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.