Jim Lovelock dies at 103

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  • Serial_Apologist
    Full Member
    • Dec 2010
    • 37865

    Jim Lovelock dies at 103

    I just saw this news on a meteorological site, with a link to a Guardian tribute, which I apologise for not linking here since I am not a subscriber. How extraordinary that his passing has taken place on his birthday.

    Jim Lovelock: 26 July 1919 - 26 July 2022

    R.I.P.

  • oddoneout
    Full Member
    • Nov 2015
    • 9310

    #2
    No need for a subscription for the Guardian
    Scientist, environmentalist, inventor and exponent of the Gaia theory of the Earth as a self-regulating system

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    • kernelbogey
      Full Member
      • Nov 2010
      • 5808

      #3
      Originally posted by oddoneout View Post
      No need for a subscription for the Guardian
      https://www.theguardian.com/environm...elock-obituary
      This news story of his death from the Guardian includes a link to a short clip of him talking to camera about the Gaia hypothesis. What he says, unsensationally, about what we in Europe will be experiencing within less than half a century is not merely sobering but frightening.

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      • Bryn
        Banned
        • Mar 2007
        • 24688

        #4
        Originally posted by kernelbogey View Post
        This news story of his death from the Guardian includes a link to a short clip of him talking to camera about the Gaia hypothesis. What he says, unsensationally, about what we in Europe will be experiencing within less than half a century is not merely sobering but frightening.
        Here's another tribute: https://theconversation.com/inspirat...-at-103-187846

        When JFK was assassinated, Stravinsky wrote an elegy to him. Sadly, Auden's Haikus rather misrepresented JFK's character, somewhat inflating the positive. That text, however, would fit James Lovelock rather better, I feel:

        When a just man dies,
        Lamentation and praise,
        Sorrow and joy, are one.

        Why then, why there,
        Why thus, we cry, did he die?
        The heavens are silent.

        What he was, he was:
        What he is fated to become
        Depends on us

        Remembering his death,
        How we choose to live
        Will decide its meaning.

        When a just man dies,
        Lamentation and praise,
        Sorrow and joy, are one.


        โ€” W. H. Auden

        Comment

        • Keraulophone
          Full Member
          • Nov 2010
          • 1972

          #5
          .
          Arguably the most influential environmental science thinker and populariser this country has produced. By contrast to the hippie tree-hugging fraternity, with whom he was later to disagree on the necessity for nuclear power generation, as a scientist and inventor of his very compact electron capture detector he proposed that scientific ingenuity allied to a new paradigm to explain the interdependence of environmental systems could confront the problems facing planet earth. He invoked Gaia (suggested by William Golding) to explain how the earth behaves as a self-regulating system. James Lovelock (Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth), E. F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful) and Paul Ehrlich (The Population Bomb) were standard references for a geography undergraduate in the late 1970s. Forty-five years later, one can look back and give thanks for the life an independent, free-spirited, visionary nonconformist scientist-inventor whose thoughts on our future on 'Gaia Earth' remain as important as ever.

          James Lovelock CH [but deserved an OM] CBE FRS HonDHL HonDSc DSc PhD BSc, b. 26 vii 1919, d. on his 103rd birthday.

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