Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth by James Lovelock

This book was first published in 1979. Even my second-hand 1991 reprint is over 30 years old! The ideas it set out were revolutionary at the time and are still fresh and enlightening today, at least to this reader.

The hypothesis at the core of the book is that the Earth's biosphere - Gaia - is 'a self-regulating entity with the capacity to keep our planet healthy by controlling the chemical and physical environment'.

At 150 pages this is not a long book but it's packed with (beautifully described) science. To me, as a non-scientist, just James Lovelock's factual explanation of the air in the Earth's atmosphere as a dynamic mixture kept in balance by continual chemical reactions was a revelation. I don't pretend to have fully grasped everything, but I certainly did gain a better understanding of the many-layered complexity of the ecosystems we live in.