Editorial

Abstract

I recently had the pleasure of watching James Lovelock being interviewed during a conference on The Future of Global Systems Thinking, held here at the University of Exeter. The event was a celebration of Lovelock’s 100th birthday and of his pioneering approach to thinking about planet Earth as a living system. Although Lovelock’s (1979) ‘Gaia hypothesis’, which proposed that the Earth is a single, self-regulating entity, has been a major influence on the subsequent interdisciplinary development of Earth system science, it was initially met with considerable resistance and ridicule from the scientific community. It seemed, nevertheless, to capture the imagination of large numbers of people in a way that Lovelock later said had surprised him (Joseph 1991, 70). Within less than a decade, the political and other implications of Gaia were being explored and advanced by a number of influential writers (Thompson 1987 summarises). Whether or not people understood or accepted even the basic premise of the scientific hypothesis, the evocative image and name of Gaia – the ancient Earth Goddess – that Lovelock attached to it seemed to offer a rallying cry for those seeking to understand the world in terms and structures other than those of the so-called ‘clockwork universe’. The clockwork worldview became dominant in Western societies in the wake of Cartesian and Newtonian physics which suggested that all phenomena could be explained in terms of mechanics (Dolnick 2012). The notion that, like the universe itself, human society can also be understood in clockwork, machine-like terms remains embedded in much political and organizational thinking. This is due, in part, to F.W. Taylor’s work on ‘scientific management’ at the turn of the twentieth century. Whitehead says of it: