Jim’ll fix it

Could James Lovelock really solve the earth’s problems? Peter Forbes is almost convinced

For two decades, James Lovelock was seen by many of his scientific peers as an eccentric loner who had ruined his otherwise solid reputation as an inventor and pioneering environmental chemist by insisting that the earth was “alive”, not very well, and living under the name of Gaia. But as global warming has moved up the agenda, he has increasingly appeared to be a prophet who deserves every honour the human race can bestow.


Lovelock was a fully paid-up member of the awkward squad from an early age: at school he refused to do homework, and somehow got away with it. A Brixton boy from a socially ambiguous background, Lovelock in some ways resembles a character out of HG Wells, whose scientific fiction and broad prophetic sweep have guided him from an early age. The adult Lovelock is a blend of sturdy individualist inventor, nature rhapsodist and hard-headed Malthusian prophet of human destiny.

The story of Gaia has been told many times, but it bears repetition and frequent updating because the urgency of Lovelock’s warnings is increasing. He has written seven Gaia books since the first in 1979, as well as an autobiography, Homage to Gaia, in 2000. Now we have John and Mary Gribbin’s biography, which also talks about Gaia before Gaia: Lovelock’s forebears and their tentative stabs at the theory Lovelock has made his own.

With Darwin’s name ringing in our ears from his anniversary celebrations, it is impossible, reading The Vanishing Face of Gaia, to resist comparison. Lovelock is an independent scientist who works from home, as was Darwin. Both were patient observers of nature before they were theorists. The theories of evolution by natural selection and Gaia were each proposed at a time when they were far ahead of the evidence necessary to confirm them, but they suggested innumerable ways in which they could be tested. The two theories are related, of course. The best way to understand Gaia is that it proposes a new context for evolution. Lovelock is an interdisciplinary scientist and he challenges the orthodoxy that the physical earth – the rocks, the oceans and the atmosphere – evolved by purely physical and chemical principles, with life then evolving as icing on the cake, having to cope with whatever the planet threw up in the form of ice ages, meteorite strikes and huge volcanic eruptions, but never itself being a player in the geological drama.

That this was wrong became clear to Lovelock in the 1960s, when he was working for Nasa’s project to determine whether there is life on Mars. He realised that sampling Mars’s atmosphere would show life’s presence or absence. The atmosphere on earth may seem to us like the most natural thing, but its composition – 21% oxygen and 79% nitrogen – is very odd. These gases were generated, and are maintained at an equable level for life’s processes, by living organisms themselves; if the biosphere died, oxygen and nitrogen would disappear with it, leaving a greenhouse atmosphere similar to that of Mars and Venus (around 95% carbon dioxide and hundreds of degrees hot). The Gaia theory proposes that the atmosphere, oceans, rocks, soil and all living things constitute a self-regulating system that maintains favourable conditions for life – but not necessarily the life that is comfortable for human beings.

Guardian