Lovelock first sketched out his theory in his bestseller,This book describes a set of observations about the life of our planet which may, one day, be recognized as one of the major discontinuities in human thought. If Lovelock turns out to be as right in his view of things as I believe he is, we will be viewing the Earth as a coherent system of life, self-regulating and self-changing, a sort of immense living organism.James Lovelock proposes that all living species are components of that organism, as cells are components of the human body.