Homage to Gaia (2 page)

The strongest objection to Gaia came from neo-Darwinist
scientists
, and I was moved when Stephan Harding, an Oxford biologist, joined me in Gaia research in 1994; he is now a close friend. I had always felt that Gaia needed approval from eminent neo-Darwinists before it would be taken seriously. I am therefore deeply grateful to John Maynard Smith and William Hamilton for having the courage and generosity to discuss Gaia seriously as a scientific topic.

The Gaia story is a long-running show and provides an opportunity for new leading actors. The most prominent of these today is Tim Lenton, whose quiet competence makes his recent appearance from behind the props so welcome. Tim, as my principal successor, will have to write the plot as well as act the science.

The Gaia meetings in Oxford in 1994 and 1996 were supported by the Department of the Environment through Mr. Derek Osborn, by the Ecological Foundation through Mr. Teddy Goldsmith and
by Shell Research Limited through Mr. Frank Briffa. The larger part of the funding came from a Norwegian gentleman, Knut Kloster. Soon after we met him in 1991, he gave Gaia a major opportunity for decent development as a unifying theory. Therefore, my
acknowledgement
to him is a story in itself but it concludes my cast of characters.

As we were preparing to return home from a visit to New York, the World City Corporation, a shipping company whose chairman was Knut Kloster, invited me to travel to Port Canaveral in Florida to give a short speech to send off a Viking ship called
Gaia.
The ship had already sailed the Atlantic from Norway, following the route taken by Eric the Red, the Norseman who had pioneered Atlantic travel when they settled Greenland, and perhaps North America.
Gaia
was a traditional Viking ship with a single square sail. The ship’s name and voyage had the blessing of two Scandinavian leaders: the President of Iceland, Vigdis Finnbogadottir, and the Prime Minister of Norway, Gro Brundtland.

The ship was en route to Rio de Janeiro for the United Nations environmental conference of 1991. The World City Corporation did us proud. Sandy and I were booked into a hotel in Orlando, where we renewed acquaintance with John Rogers and Stephanie Gallagher of the Corporation. We were given time to recover from our journey and we arranged to meet for breakfast. Here, to our delight, we met the astronaut Jim Lovell and his wife. We were to be the two speakers at the launch. At Port Canaveral we wandered over to the quay where
Gaia
was berthed, went aboard, and talked with the crew. It was a small ship and, knowing how rough is the North Atlantic, I marvelled at her seaworthiness. The captain told us how easy it was to use the single, large square sail. How apposite it was to speak for this small ship
Gaia
on its journey from Cape Canaveral. Across the marshes from the port, the huge launch towers of the space vehicles were visible. A proud nostalgia filled my mind as I prepared to speak. Sixteen years back, those towers had held the giant launch vehicles which lifted the Viking mission to Mars. That mission
confirmed
the Gaian prediction—made long before the journey—that Mars was lifeless. The spacecraft of that mission carried the two Viking landers to Mars and left them there on the corrosive regolith of that most inhospitable planet. In the landers were essential components. These I had designed when working at the Jet
Propulsion
Labs.

My speech, and that of my companion on the platform, Jim Lovell, was brief, and then we watched the small vessel set sail for Rio, taking with it its message of a living Earth. Afterwards, it was fulfilling to talk with Jim Lovell about his almost ill-fated expedition, Apollo 13, the spacecraft that suffered a fuel-cell explosion on its way to the moon, a disaster that left them with barely enough power to bring it home. They had no heating, so that the interior temperature sunk at times to –40° C. Their ordeal was the subject of a recent film, but no film could have equalled Jim Lovell’s personal account. He confirmed that he and other astronauts shared a common feeling about the Earth. Their view of it from space led them to see the planet itself as their home. Home was not the nation, or the town, or the street, or their house. Home was the whole planet. He expressed it graphically by holding out his thumb at arm’s length and saying, ‘That small area of my thumbnail covered the Earth completely when we were in the moon’s orbit; I knew then that home was that small blue ball.’ I felt a deep sense of gratitude to Knut Kloster for having brought us here to this historic place and for this important event.

Next morning we had breakfast with him. He was what my mental model of a Viking told me he should be. He thanked me for my part and said, ‘Now what can I do for you?’ I have never been much good at fund-raising and, although we run a charity, Gaia, much of the money that goes into it we put in from our own pockets. Whenever I meet a wealthy organization or person there never seems to be a proper moment during which to broach the topic of support, but here, unexpectedly, Knut asked ‘What can I do for you?’ I said, ‘We have a charity, Gaia.’ Knut broke in at once and said, ‘To me, charity is a dirty word. What can I do for
you
?’ I replied, ‘Give me a contract to work to make Gaia scientifically acceptable. I can’t promise success but I would guess that a three-year contract at £25,000 per year would go far to achieve this objective.’ And he did.

We might have taken Knut’s gift as a grant of funds for salaries and equipment to do research on Gaia full time. However, it did not work out that way. Somehow, when the first cheque arrived we realized that it was like the gift of talents described in the New Testament. The vineyard owner gives to his servants varying numbers of talents and then comes back a year later to see what they have made of them. It seemed quite inappropriate to use Knut’s gift in the same way as a grant. We were accountable for our use of it, and somehow we must use it to make the concept of Gaia grow. Sandy and I decided that the
best way to achieve his, and our, objective of achieving scientific credibility for Gaia was to organize and then hold one or more special kinds of scientific meeting in a recognized scientific venue. And this is how we spent his gift.

I am indebted to Sir John Cornforth and Mr John Lane for their thoughtful criticisms of the first edition of this book.

Introduction

We were enjoying our tea break in a warm cedar-panelled room with a view down the valley to the next village, Broadchalke. Suddenly and rudely as ever, the telephone rang its strident, insistent call. No one expected Helen, my first wife, to answer it—multiple sclerosis had already disabled her. I hate telephones and always wait for someone else to pick them up. Peggy Coombs—the lady from the village who helped Helen, and who came from the Welsh valleys where they are properly outspoken—burst out, ‘Does no one in this house answer the phone?’ and dashed to still its clamour. ‘Hello. What do you want?’ asked Peggy informatively. ‘I want to speak to Dr Lovelock,’ said the disembodied voice. Peggy replied disdainfully, ‘He’s not a proper doctor but I’ll get him for you.’ The caller was a professor from a distant university who wanted me to lecture on the possibility of life on Mars. For once, thanks to Peggy, I had had time to prepare my mind and say no.

Peggy was right. I am not a proper doctor. To her and to most of us, a proper doctor is one qualified in medicine. Someone who treats the sick and who she regards with the respect earlier generations gave to the priest. A DSc was not enough to justify the title ‘Doctor’. More than this, my solitary practice in Bowerchalke spread across the sciences ranging from Astronomy to Zoology. How could anyone so divided be a proper doctor of science? For a moment, my
self-doubting
nature made me think of other impostor doctors like the Vicar of Unworthy in Devon, the Reverend Fiddle, DD.

When I set my heart towards independent science, I had no
intention
whatever of becoming a professional chemist and consultant.
That is a good and proper way of life but it was not for me. Science was and is my passion and I wanted to be free to do it unfettered by direction from anyone, not even by the mild constraints of a university department or an institute of science. Any artist or novelist would understand—some of us do not produce their best when directed. We expect the artist, the novelist and the composer to lead solitary lives, often working at home. While a few of these creative individuals exist in institutions or universities, the idea of a majority of established novelists or painters working at the ‘National Institute for Painting and Fine Art’ or a university ‘Department of Creative Composition’ seems mildly amusing. By contrast, alarm greets the idea of a creative scientist working at home. A lone scientist is as unusual as a solitary termite and regarded as irresponsible or worse.

In the early 1970s,
New
Scientist
published a review of a book on Darwin’s life. The reviewer claimed the book confirmed his view that our most distinguished biologist was insane. He argued that anyone with Darwin’s reputation who chose to bury himself in a country village instead of enjoying the intellectual stimulation Cambridge offered must be mad. As I see it, the reviewer, not Darwin, was the lunatic.

I want to tell you in this book why I ‘buried myself’ in the country village of Bowerchalke. I worked happily there until 1977, when sadly the agribusiness revolution socially cleansed the village. My escape was to West Devon and to a house surrounded by trees and almost a mile from its nearest neighbour. I want to show that the solitary practice of science in a country village, or even a remote house, is both pleasant and productive.

Soon after starting work in Bowerchalke, chance favoured me with a view of the Earth from space and I saw it as the stunningly beautiful anomaly of the solar system—a planet that was palpably different from its dead and deserted siblings, Mars and Venus. I saw Earth as much more than just a ball of rock moistened by the oceans, or a spaceship put there by a beneficent God just for the use of humankind. I saw it as a planet that has always, since its origins nearly four billion years ago, kept itself a fit home for the life that happened upon it and I thought that it did so by homeostasis, the wisdom of the body, just as you and I keep our temperature and chemistry constant. In this view the spontaneous evolution of life did more than make Darwin’s world: it started a joint project with the evolving Earth itself. Life does more than adapt to the earth; it changes it, and evolution is a
tight-coupled dance with life and the material environment as
partners
, and from the dance emerges the entity Gaia. This book is as much about Gaia as it is about me. That part which is about me is to set the scene for the birth of what is still a revolutionary theory. I doubt if the scientific establishment would have allowed a proper doctor to work on so unfashionable a topic and one with a name that many scientists regard as politically incorrect.

The naming of things is important. Our deepest thoughts are unconscious and we need metaphors and similes to translate them into something that we, as well as the rest of humankind, can
understand
. For reasons that I never understood, many scientists dislike Gaia as a name; prominent among them is the eminent biologist, John Maynard Smith. He made clear when he said of Gaia, ‘What an awful name to call a theory’, that it was the name, the metaphor, more than the science that caused his disapproval. He was, like most scientists, well aware of the power of metaphor. William Hamilton’s metaphors of selfish and spiteful genes have served wonderfully to make his science comprehensible, but let us never forget that the powerful metaphor of Gaia was the gift of a great novelist. I would remind those who criticize the name Gaia that they are doing battle with William Golding, who first coined it. We should not lightly turn aside from the name Gaia because of pedantic objection. Why do scientists, who now accept Gaia as a theory that they can try to falsify, continue to object to the name itself? Surely, it cannot be metaphor envy. Perhaps it is something deeper, a rejection by reductionist scientists of anything that smells of holism, anything that implies that the whole may be more than the sum of its parts. I see the battle between Gaia and the selfish gene as part of an outdated and pointless war between holists and reductionists. In a sensible world, we need them both.

I gladly accepted William Golding’s choice of the name Gaia for my theory of the Earth and I have devoted all my working life, since completing my apprenticeship, to the furtherance of Gaia theory. It has been an exciting but bruising battle and this book tells both the story of Gaia and tries to explain how my life as a scientist led me to it. I take comfort in the fact that Gaia theory is now widely accepted by scientists in disciplines ranging from astrophysics to microbiology, they only reject the name Gaia, not the theory itself. Unfortunately, science is divided into a myriad of facets like the multi-lensed eye of a fly and through each separate lens peers a professor who thinks that his view alone is true. The danger now is that each of these fragmented
faculties who once spurned Gaia will now claim the theory as their own. We must not stand aside and let these specialists highjack the unifying concept of Gaia.

Gaia and environmentalism have never had an easy relationship. I seem to view environmental politics much as George Orwell did the socialism of his time. My heart is with the environmentalists but I see their good intentions thwarted by their failure to see that human rights alone are not enough. If, in caring for people, we fail to care for other forms of life on Earth then our civilization and we will suffer. I wonder if in the 21
^st
century, when the grim effects of global warming become apparent, we will regret the humanist bias that led us to continue to burn fossil fuel and plunder the natural world for food. Is our distrust of nuclear power and genetically modified food soundly based? I share Patrick Moore’s disenchantment with
environmentalism
. He was a founder of Greenpeace, but like me has an Orwellian view of the environment lobbies as they are today.

Some who read this book might think it old fashioned, and if they do, I ask them to note that I was born in 1919, when English society was still conditioned by the code of the gentleman, a culture which valued good manners, playing by the rules, admiring the good loser and above all taking full responsibility for mistakes. In certain ways, it resembled the Samurai code of another island nation. I grew up believing in it and still do but recognize now when a young woman offers me her seat on the Underground that I am no longer with it. I acknowledge the debt I owe to the United States of America for launching me on my quest for Gaia and for sustaining me throughout my independence. Now with Sandy, my American wife, to accompany me, I no longer feel, when in the United States, a mere visiting alien. If at times in this book, I am critical of American institutions, it does not come from the spite or envy of an outsider but is the concern of one member of an American family. I am critical also of academia and share the author Robert Conquest’s view, expressed in his book
Reflections
on
a
Ravaged
Century,
that a surprising number of midlife academics seem selected for dogma. He was thinking of politics, but I think it applies to science also.

Few are privately wealthy enough to develop a new theory of science and support a family from their own resources. When we started in Bowerchalke, my first wife Helen and I were less than rich; we had our parents to support as well as our children. Like most young families, we were heavily mortgaged and, like an
intending
artist, I knew that to make a start would not be easy. No matter how good was my science, no one would sponsor it until the science critics had approved. Like art critics, their first reactions are often cautious or negative.

The answer was to do what the artist does: expect no sale for my masterpieces but live by selling ‘potboilers’. My potboilers were small research contracts and consultancies. These provided an ample income without needing more than a small proportion of my time. I had hoped that the sale of inventions would pay my bills but these turned out to be an unreliable source of income.

Strangely, wealth threatens the would-be independent as much as poverty. It would have been easy for me at several stages in my independence to have built and marketed a successful product. In the 1960s, I built a prototype leak detector that was cheaper, simpler, and over a thousand times more sensitive than those that were then on the market. I could have joined with an engineer and a marketeer to form a company to make and sell it. I do not regret parting with that chance of wealth. Becoming an entrepreneur is a full-time job.
Building
, testing and selling a well-made product is a right and proper way of life. It provides employment, brings wealth to our country, and is a source of pride, but it was not what I wanted. How could I devote my time to science if I was concerned about the future and the welfare of my employees and my company?

As a scientist, I have been an explorer looking for new worlds, not a harvester from safe and productive fields, and life at the frontier has shown me that there are no certainties and that dogma is usually wrong. I now recognize that with each discovery the extent of the unknown grows larger, not smaller. The discoveries I have made came mostly from doubting conventional wisdom, and I would advise any young scientist looking for a new and fresh topic to research to seek the flaw in anything claimed by the orthodox to be certain. There are several examples of the use of this approach in this book. The most important was to challenge the biological dogma that organisms simply adapt to their environment. It turned out that just as we cannot observe an atom without changing its state, so neither can we, or any living thing, evolve without changing the state of the Earth. This is the essence of Gaia.

I hope that I can convince you that the independent scientist has a wonderfully interesting and rewarding life—every bit as good as that of the artist or composer, and may even be as worthwhile. I doubt if
the discovery of CFCs in the atmosphere, or the extraordinary link between the microscopic algae of the oceans and the clouds above them and, most of all, the idea that the Earth regulates its climate and composition—the Gaia theory—would have come as quickly had I stayed in employment or become an entrepreneur. Gaia has been my inspiration since it first came into my mind in September 1965. Theories in science are valued by the success of investigations and experiments they inspire; by this measure, Gaia has been fruitful. Thousands of scientists owe their employment and their grant funds to my work as an independent scientist and I include among them those who spend their time trying to disprove Gaia theory.

The four chapters that follow are about my childhood and my experiences as an apprentice practitioner of science. Then, in Chapters 5 and 6 I explain how I became an independent scientist, how I do it, and about the customers who provide support. In Chapters 7 to 9 I try to show how serious science can be done from a home laboratory and paid for from the profits of the practice. Chapter 9 is about the quest for Gaia from its start in the 1960s until the writing of this book. In Chapter 10 I explain the practical details of a life spent as an independent scientist. My more recent personal history follows in Chapters 11 and 12, and in the Epilogue, I offer Gaia as a way of life for agnostics.