About This Book
In September 2015 Hans Ulrich Obrist travelled to Dorset to sit with James Lovelock at his seaside cottage. They talked for nine hours—about garden cities, frozen hamsters, rising temperatures, tiny widgets, the space age, the birth of modern science, the agonies of institutions and the future of humanity. Ever Gaia presents that conversation as a tribute to Lovelock, who died in 2022 at the age of 103.
Lovelock spent his working life outside the institutions that might have contained him, inventing instruments in a shed and formulating, in the Gaia hypothesis, one of the few genuinely reorienting ideas of the 20th century: that Earth and its life are a single self-regulating system. What emerges across these pages is less a summary of that theory than a demonstration of the habit of mind that produced it—curious, unhurried, indifferent to disciplinary borders.
Published as the eighth in the isolarii series, which revives the Renaissance genre of the 'island book': small, self-contained volumes that can be carried in a pocket and read in an afternoon.
Key Features
- A nine-hour conversation between Lovelock and Obrist, recorded at Lovelock's Dorset home
- Contributions from novelist Daisy Hildyard and poet and artist Precious Okoyomon
- An afterword by earth-system scientist Tim Lenton, one of Lovelock's intellectual heirs
- Pocket-format 'island book' design, opening isolarii's second season
What You'll Discover
- How the Gaia hypothesis took shape, described by the person who formulated it
- Why Lovelock believed invention matters more than institutional affiliation
- A Gaian framing of the overlapping crises now grouped under the term 'polycrisis'
- Two younger writers thinking with Gaia rather than merely about it
About the Author
James Lovelock (1919–2022) was a British scientist, inventor and independent researcher. He devised the electron capture detector, which made the detection of CFCs in the atmosphere possible, and formulated the Gaia hypothesis. His books include Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (1979) and Novacene (2019).
Hans Ulrich Obrist is artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries, London, and has curated more than 300 exhibitions since 1991. His conversation-based books include The Archipelago Conversations with Édouard Glissant, also published by isolarii.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Dimensions: 70 x 108 mm
- Pages: 220
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9798987123102
- Publisher: isolarii
- Publication Date: 17th March 2023
Perfect For
Readers of ecological and environmental thought, designers and architects working on climate-adjacent briefs, and anyone drawn to the conversation as a form. A natural companion to Lovelock's own books and to isolarii's The Archipelago Conversations.