The birth of Gaia

So what does “alive” mean? What exactly is life? Lovelock doesn’t have an answer to that. Nor, he says, have most biologists. But we will not understand the history of the Earth, according to him, until we see that a congeries of living things have, to an extent, taken control of it. In three books, the first published in 1979, the second 10 years later and the latest of them this month, he has patiently explored the idea he calls Gaia.

In the first of these, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, he questioned whether environmentalists were concerned about the right problems. In this book the man who discovered CFCs argued that the damage to the ozone layer was actually a minor problem, as were nuclear radiation and acid rain. We were too worried about such things, he argued, and too little about more serious threats to the well-being of the Earth like the increased emissions of carbon dioxide and methane—greenhouse gases—that resulted from forest clearance and stock raising. Following the success of Gaia, in his next book, The Ages of Gaia, Lovelock rewrote the history of the planet in Gaian terms. In this book he proposed a new science of geophysiology which would combine earth science and life science.

In the latest in the series, Gaia: The Practical Science of Planetary Medicine, Lovelock develops the metaphor of the Earth as organism further in the direction of geophysiology: the planet as patient. If Gaia is a super-organism, how is her state of health? Does human abuse of the environment threaten the future of the Earth? Or just that of the species? If Gaia is sick and we are the disease, how will she recover from us? Lovelock compares our understanding of planetary ecology to that of doctors before the advances of twentieth-century medicine. Despite, or because of, our ignorance, he says, it would be better if most scientists gave up their research and became planetary physicians, experts on the self-regulatory mechanisms that maintain the conditions for life.

Neo-Darwinists such as Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene, are deeply sceptical of the Gaia hypothesis. If the geosphere-biosphere were to be something that could be described as alive, they say, it would have to be in competition with other worlds, as organisms are in competition with each other; and it would have to reproduce itself. These are the minimal conditions, they argue, for something that could be understood as a living system.

Dawkins and his followers, the so-called “Genies”, see the world from a microscopic point of view: individual organisms are simply a set of genes’ means of self-preservation and replication. Gaians, on the other hand, see individual organisms–and a good deal else besides–from a much wider perspective, as Gaia’s way of preserving herself, of keeping life alive. Genies think this is mystical and absurd. The dispute is a very old one in biology, that between holists, who look at the highest level of organisation of matter–at the sum of the parts–and reductionists, who look mainly at the parts. Lovelock is a holist with a vengeance.

Other biologists may disagree with Lovelock’s vision of the world, but all those who have met him agree that he is a delightful person, whose views they find intriguing. Edward Goldsmith, the veteran ecological activist and brother of the financier James Goldsmith, has known him since the 1970s. “It is impossible not to like Lovelock,” is the first thing Goldsmith says when I speak to him. “He’s absolutely charming, very loveable. He’s very brilliant. Very brave. His work is very, very important.”

“The trouble is,” says Goldsmith, “he puts too much trust in the capacity of industrial civilization to reform itself. He can’t see that what we have to do is dismantle it. He’s unworldly. And now he’s suddenly found himself a hero to people whose existence he simply wasn’t aware of before.”

“By the way,” adds Goldsmith. “Say hello to him for me.”

In Devon, I relay these remarks to Lovelock. “I hear what Teddy Goldsmith is saying,” he says. “But I think we’re too far gone to dismantle industrial civilization. We have to look for ways to reform industry, to make it become non-polluting, low-consuming and benign. Green wrath ignores the certainty that if we gave up our industrial civilization only a few of us would survive.”

Cars, cows and chainsaws

Lovelock is not that keen on the human species, though. In his encyclopaedia of Earth medicine, Gaia suffers from an affliction he jokingly calls “disseminated primatemia”—a worldwide plague of primates, specifically humans. There is nothing anthropocentric about Gaian theory; Lovelock seems to take a sombre pleasure in telling us that if we continue to threaten the life of the planet Gaia will eventually get rid of our species entirely.

His thirty-acre property in Devon, Coombe Mill, is surrounded by sheep and cattle pasture, but he has carefully recreated a patch of mixed woodland of the kind that commonly coexisted with farmland until the expansion of agriculture after the war. On the lawn of the house peacocks strut and mew; a pair of barn owls have built their nest above the Exponential Dilution Chamber, a sealed upper room that was built in order to calibrate the Electron Capture Device. In the garden stands an off-white baroque plaster statue: the image of Gaia.

“We found her in a garden centre,” says Lovelock, and adds, drily, “She needed rescuing.”

Surveying the surrounding land, Lovelock inveighs against the ubiquity of cattle. Methane from cattle dung is, he believes, a bigger threat to the environment than CFCs. (The three big threats to the atmosphere he says, are “cars, cows and chainsaws”). His thirty acres are an oasis in a desert of agriculture, an ecological pocket, a fragment of the old world. He deplores what he calls the “right-wing conservationist elite” who opposed building a reservoir on nearby Dartmoor and had it built instead in a fertile river valley. The effect, he says, was to “drown three of the last remaining old-fashioned farming villages of England”. He is wont to refer to the traditionally privileged classes as Normans and to the rest as Saxons. “Most scientists are Saxons,” he says, clearly including himself. “Margaret Thatcher was the first Saxon Prime Minister.”

“I’m afraid I was myself involved in this process of wrecking the countryside.” Lovelock says, as we wander through the alders and willows and poplars that line the river running through his property.

“After World War Two there was a move to make the country self-sufficient. We knew there was enough land. I invented a piece of equipment that sat on the back of a bullock, a telemeter, which measured its foraging. We came to the conclusion that fields should be larger. This led to the introduction of the government’s hedgerow removal subsidy. I feel quite culpable, though we had the best of intentions.”

“In the case of CFCs, though, I don’t consider I was mistaken. The threat they pose is negligible compared to that of carbon dioxide build-up. I do agree it was right to withdraw them, though, and I see now that the campaign against them, which I once dismissed as a hysterical bandwagon, may have been necessary.”

Lovelock has been criticised for being soft on industries responsible for environmental pollution.

“It’s complicated,” he says. “For example, it’s not widely known that the manufacturers were quite happy about CFCs being banned. There are only about a dozen worldwide, and they met and talked through a body called the Chemical Manufacturers’ Association.”

“They’re sophisticated. They realised that in the past industry had made big mistakes attacking green issues, trying to discredit activists. Now they pour money into research and sooner or later the academics start disagreeing with one another. In the meantime, manufacturers treat the thing as a real problem and see if they can make a profit out of solving it. Multinationals can often afford to take a longer view than governments can.”

But not the auto industry. Car manufacturers, I suggest, are not about to get that sophisticated.

“No, they’re not. They’re very Stone Age. When I worked at Shell, they were always fulminating about how backward the car manufacturers were. There were all sorts of things Shell could do to improve efficiency, cut back on pollution, but all the car manufacturers would do is change one bolt in the new model.”

A Brixton childhood

Lovelock’s radical view of the relation of technology to the environment has roots in his upbringing in the 1920s and 1930s in Brixton, where his father was a gas man.

“The gasworks was the high-tech industry of its day,” he says. “My father worked his way up from stoker to emptying slot meters. He and my mother ran an antiques business for a time, but it went bust in 1929, when I was 11. Neither of them had much of a head for business.”

“After they went bust, they moved to Orpington and I used to take the train to school in Brixton. There was a stall in Railton Road–next to the eel and pie shop where they chopped live eels up in front of your eyes–a stall that sold second-hand American pulp fiction. I read my first copy of Astounding Stories there. It was trash, of course, but sometimes remarkably prescient. They had laser weapons in Astounding Stories long before the US Defence establishment thought up Star Wars.”

Science fiction has exerted a continuing fascination on Lovelock. He co-wrote a novel, The Greening of Mars, in which intergalactic criminals try to create the conditions for life on Mars by dumping surplus CFCs from Earth.

“The real job of science,” he is wont to say, “is trying to make science fiction come true.”

It may look like a Boys’ Own world: science fiction and fantasy weapons systems. It is notable, though, that all Lovelock’s scientific collaborators have been women; that his theory is named after a goddess; and that he often speaks of the distorting effect of “macho science”. This is a striking phrase coming from one of his generation. I ask him about his mother.

“She was a staunch socialist,” he says. “She came from a line of them–a great-uncle of mine was one of the first Labour MPs.”

“But my father may have been a stronger influence on me. If anything, he was a Tory. He grew up in the country, on the Downs above Wantage. It was a very poor family. They had a very rough life. His father died when he was quite young, and left 13 children to fend for themselves. My father was nicked soon after that for picking holly from the local estate to sell in Wantage at Christmas. He did six months’ hard labour in Reading Jail when he was just 14. It was Dickensian, really.”

“My mother used to get furious about this. She’d say to him, ‘You were misused by the wickedness of the capitalist system,’ and he’d say, ‘Oh, no. I really did do wrong. It was right that I should have been punished.’ He was a lovely man; knew the names of every flower. He had no ambitions. He was at home in the world. To him it was always a happy place.”

Tentatively I mention something Teddy Goldsmith had told me, that Lovelock found out after his father died that he was a gypsy.

“A gypsy? Really? He said that?” Lovelock says. “I don’t think so. But he may have been a Baffinlander…”

“A what?”

“An eskimo,” Lovelock says, without blinking. “Do you notice a Mongolian cast to my features? That comes from my father. When I was working in America, we were quite poor. I used to sell my blood to the hospital there. And I discovered I have a rare type thought only to occur in Baffinland.

“From Baffin to boffin,” he adds, with barely a pause, “in one generation.”

In Boffinland

After he graduated in chemistry from Manchester University, Boffinland was Lovelock’s destination. He joined the Medical Research Council at Mill Hill. His wartime experiences at the MRC have clearly been an important influence on his idea of the true life of science, the life he has striven to live subsequently as an independent researcher.

“I went there when I was 21,” he says. “It was the most wonderful apprenticeship for a young scientist. There were hundreds of ad hoc problems to be solved. All disciplinary barriers were removed. You’d be standing on the roof with a Nobel prize-winner and when the bombs started falling those distinguished scientists who you worked with underwent a kind of mind dump—following an instinct to impart all the important things they knew while there was still time. Science was really wonderful then. No health and safety regulations. You had to be careful, or you died.”

“One day my boss came in and said, ‘I say, Lovelock, do you think you could produce something–with no moving parts–something to measure the heat needed to produce burns . . . first, second, third degree, you know?’”

“We were supposed to use shaved rabbits, but neither I nor my colleague liked using animals. So we did the radiation experiments on ourselves. Look at the scar on my arm. It was Stephen Hawking’s father who did that–he was a physician working there. He cut a histological specimen from a third-degree burn on my arm.

“During the war, nothing could be published because of security—there was no time to write anything up anyway—so there was no cult of personality in science. Nobody locked up their notebooks like they do now—though they should have done, really, for security reasons.”

I glance at the safe where Lovelock keeps the work he is doing for Hewlett-Packard. These days, it seems, even rural Devon is not safe from industrial espionage.

Quakerism, non-conformism, neo-Darwinism

For the first two years of the war, although he worked for a government research organisation, Lovelock registered as a conscientious objector.

“If you’re brought up as a Quaker, as I was, it’s the honorable thing to do. The authorities were very decent. They said, ‘Of course, it’s a moral matter for you’, and gave me absolute exemption, meaning that I didn’t have to do anything. I thought about this. I thought, ‘What a society! They can do that for you. Is it really right that I’m sitting here doing nothing for them?’ So after two years I gave up my CO status and registered. I don’t know if I was weak or strong doing that. After that I hoped to get into the Navy to do radar, but they wouldn’t let me leave the Medical Research Council.”

I stop him at this point. “Let me get this right,” I say. “You thought it was such a wonderful society to allow you be a conscientious objector that you decided to fight for it after all?”

“It sounds mad, doesn’t it?” he replies. “It’s what happened, anyway. Had they put me in prison I’d have held out, naturally. It was a brilliant strategy. We were all prepared to be heroes. As a Quaker, one was trained, almost, to be a hero, to be prepared for the worst.”

“What else did Quakerism do for you?” I ask. “Do you think it gave you the courage to be a nonconformist, a heretic in science?”

Lovelock thinks for a moment. “Thank you for asking that,” he says–and in his tone of voice I hear an echo of the solemn civilities of a Quaker meeting. “Nobody has ever asked me that before.”

“I think you’re right,” he says after a while. “Although the rebel strain in my mother’s family also had a hand in it. The thing about the Quakers is that they took dissent seriously. They weren’t just talkers. Making the jump from expressing strong opinions to actually doing something is quite a leap. They certainly helped me. I would probably still be a Quaker if it hadn’t been that the Meeting at Salisbury I joined after the war was so old-fashioned and rigid. They didn’t approve of me, so I left. Quakers are a little bit austere. And I must admit I enjoy ritual in church services, even if I don’t approve of the dogma.”

For Lovelock, the heroic period of science also ended soon after the war. “People used to say, ‘You wait till the war’s over and we get back to real science.’ But when we got back to real science I found it quite deplorable. It was a mad scramble for fame, like the Olympics. Then came the Macmillan and Wilson governments–the white heat of technology and so on–with their crazy idea that if we had twenty times as many scientists, the country would go ahead twenty times as fast. I was determined to go independent.”

He thought about breaking free and writing science fiction, then came an invitation that changed the direction of his career. “Out of the blue came a letter from the Director of Space Flight Operations at NASA saying would I be an experimenter on the first lunar survey mission. It was like a dream. It was like science fiction. This was only three years after Sputnik.”

“It was the problem of detecting life on Mars that first gave me the idea of Gaia. We are the first generation to see images of the Earth from space, and I think this had a profound effect on me. But I was surprised when many people saw Gaia as a religious idea.”

More recently Lovelock has written that Gaia “may turn out to be the first religion to have a testable scientific theory buried in it.” I ask him: isn’t such talk about Gaia as a religion playing into the hands of his critics?

“Well, the neo-Darwinists—Dawkins and so on—are really the Jesuits of modern science. It’s they who have made a dogma of Darwinism. I think it’s because they’ve been embattled for so long with Creationists, particularly in America. But you can’t deny the presence of religious sensibility.”

I ask him if he ever thinks he should have given Gaia another name.

“Yes”, he says. “Quite often. But I was determined not to have an acronym. I hate acronyms. It was William Golding who thought it up. Perhaps you know? We were neighbours when I lived in Wiltshire. Actually, when he first suggested it I thought he said ‘gyre’—as in Yeats’ ‘turning and turning in the widening gyre’. Now that would have been really far-fetched.”

Lynn Margulis, a prominent American cell biologist who has been Lovelock’s chief collaborator in developing the theory, has a less ambiguous opinion.

“A goddess? I think it’s not necessary,” she says when I call her to discuss it. “It makes some people mad. It makes it easier to accuse us of being non-scientific. The idea is too important to let a name get in the way. We have to save Gaia for science.”

“By the way,” she says, “will you ask Jim to give me a call?” It seems another of Lovelock’s friends is longing to lure him out of rural seclusion. “He owes me a fax at least.”

The palladium transmodulator

In his laboratory the next morning I find Lovelock seated at a brand-new 486 computer running a program called Daisyworld. Daisyworld is a simulated global ecosystem developed to counter the criticisms of Gaia posed by the Genies. It shows what happens on an imaginary planet if there is an alteration in the temperature of the sun. Organisms that reflect light and heat multiply as the sun’s temperature rises, modifying the effect of the change and helping keep the temperature of the planet’s surface within the limit of the tolerance of living things. Ditto for dark organisms when the sun’s temperature drops. It is a radically simplified model of the evolutionary feedback that Lovelock believes is at work in the real world.

On the screen of the computer, imaginary foxes pursue different species of imaginary rabbit—pale rabbits and dark rabbits. As Daisyworld heats up, rabbits with pale pelts thrive; foxes repine. Lovelock is delighted that a version of this program is being marketed as a computer game, SimEarth. ”You can alter everything–radioactivity, plate tectonics, erosion rate. It’s incredible they can get all this on a program that runs on a home computer.”

“And,” he adds, “they pay us a royalty.”

Such computer games, he says, are the equivalent of the Astounding Stories of his youth: most of them are trash; but some are prescient.

On the other side of the laboratory Lovelock has set up a coiled tube, a transmodulator, made from a platinum-like metal, palladium.

“This is a real piece of magic,” he says, radiant with boffinry. “Look!”

Heated, the tube acts as a kind of pump; it was this, he explains, that enabled the gas chromatograph to be used on Mars, where there is hardly any atmosphere.

“The problem,” Lovelock says, “is that some compounds react with palladium, so I thought if I coated the inside of the tube with the right kind of impervious layer, the hydrogen would still go through but the other substances wouldn’t be able to see the palladium and all would be well. And to my joy I discovered that if I treat the tube with fluorine gas, of which I have a small cylinder here”—he points to a white cylinder on the floor—“it forms a fluoride, a bit like anodised aluminium, which lets the hydrogen through but leaves everything else unchanged, as I hoped.”

“If I was in an ordinary lab, I’d have hell’s delight to be allowed to do this. Health and Safety would be around saying, ‘Oh, no. Can’t possibly have fluorine in the lab. Could cause an explosion. Palladium? Don’t know about that. Sounds toxic… Could be carcinogenic…’ But here I can do what I want.”

The palladium transmodulator, I realise at this point, is a refinement of the original Electron Capture Detector, invented 34 years ago and still going strong.

“Oh yes, it’s selling like hot cakes,” Lovelock says. He seems surprised that I should ask. “There’s really nothing like it, you see. Nothing that sensitive that’s still small enough to take on a plane and into the jungle, wherever you need it. When it first appeared it made all other measuring instruments look silly. It was so exquisitely sensitive. This machine makes everything possible. It has done more to change the world than any of my books.”

The fate of the earth

To change the world. Here in Lovelock’s technological Arcadia, with hydrogen bubbling through the transmodulator, foxes chasing rabbits through Daisyworld, and peacocks mewing in the woods outside, it is necessary suddenly to remind yourself how much all this matters—that the world we know may be at stake.

Ford Doolittle, one of Richard Dawkins’ school of Genies, a biologist who has been one of the most assiduous critics of Gaia, puts it like this:

It’s as if we awoke in surprise to find ourselves at the controls of an overbooked jumbo jet hurtling through the night. We’ve never flown a plane before, but the warning lights have all gone red, and the passengers clamour for action. The passengers are divided, however, between those who think we are on automatic pilot (some even think that God is that automatic pilot) and those who fear we are already in a fatal nosedive. Both camps agree we must learn what all those buttons are, the first so that we might not inadvertently assume manual control, the second so that we can do just that, before it is too late. Learn we must, even though we will not be able to decide between these two points of view until dawn breaks, and we can see whether or not the ground below us is littered with wreckage.

Lovelock argues that this kind of image is misleading, giving the human species much greater importance than it warrants. To suggest that we are at the controls— that we the stewards of the Earth—shows, he says, breathtaking hubris. In his view we are more like shop stewards, representatives at the species level in the vast enterprise of Gaia. He is not afraid of a grand metaphor to elaborate this idea. The union we belong to, he says, includes the bacteria, the fungi and slime moulds as well as the nouveaux riches fish, birds and animals. Although we have little executive power, we would do well to respect their rights instead of merely exploiting them and their habits. If not, we may be displaced.

As I prepare to leave Lovelock’s Arcadian laboratory, I reflect that the news Gaia brings us is both good and bad. If we are to believe her prophet—this charming contrarian—she will survive but we may not. For Gaia, too, is selfish.

“If we continue to despoil her,” Lovelock says flatly, “the rest of creation will, as part of Gaia, unconsciously move the Earth itself to a new state, one where we humans may no longer be welcome.”  ★