1975

Summary

The Ozone War breaks out in the same year that the Gaia concept ventures beyond scientific circles.²⁰⁹ The first of these more general appearances took place in two very different venues. Lovelock and Margulis seem to have made a concerted decision around this time to launch the Gaia hypothesis toward science periodicals rather than academic journals. Lovelock targeted the British weekly magazine New Scientist, while Margulis planned to take a second shot at the illustrated bi-monthly magazine American Scientist. “Enclosed is a copy of the Gaia for New Scientist article,” Lovelock wrote at the end of 1974: “It will probably make you wince but it might serve as a model for the American Scientist version” (Letter 69). Perhaps Lovelock was thinking about Margulis’s likely response to the teaser introducing the New Scientist article: “Do the Earth’s living matter, air, oceans and land surface form part of a giant system which could be seen as a single organism?” (Lovelock and Epton 1975: 304).