The Gaia Book Store

The Gaia Hypothesis:

     James  E  Lovelock, Gaia, A new Look at Life on Earth.

              Lovelock's first book on the Gaia Hypothesis, first published in 1979.  Although it contained the usual weaknesses of an initial attempt to explain a brand new idea; sweeping theory and sparse facts, a scattering of scientific errors, and unfortunate turns of phrase, it remains a good introduction to the idea of life on earth acting as one solitary, purposeful system.  You still get enthralled by what physicist Philip Morrison called "the exciting and personal argument of an original thinker caught up in wonder."

James E. Lovelock, The Ages of Gaia: A Biography of Our Living Earth.

              Lovelock's 1988 book presented a version of the Gaia Hypothesis that was more palatable to the scientific community by abandoning any attempt to argue that Gaia intentionally or consciously maintained the complex balance in her environment that life needed to survive, thus leaving aside the age old argument between the vitalist who believes that living matter possesses some extra vital force or essence that cannot easily be reduced to mechanical components, and the mechanist who believes that all life can be described in terms of physical and chemical equations.  

         Lynn Margulis, Dorian Sagan, Microcosmos: Four Billion Years of Evolution from Our Microbial Ancestors.

              Lynn Margulis, the first wife of Carl Sagan, along with her cowriter, her first son, Dorian, sums up her nearly forty years study of the importance of the microbial world to the establishment and maintenance of all higher forms of life.  In the early 1960s, Margulis first developed the theory that chloroplasts, the autonomous organs within eukaryotic cells, were originally descended from the cyanobacteria which first began the process of putting oxygen into the atmosphere (and thereby poisoning the environment for themselves.)  By retreating into other cells, the cyanobacteria saved themselves from their own poison while at the same time contributing their powerful oxygen processing capabilities to the cell.  This important look into the symbiotic relationship at the smallest level of life made her a natural partner for Lovelock in his later work with the Gaia hypothesis.

         Lynn Margulis, Dorian Sagan, Slanted Truths: Essays on Gaia, Symbiosis, and Evolution.

               A collection of essays done by Margulis and Sagan over the last decade and a half, tying together their ideas on Gaia theory, symbiosis and individuality into a coherent scientific world view.

Gaia Related Science:

Lyall Watson, Lifetide: a biology of the unconscious

               Published the same year as Lovelock's first book on Gaia, this book puts forward a remarkably similar thesis (although without the mythological hook it never achieved the same popularity.)  Stressing symbiosis in nature, Watson argued that many things could only be explained by what he termed a "contingent system," something that had a "collective rather than a personal nature" which was constantly affecting every part of the biosphere.  Watson compares this system to Aldous Huxley's "mind at large" or Jung's "collective unconscious" saying that it interacts with the physical biosphere to determine the course of evolution.

         Ervin Laszlo, The Whispering Pond: A Personal Guide to the Emerging Vision of Science

               Ervin Laszlo gives a recent version of what turns out to be a fairly longstanding idea among scientists; that much of the physical world, and living nature in particular, cannot be explained by current knowledge and that some form of unknown energy field is needed to explain it.  This concept dates back to the 1920s when Alexander Gurwitch postulated a morphogenetic field, a system wide force field generated by the particular force fields of individual cells.  Laszlo calls this a fifth field (referring to the four accepted universal fields; the gravitational, the electromagnetic, the strong and the weak nuclear fields.)  Lsazlo terms this the psi field and suggests that it might explain everything from the mysteries of the wave function in quantum mechanics, to the remarkable syncronicity found in nature, even to psychic phenomena documented among people.

         Rupert Sheldrake, A New Science of Life: The Hypothesis of Morphic Resonance

              Following in Gurwich's footsteps, Sheldrake argues for the existence of morphogenetic fields which act as a sort of cumulative memory for all actions and forms.  Sheldrake even extends this to the non-living material world, pointing out that crystals of a chemical substance are difficult to form the first time, but as the same compound is crystallized again and again, form more readily all over the world.

         Rupert Sheldrake, Seven Experiments That Could Change the World: A Do-It-Yourself Guide to Revolutionary Science

               Writing for a popular audience, Sheldrake outlines seven experiments that can demonstrate the interconnectedness of things.  Ranging from psychic pets (I once had a cat that seemed to know when my wife would be coming home from work and would be out waiting for her five minutes in advance, even though she worked a highly irregular schedule) to people sensing when you are staring at them, this book offers ways for the average person to test the idea that the psyche extends beyond the physical body.

Mind and Consciousness:

Gregory Bateson, Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity

               Gregory Bateson's tour de force on mind as a system is a thorough going examination of the functionings of a mind, how mind interacts with the world, and the relationship between information and knowledge.  This early systems approach is an important background work for understanding the development of Gaia theory.

         David Chalmers, The Conscious mind: In Search of a Fundamental Theory

               Chalmers offers an in depth summary of current theories of consciousness and convincingly argues that all mechanistic explanations of consciousness fail to deal with the fundamental issue.  Chalmers offers an analogy drawn from physics that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe that can't be explained in terms of anything else.  The major ideas in this book are available online in his earlier essay, Facing Up to the Problem of Consciousness