The whole world in our hands James Lovelock's Gaia theory inspired the Green movement. But as fossil fuels begin, literally, to cost the earth, he argues that nuclear power could save the planet. The Guardian Life is not just a force for good, it is a force for its own good.
Life has a way of managing things in favour of more life.
And in the course of doing so, life manages a whole planet. It hijacks sunlight and passes it around to the next user in digestible, shrink-wrapped form. Having done that, it disposes of itself, directly as nutrient for some other creature, or indirectly as a strata of phosphate or a layer of chalk or fossil limestone, or as energy to burn 1bn years later. But this heavenly host of living things surprised no one. Life has been turning up in improbable places for years.