Book review: The Vanishing Face of Gaia, by James Lovelock | He Knew He Was Right: The Irrepresible Life of James Lovelock and Gaia

Published on Thursday 26 February 2009 15:40

THE VANISHING FACE OF GAIA BY JAMES LOVELOCK Allen Lane, 172pp, £20 HE KNEW HE WAS RIGHT: THE IRREPRESSIBLE LIFE OF JAMES LOVELOCK AND GAIA BY JOHN GRIBBIN & MARY GRIBBIN Allen Lane, 240pp, £20 Reviews by ROGER COX

IS JAMES LOVELOCK A HYPOCRITE? The introduction to his new book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, will certainly leave many hardcore Greenies choking on their organic hemp seeds. Soon, perhaps as soon as this year, Lovelock says, he intends to fly into space on Sir Richard Branson's new passenger spacecraft, SpaceShipTwo, so that he can "catch a glimpse of the Earth I have lived with all my life".

It's an almighty coup for Branson, getting a leading environmentalist to endorse his controversial new project, but has Lovelock sold out his Green principles by taking up the Virgin boss's offer of a free seat?

Branson has claimed that his Virgin Galactic flights will cause "no damage whatsoever" to the environment because they will be powered by biofuels, but in an age when we're constantly being told to turn off lights and avoid overfilling kettles, carbon-neutral space travel seems a little hard to swallow.

The Green lobby has wasted no time in shredding Virgin Galactic's eco-credentials. Richard Dyer, transport campaigner for Friends of the Earth, has described it as "the ultimate in irresponsible elitist travel", and Lovelock himself has previously slammed biofuels. In his 2006 book, The Revenge of Gaia, he writes: "The craziest idea is the notion that we can use biofuels as replacements for fossil fuels. All those people who run their cars on biofuel and think they are helping the environment are only deluding themselves."

So what's going on? Has Lovelock, about to turn 90, started to lose his marbles and forgotten about his earlier concerns? Given the cogent, insightful nature of his new book, that seems unlikely. A more plausible explanation is that his decision to fly into space springs from a deep-seated sense of entitlement. "After all I've done for the planet," you can imagine him thinking, "I've earned a wee jaunt into space – even if it does leave an almighty carbon bootprint."

That might make Lovelock sound incredibly self-important, but if anyone has the right to value themselves so highly, it's probably him. This is a man who has already saved us from ourselves once. Remember the hole in the ozone layer? If it hadn't been for him, we might never have known it was there.

In the late 1950s, Lovelock came up with his most famous invention – a super-sensitive device for identifying and measuring pollutants called the Electron Capture Detector or ECD. This was used by early environmentalists to document the widespread dissemination of harmful pesticides such as DDT, but in the early 1970s Lovelock used it to prove the presence of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) in the air over the Antarctic Ocean, paving the way for the discovery that these industrial by-products were depleting the ozone layer at a terrifying rate.

For most scientists, that would have been achievement enough for one lifetime, but Lovelock was just getting started. In 1965, he came up with one of the most controversial ideas to hit the scientific community in a generation – the concept of the Earth as a single organism. At the suggestion of his neighbour and friend, William Golding, Lovelock dubbed his big idea the Gaia Hypothesis, after the Greek goddess of the Earth. Various predictions made on the back of the hypothesis have already come true, to the extent that it is now known as Gaia Theory; however, its implications are still hotly debated in scientific circles, so in The Vanishing Face of Gaia, Lovelock claims to offer the "final word". .

On the whole, the book makes for deeply depressing reading. The main problem we face as a species, Lovelock believes, is that there are now far too many of us for the planet to support, so Gaia, as a living organism concerned only with self-preservation, is reacting by reducing our numbers. We are a virus, and global warming – a process which we have triggered but can now do little to prevent – is Gaia's way of reducing our malign influence; a planetary fever, if you will.

The solution for humankind? Prepare the lifeboats, says Lovelock, or rather the lifeboat states. As the Earth heats up and its continental land masses become increasingly inhospitable, temperate island nations like the UK and New Zealand will offer the last safe havens, and, importantly, their borders will be relatively easy to control.

"Soon," Lovelock writes, "we will face the appalling question of who we can let aboard the lifeboats? And who must we reject? There will be no ducking this question for before long there will be a great clamour from climate refugees seeking a safe haven in those few parts where the climate is tolerable and food is available." (Lovelock finished writing this book last year, but now, inevitably, this passage brings to mind the recent bush fires in southern Australia.)

Of course, for these lifeboat states to be viable, they must be self-sufficient in energy. Wind farms are written off as a laughably inefficient solution. Renewable energy in general? Pissing in the wind. Nuclear power, says Lovelock, is the only realistic way of producing energy in the quantities modern civilisation requires without exacerbating climate change still further, and he applauds Gordon Brown's recent decision to build a new generation of nuclear power plants. (Ironically, Alex Salmond may have missed a trick with his "no nuclear for Scotland" policy. Renewables provide only intermittent power, so they need to be backed up by conventional power stations. In order to function effectively, a 100 per cent renewable Scotland would still require a reliable power source – presumably provided by England.)

Although Lovelock approaches the problem of climate change from a coldly scientific standpoint, he comes to very much the same conclusion as touchy-feely "environmental humanists" like Scotland's Alastair McIntosh: "Until we all feel intuitively that the Earth is a living system, and know that we are part of it, we will fail to react automatically for its, and ultimately our, own protection."

Although this state of universal eco-enlightenment may seem impossibly far-fetched now, like McIntosh, Lovelock does envisage a ray of light at the end of the tunnel.

"We (humankind] could have a great and proud future as the people from whom some future Adam and Eve may evolve," he concludes, "progenitors of a species closer to Gaia which might serve within her as our brains do in each of us."

Lovelock's forecast for the immediate future, however, is less uplifting: things are going to get nasty and there's not much we can do about it. On reflection, perhaps that's why he's decided to take a ride on Branson's spaceship.

To coincide with the release of The Vanishing Face of Gaia, Allen Lane is also publishing John and Mary Gribbin's biography of Lovelock, rather smugly entitled He Knew He Was Right.

You have to question the objectiveness of biographers who refer to their subject as "Jim" in their introduction and seem to revel in the fact that they've known him for over 30 years, but they do a good job of locating their friend's work within the broader history of climate science and they are also good at showing how the Gaia hypothesis sprang from Lovelock's uniquely varied background as a chemist, medical researcher and independent scientist. Moral of the story? Blessed are the polymaths.