Earlier this year, I published a piece on the forgotten history of the 1990 video game Sim Earth, a planet simulator that pays homage to the Gaia Hypothesis—the idea that Earth’s oceans, atmosphere, rocks, and life forms together create a vast, self-regulating system. My reporting showed how Maxis co-founder Will Wright struck up a connection with James Lovelock, the scientist who developed the Gaia Hypothesis in collaboration with evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis. Lovelock went on to become an advisor for Sim Earth and one of the game’s key boosters.

But I missed part of the story. 

What I didn’t know was that Lovelock’s science was bankrolled, in part, by the oil industry.

Lovelock is often remembered for the work he did at NASA, developing instruments for detecting life on other worlds. But from the mid-1960s through the early 80s, Lovelock also worked for Royal Dutch Shell. Shell hired Lovelock to advise the company on how fossil fuels were affecting Earth’s atmosphere, before funding Lovelock’s research on how ocean algae do the same thing. This Shell-sponsored research, which occurred while Lovelock was developing the Gaia hypothesis, supported one of its key insights—that Earth’s life forms control its climate. 

It’s an idea that helped launch an entire field of research on so-called climate feedback mechanisms, while inspiring fiction writers to imagine self-sustaining space habitats and planetary consciousnesses. But Lovelock’s insight was also exploited by corporations seeking to diminish their own role in affecting Earth’s climate.

“Gaia created the conditions for a denialism that derived its power by denying the uniqueness of humans’ capacity to permanently alter the Earth,” historian of science Leah Aronowsky wrote in a 2021 article on the Lovelock-Shell connection.

Lovelock was an independent scientist and inventor whose career began as a technician at Britain’s National Institute for Medical Research, where in 1957 he developed the “electron capture detector”— a gas chromatography device that could sniff out atmospheric molecules present in vanishingly low concentrations. From there, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory recruited Lovelock to work on technology for detecting life beyond Earth, including a gas chromatograph for lunar missions, and detectors for missions to Mars.

In the early 1960s, Lovelock’s work also attracted the attention of Shell director of research Victor Rothschild. As Aronowsky explains, Rothschild first hired Lovelock to work on various patents for the company before asking him, in 1966, to investigate a different matter: How fossil fuel combustion was impacting Earth’s atmosphere. Lovelock wrote a report for Shell that discussed how carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning warms the planet via the greenhouse effect, but also how industrial smog can block sunlight and cool the Earth. (At this point in history, scientists were debating which of these fossil fuel-driven effects—warming or cooling— would win out. We now know the answer.)

Around the same time, Lovelock’s work at NASA prompted him to think more about how microorganisms impact the atmosphere. After the fossil fuel report was completed, Lovelock pitched Shell a research project that would identify potential biological sources of smog-forming chemicals. Lovelock was especially interested in marine algae that produced di-methyl sulfide, a precursor to ammonia sulfate, which creates a smog-like haze. In 1971, on Shell’s dime, Lovelock set sail aboard the British research vessel RSS Shackleton to hunt for this microbial “pollution.” In seawater samples from the South Atlantic, he found it everywhere.

This finding lent credence to a bigger idea Lovelock was developing: That life actively engineers the atmosphere to keep the planet habitable. He went so far as to suggest that marine sulfide emissions—with their atmospheric cooling effects—might be a “regulatory response” to the warming effects of human carbon emissions.

Lovelock eventually named his idea the Gaia Hypothesis and published his first paper on the subject in 1972. Behind the scenes, Margulis was helping Lovelock develop the concept by adding a deep-time evolutionary perspective. The Gaia Hypothesis became a joint work, and the pair would go on to publish scientific and lay-friendly articles and books on it for decades.

The Gaia hypothesis was misunderstood by the public.

Its name, a reference to the primordial goddess of the Earth from Greek mythology, made Gaia seem more like a numinous planetary being than a self-sustaining cybernetic system, as Lovelock and Margulis envisioned. This spiritual take on Gaia often pops up in fiction: John Varley’s Gaea Trilogy, for instance, explores humanity’s encounter with a planet-sized alien mind orbiting Saturn. In Tamysn Muir’s Locked Tomb series, a man (Jonathan Gaias) becomes an all-powerful necromancer after murdering the Earth and stealing its soul. 

Other works of science fiction blend a spiritual Gaia with ideas from ecology. In James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar, the planet Pandora is guided by a global consciousness called Eywa. While Eywa is a goddess-like entity, she regulates the environment not unlike how Lovelock and Margulis’s Gaia does. Eywa’s connection to all living plants through a network of roots is a nod to our emerging understanding of how trees signal and respond to each other, according to Kenyon College microbiologist and science fiction author Joan Slonczewski.

“Cameron did a good job of using…this idea of plant communication as inspiration for how you could imagine an overall tree network having a consciousness,” Slonczewski said.

Slonczewski has been interested in the Gaia Hypothesis since it first appeared on the scene in the 1970s. They have explored it in their fiction for decades. Slonczewski’s 1986 novel A Door into Ocean takes place on an ocean world inhabited by an all-female population of genetic engineers. At first glance, the planet appears to be self-regulated, but behind the scenes, human engineers keep the ocean in balance. The idea, Slonczewski says, was to show that for Earth—or any planet—to remain habitable, “continual regulation and response” are needed.

Slonczewski’s more recent novel, Minds in Transit, addresses one of the biggest scientific critiques of the Gaia Hypothesis: Its untestability.

“You don’t have multiple independent Earths to test, and therefore, you can’t really ask questions about it,” Slonczewski said. “But in science fiction, you can.” Minds in Transit does so by envisioning a world in which people have different populations of alien microbes in their brains, and showing what happens when they treat their microbial co-habitants differently.

Another way fiction writers have stress-tested the Gaia Hypothesis is by exploring what it would take to recreate Earth’s biosphere elsewhere. In his book Gaian Systems, Bruce Clarke, a professor of literature and science at Texas Tech University, praises Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2015 novel Aurora for showing how hard it would be to build a miniature Gaia for off-world living.

The book follows a group of space colonists en route to the Tau Ceti star system aboard a generation ship. The ship is a perfect artificial replica of Earth, complete with diverse ecological biomes and microbially-mediated nutrient cycles. Despite the stupendous engineering that went into it, a ship-sized biosphere proves impossible to maintain, and after several generations, toxic compounds are piling up due to ‘metabolic rifts’. After arriving at Tau Ceti and learning that the planet Aurora is inhospitable, some colonists decide to return to Earth.

“The disappointment of the mission to Aurora traces the novel’s most acute Gaian implication,” Clarke writes. Namely, that we are creatures of Earth, and Earth is our only home. 

Of course, there’s one more genre of fiction the Gaia Hypothesis influenced: The lies industry spins about its own impacts on the Earth.

In 1975, Lovelock and Shell manager Sidney Epton co-wrote an article for New Scientist suggesting that trace gases from microbes may be driving climate change more than humans. That same year, Dupont recruited Lovelock to testify before Congress that the ozone hole may be the result of natural processes rather than industrial chlorofluorocarbons. 

Other companies used the idea that Earth’s climate is self-regulating to attempt to assuage public concerns about pollution and global warming.  As a 1995 advertorial by Exxon put it, “Mother Nature is pretty successful at taking on human nature.” Thirty years later, politicians who deny the unfolding planetary catastrophe still assert, with breezy confidence, that nature can handle whatever we throw at it.

What do we do with an idea that has inspired decades of scientific and creative thinking about the nature of our living planet, while also offering intellectual cover to those who would destroy it for profit? 

In Clarke’s view, Gaia’s positive contributions to knowledge outweigh the negatives. The Gaia Hypothesis’s integration of life and the non-living Earth laid the groundwork for the development of Earth system sciences as a bonafide field of study. The Gaian signatures Lovelock and Margulis identified in Earth’s atmosphere gave us a blueprint to search for life on other worlds. Gaia’s positioning of life as an agent of planetary change over Earth’s history gives deep-time context for the Anthropocene—the proposed geologic epoch of human dominance. 

And it’s precisely because of the mismatch between planetary time and human time, Clarke says, that Gaia, despite its remarkable ability to self-regulate, “is not coming to our rescue.”

But even if that read on the Gaia Hypothesis is patently wrong, it has been influential. And that is why Lovelock’s funding matters. Shell may not have paid for Lovelock to study sea algae with the intent of proving man-made climate change has a natural cause. But a scientist who took oil industry money, and who was often sympathetic to polluters in his public statements, crafted ideas that made such a claim more plausible.

It’s a reminder that even brilliant scientists aren’t immune to influence, and even the best ideas can be twisted to serve corporate agendas. In a time where government support for research is imploding and private companies are stepping in to fill the void, Gaia’s oil-slicked history should not be forgotten.

— Maddie Stone