James Lovelock returns to the theory that made him famous: Earth is not merely a stage on which life happens, but a complex, self-regulating system shaped by the organisms living within it.

Here, however, Gaia is no serene mother figure. Lovelock argues that human industry has pushed the planet’s regulatory systems toward dangerous instability, and that climate change must be understood not as an isolated environmental problem but as a disturbance to the whole machinery of life.

Written with the urgency—and occasional grandiosity—of a scientific warning issued too late for politeness, the book ranges across atmospheric chemistry, energy, population, planetary history and the limits of environmental politics. Some of Lovelock’s forecasts and proposed remedies remain contentious, particularly his defence of nuclear power, but the book matters as an uncompromising attempt to think at planetary scale: beyond conservation as sentiment, toward the Earth as an active system capable of reorganising itself without regard for human comfort.

Australian Penguin edition, 2006. Paperback. Light shelf wear and rubbing; clean and firmly bound.