in 1982. The defeat meant an end to Deep Ecology as a movement and an intellectual endeavor in Norway as they became increasingly fundamentalist and thus politically irrelevant. However, at the same time they enjoyed their first international breakthrough in North America, thanks to the environmental organization Earth First! The end of the Cold War in 1989 also meant a turn towards global climatological perspectives. Propelled by the sentiment that capitalism had won over communism, Gro Harlem Brundtland would, as Chair of the World Commission on Environment and Development, frame the solution to climate change in cost–benefit terms, rather than in socialist terms. Climate change problems were to be solved by treading carbon dioxide equivalent quotas and by buying clean development mechanism certificates. Norway would be an active buyer in these markets, making sure Norway would look like a virtuous “pioneer country” to its own citizens and the world.