Gaia (1450186112)

It is perhaps now hard to remember the impact of the ideas in this book when they were first published. These ideas were so influential on people's thinking that they have been absorbed into the discussion of the global environment. True, they are not universally accepted, indeed there are some who reject much of the thinking in the book. However, the core idea - of regarding the Earth as a single living organism, is so simple yet huge in scope that it touches all subsequent thinking. You can see this idea as a hard fact - a minority view, sometimes almost religious in intensity. Or you can see this idea as a useful metaphor for thinking about how the Earth responds to the good and bad of human actions - probably the more common view.