Fascinating; I know you sent this earlier but I just got a chance to look at it more closely. A few overlaps with stuff I'm thinking about & writing about... You mention the "alphabetic origins of the letter Q." After I posted my piece on sentient oil, someone on twitter wrote to me enthusiastically about James Lovelock -- I noticed the word Gaia made its appearance here, but not uncritically "garbled choruses of Gaia" sounds about right to me. I hadn't before come across the claim that Lovelock was the basis for the Q character in the James Bond movies, the member of MI6 who does gadgets and inventions. There's that letter again, and in an appropriately paranoiac context: I hadn't really researched Lovelock, and the news that he was both corporate and implicated in the worst of the Cold War was surprising, since I had thought of gaia as a vaguely eco spiritual concept.My impressions on the matter had been bought by a well-funded marketing campaign behind Lovelock led by Shell Oil and the "Intelligence Community." I'm just curious if you have any reflections on any of this, having lived through the evolution of "environmentalism" or ecological consciousness from Silent Spring to Limits to Growth to Lovelock to Climate Change.
Enticing!
Fascinating; I know you sent this earlier but I just got a chance to look at it more closely. A few overlaps with stuff I'm thinking about & writing about... You mention the "alphabetic origins of the letter Q." After I posted my piece on sentient oil, someone on twitter wrote to me enthusiastically about James Lovelock -- I noticed the word Gaia made its appearance here, but not uncritically "garbled choruses of Gaia" sounds about right to me. I hadn't before come across the claim that Lovelock was the basis for the Q character in the James Bond movies, the member of MI6 who does gadgets and inventions. There's that letter again, and in an appropriately paranoiac context: I hadn't really researched Lovelock, and the news that he was both corporate and implicated in the worst of the Cold War was surprising, since I had thought of gaia as a vaguely eco spiritual concept.My impressions on the matter had been bought by a well-funded marketing campaign behind Lovelock led by Shell Oil and the "Intelligence Community." I'm just curious if you have any reflections on any of this, having lived through the evolution of "environmentalism" or ecological consciousness from Silent Spring to Limits to Growth to Lovelock to Climate Change.