James Ephraim Lovelock was an English independent scientist, environmentalist and futurist. He is best known for proposing the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system.
Transcendence, transcendent, or transcendental may refer to:
Dame Carol Ann Duffy is a Scottish poet and playwright. She is a professor of contemporary poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University, and was appointed Poet Laureate in May 2009, and her term expired in 2019. She was the first female poet, the first Scottish-born poet and the first openly lesbian poet to hold the Poet Laureate position.
Zadie Smith FRSL is an English novelist, essayist, and short-story writer. Her debut novel, White Teeth (2000), immediately became a best-seller and won a number of awards. She became a tenured professor in the Creative Writing faculty of New York University in September 2010.
The Anthropocene ( ) is a proposed geological epoch dating from the commencement of significant human impact on Earth until now. It affects Earth's geology, landscape, limnology, ecosystems and climate. The effects of human activities on Earth can be seen for example in biodiversity loss and climate change. Various start dates for the Anthropocene have been proposed, ranging from the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution, to as recently as the 1960s as a starting date.
The Royal Society Science Books Prize is an annual £25,000 prize awarded by the Royal Society to celebrate outstanding popular science books from around the world. It is open to authors of science books written for a non-specialist audience, and since it was established in 1988 has championed writers such as Stephen Hawking, Jared Diamond, Stephen Jay Gould and Bill Bryson. In 2015 The Guardian described the prize as "the most prestigious science book prize in Britain".
Kate Atkinson is an English writer of novels, plays and short stories. She is known for creating the Jackson Brodie series of detective novels, which has been adapted into the BBC One series Case Histories. She won the Whitbread Book of the Year prize in 1995 in the Novels category for Behind the Scenes at the Museum, winning again in 2013 and 2015 under its new name the Costa Book Awards.
Mary Beatrice Midgley was a British philosopher. A senior lecturer in philosophy at Newcastle University, she was known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights. She wrote her first book, Beast and Man (1978), when she was in her late fifties, and went on to write over 15 more, including Animals and Why They Matter (1983), Wickedness (1984), The Ethical Primate (1994), Evolution as a Religion (1985), and Science as Salvation (1992). She was awarded honorary doctorates by Durham and Newcastle universities. Her autobiography, The Owl of Minerva, was published in 2005.
Lisa Anne Jardine was a British historian of the early modern period.
Diane Ackerman is an American poet, essayist, and naturalist known for her wide-ranging curiosity and poetic explorations of the natural world.
Elif Shafak is a Turkish-British novelist, essayist, public speaker, political scientist and activist.
Bernardine Anne Mobolaji Evaristo is a British author and academic. Her novel Girl, Woman, Other jointly won the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside Margaret Atwood's The Testaments, making her the first Black woman to win the Booker. Evaristo is Professor of Creative Writing at Brunel University London and President of the Royal Society of Literature, the second woman and the first black person to hold the role since it was founded in 1820.
Nikita Lalwani FRSL is a novelist born in Kota, Rajasthan and raised in Cardiff, Wales.
Karen Christiana Figueres Olsen is a Costa Rican diplomat who has led national, international and multilateral policy negotiations. She was appointed Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in July 2010, six months after the failed COP15 in Copenhagen. During the next six years she worked to rebuild the global climate change negotiating process, leading to the 2015 Paris Agreement, widely recognized as a historic achievement.
Evelyn Rose Strange "Evie" Wyld is an Anglo-Australian author. Her first novel, After the Fire, A Still Small Voice, won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2009, and her second novel, All the Birds, Singing, won the Encore Award in 2013 and the Miles Franklin Award in 2014. Her third novel, The Bass Rock, won the Stella Prize in 2021.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing is a Chinese American anthropologist. She is a professor in the Anthropology Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In 2018, she was awarded the Huxley Memorial Medal of the Royal Anthropological Institute.
Half-Earth: Our Planet's Fight for Life is a 2016 book by the biologist E. O. Wilson, the last in a trilogy beginning with The Social Conquest of Earth (2012) and The Meaning of Human Existence (2014). Half-Earth proposes that half of the Earth's surface should be designated a human-free natural reserve to preserve biodiversity. Wilson noted that the term "Half-Earth" was coined for this concept by Tony Hiss in his Smithsonian article "Can the World Really Set Aside Half the Planet for Wildlife?"
Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence is a 2019 non-fiction book by scientist and environmentalist James Lovelock. It has been published by Penguin Books/Allen Lane in the UK, and republished by the MIT Press. The book was co-authored by journalist Bryan Appleyard. It predicts that a benevolent eco-friendly artificial superintelligence will someday become the dominant lifeform on the planet and argues humanity is on the brink of a new era: the Novacene.
Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty, and Time is a non-fiction book by Gaia Vince published in 2019. It describes how human evolution was shaped by genetic, environmental and cultural factors. It has been reviewed by several science publications, including Nature.
Karen Bakker was a Canadian author, researcher, and entrepreneur known for her work on digital transformation, environmental governance, and sustainability. A Rhodes Scholar with a DPhil from Oxford, Bakker was a professor at the University of British Columbia. In 2022–2023 she was on sabbatical leave at Harvard, as a Harvard Radcliffe Institute Fellow. She was the recipient of numerous awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Stanford University's Annenberg Fellowship in Communication, Canada's "Top 40 Under 40", and a Trudeau Foundation Fellowship.
