In 2004, writing for the New York Times, music critic Allan Kozinn called the material behind composer Nathan Currier's largest work, Gaian Variations (a revised version, Gaia Variations, was completed in 2025), 'mostly pseudoscientific.' The work had already taken over half a decade to create in its first version, and was written in consultation with one of the major scientific minds of the last century: for example, the London Museum of Science had never once, in its entire 150 year history as a preeminent institution presenting scientific history, devoted a full retrospective to the work of a living scientist, until it did so in 2014 for James Lovelock and his Gaia theory, and Currier had been in consultation with Lovelock frequently while writing his composition (the photo below shows Currier's score, silently embalmed behind a glass case, at that exhibit). This website, then, is devoted to showcasing Currier's response, and the interrelationships between his mixture of musical activity and pursuit of Nature.

After the death of his father the following year, the composer soon began to engage in a wide variety of activities to increase public understanding and awareness of Earth System science, often acting under the inspiration of its co-founder, polymathic evolutionary theorist Lynn Margulis, Lovelock's primary collaborator.

Currier became a member of Al Gore’s Climate Reality Project at the time of its inception in 2006, giving all of his talks from Lynn Margulis' laptop, which she gave him for that purpose. As Gore quickly began to advise members to give their climate presentations from their own perspective, Currier became the only presenter to give all his presentations from the viewpoint of the origins of the discipline itself - namely, the development of modern climatology as a subdiscipline of Earth Systems science, initiated at NASA in the early 1980s based on the inspiration provided by Lovelock's work on his Gaia theory. Currier served as Senior Climate Adviser and methane specialist for Public Policy Virginia. He spoke on climate change at United Nations headquarters, UNICEF headquarters at the United Nations, Columbia University, NYU and many others. Currier immersed himself in what became a primary focus - the potential for methane and other short-lived species to play a key role in controlling near-term warming and Arctic change for the coming decades. He was a guest panelist for the first of Al Gore's “24 Hours of Reality”, viewed by some 8 million live streaming, along with Drew Shindell, whose work on methane has been of global importance. Currier wrote for several years on methane and other climate concerns for the Huffington Post. He started a climate group, 1250, focused on methane and near-term climate. He was also a founding member of the London-based Arctic Methane Emergency Group, which twice presented before the UK Parliament. Currier had a number of meetings with Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) and his staff regarding methane policy.

Currier has advocated for a broader understanding and recognition of Gaia theory, or Earth System science, as being necessary for any viable path forward in response to climate change. He co-authored Life's Tectonics with NASA scientist Paul D. Lowman (see below), which involves Lowman's 'Comparative Planetology' approach to understanding Earth through considering it together with its immediate neighbors, Mars and Venus. In particular, data from Mars has helped confirm its lack of Earth-style tectonics, highlighting in turn the role that water, and perhaps life, have likely played in the tectonics of our planet - helping to yet again underscore how, as Vladimir Vernadsky asserted a century ago, "Life is a geological force."