Frases de James Lovelock

“Incluso si estos productos naturales [los biocombustibles] se usaran sólo para el transporte, para hacer funcionar nuestros coches, camiones, trenes, barcos y aviones, sería necesario quemar cada año entre dos y tres gigatoneladas de carbono como biofuel (una gigatonelada son mil millones de toneladas). Compare esa cantidad con nuestro consumo anual de comida, que es de media gigatonelada. Para cultivar esa comida ya usamos más superficie terrestre de la que sería recomendable, pero necesitaríamos la superficie de varios planetas como la Tierra sólo para cultivar biocombustibles. Puede que en un momento dado seamos lo bastante idiotas como prescindir de la comida con tal de poder ir en coche a donde queramos, pero Gaia no es tan tolerante como nosotros. La superficie de la Tierra ha evolucionado como hogar de ecosistemas que contribuyen al metabolismo propio de la Tierra y no pueden ser reemplazados por cultivos. Ya nos hemos apropiado de más de la mitad de las tierras productivas para cultivar comida y materias primas. ¿Como va Gaia a regular la Tierra si, para cubrir nuestras necesidades de combustible, le arrebatamos el poco suelo que le queda?.”

“La vida hace mucho más que adaptarse a la tierra. Transforma la tierra para sus propios fines.”

“Neither Lynn Margulis nor I have ever proposed a teleological hypothesis. Nowhere in our writing do we express the idea that planetary self-regulation is purposeful, or involves planetary foresight or planning by the biota. …Yet we met persistent, almost dogmatic, criticism that our hypothesis is teleological.”

“Life has to be a planetary phenomenon. You could no more have a partially occupied planet than you could half a cat or half a dog.”

“The climate and the chemical properties of the Earth now and throughout its history seem always to have been optimal for life. For this to have happened by chance is as unlikely as to survive unscathed a drive blindfold through rush hour traffic.”

“In Gaia, there's no such thing as pollution. The rules of the game are that any species that produces something noxious that affects the environment, is doomed. Imagine there's some green bug… that decides it would be a neat trick to make chlorine. That bug is not going to succeed. If it doesn't kill itself off, it will certainly kill off its progeny, and destroy the environment around it and have no food to eat.”

“Bacteria… have been here for three and a half billion years, and without them we have no chance whatsoever of survival. Humans are something very recent, like the froth on top of a glass of beer.”

“If you were an artist or novelist, or a poet or somebody like that, nobody would think it odd if you worked in your own home. In science there's none of this at all. I'm almost the only independent scientist in Britain. Everybody else works in large institutions, universities, or industrial labs. Why should one expect scientists to work that way?”

“I don't think we're yet evolved to the point where we're clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change…The inertia of humans is so huge that you can't really do anything meaningful.”

“Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.”

“Our planet… consists largely of lumps of fall-out from a star-sized hydrogen bomb…Within our bodies, no less than three million atoms rendered unstable in that event still erupt every minute, releasing a tiny fraction of the energy stored from that fierce fire of long ago.”

“Fudging the data in any way whatsoever is quite literally a sin against the holy ghost of science…I'm not religious, but I put it that way because I feel so strongly. It's the one thing you do not ever do. You've got to have standards.”

“In the current fashionable denigration of technology, it is easy to forget that nuclear fission is a natural process. If something as intricate as life can assemble by accident, we need not marvel at the fission reactor, a relatively simple contraption, doing likewise.”

“Life has to take charge of its environment and evolve with it.”

“We have since defined Gaia as a complex entity involving the Earth's biosphere, atmosphere, oceans, and soil; the totality constituting a feedback or cybernetic system which seeks an optimal physical and chemical environment for life on this planet.”

“If there were a billion people living on the planet, we could do whatever we please. But there are nearly seven billion. At this scale, life as we know it today is not sustainable.”

“Challenging the conventional wisdom is the way to make waves in science.”