Why would a ninety-year-old man choose to defy his most trusted physician? Because in an act of splendid generosity Sir Richard Branson offered him the chance to fly into space, to share that transcendental feeling known only to astronauts - that out home is the Earth itself, not the house or the street or the nation where we live - which for a scientist who has spent a lifetime studying the way our planet works was irresistible.
In the light of this trip, and as climate change speeds up, James Lovelock offers in this book a view of our and the Earth's possible future which differs from that of most scientists and the science of the IPCC. We are trying already to undo some of the harm we have done and will try harder, even desperately, but until we see that the Earth is more that a mere ball of rock we are unlikely to remedy the cause of the change. The root problem is that there are too may people, pets and livestock for the Earth to carry.
The Face of Gaia will tell us why it matters that we see and feel the earth as a living organism. The cost of our neglect of Gaia could soon cause the greatest human tragedy in living memory, because the Earth, in its but not our interests, is now moving into a new hot epoch, one where it can more easily continue to keep the planet habitable. If we are to have any chance of avoiding global catastrophe lovelock's works must be heeded.
