About Knowledge

This biography by Jonathan Watts, The Many Lives of James Lovelock, could just as well be titled “A Life of the Many James Lovelocks”. Everyone liked one or another James Lovelock. He was widely—too widely—liked. Watts quotes former Guardian journalist Tim Radford: “I’m not surprised people who might consider themselves in political enmity also liked him so much” (256). He hung out with, or was admired and even loved by all kinds of people including his colleague at NASA, philosopher, systems analyst, undercover inspector, and lover Dian Hitchcock (rarely mentioned in the story of the Gaia theory, though her input was crucial); microbiologist and theorist of endosymbiosis, Lynn Margulis (who “helped to wrench the Gaia theory out of the clutches of Shell and Dupont” (184)); French philosopher Bruno Latour; former director of Friends of the Earth, Jonathon Porritt; Margaret Thatcher; Nigel Lawson (Baron Lawson of Blaby, former Chancellor of the Exchequer, climate change denialist); Baron Rothschild (research director of the petrochemical multinational Shell, in which his family had a large stake); billionaire Richard Branson; punk fashion diva Vivienne Westwood; and “C”, head of MI6 (“We are greatly in your debt for the way you still support our operations” (267)). But this book is about much more than one James Lovelock or the many James Lovelocks.

For people who knew him, he was fascinating with his combination of brilliance, ingenuity, and contradiction. It’s tempting to put Lovelock on the amateur’s couch and Winnicottise him as an interesting example of what this English psychoanalyst theorized as the “false self.” Lovelock adored his father Thomas but always had a fraught relationship with his mother, Nellie, and her “prying attentions” (11). Her Jim pregnancy had been a “disaster” and she decided that “she would rather let go of her son than her dreams” (20-21), so he spent his first six years being raised by his grandparents. Donald Winnicott theorises that when the spontaneous desires and needs of children—in this case, a brilliant one with the great schooling difficulty of dyscalculia—are not properly met by the parent, they feel that their needs and desires aren’t acceptable, so they settle for covering up the original real desires by apparent conformity to their immediate environment, thus creating the “false self” or selves.

In Winnicott’s words, “other people’s expectations can become of overriding importance, overlaying or contradicting the original sense of self, the one connected to the very roots of one’s being”. For Watts (262), Lovelock was “a man who seemed to be a Doctor Who, Ezekiel, Galileo, Gandalf, Chauncey Gardiner, Q and the Goblin in the Gasworks” (“Q” being the James Bond character, head of research and development in the British Secret Service, and the “Goblin”, a character representing industry as a force for good in a story written by a teenage Lovelock). In other words, mostly fictional. The word “maverick” (from Texas rancher Samuel A. Maverick (1803–1870), whose famously unbranded cattle eventually bore his name), often used to describe Lovelock as a man who thought and acted independently, often behaving unconventionally, leaves him as a kind of loner. But this glosses over important relationships in matters of knowledge and science.

If Winnicott suggests that our most basic sense of self doesn’t emerge alone but within relationships, starting with parents and family, that it keeps adapting to the relationships made as we grow up, and this is how we develop as individual and social beings, Watts gives a new slant on the psychoanalyst’s insights with Lovelock’s, complex character—and his world—by exploring two essential related issues of knowledge and science: knowledge creation comes as much from relationships as from individual discovery, so theory is a social product; and, since it is social, knowledge entails responsibility because it has consequences. The chapter headings listed under “Contents”, and consisting of sixteen names (eight female) makes this emphasis abundantly clear.

The first eight, starting with James, pertain to family influences, his parents and then his own family with first wife Helen and children Christine, Jane, Andrew, and John. The next four, “Dian”, “Victor”, “Lynn”, and “Barry”, are closely related with his work, ideas, and their applications, and this is where the book’s two core themes are concentrated. In a world of ever-increasing dependence on techno-fixes, AI, algorithms (complete with biased and flawed logic and assumptions, coding mistakes, bad modelling and misidentification of patterns), and so-called dispassionate science, Watts gives credit to love as a stimulus and also tempering influence in the processes of the advancement of science. The last four names sum up (what this reviewer sees as) deep-rooted contradictions at the end of Lovelock’s life.

The influence of love is especially true of Dian Hitchcock, whose crucial question of what made life possible on Earth and maybe nowhere else (93) led to the idea of this planet as a self-regulating system whose atmosphere was a product of life. Together, they had brilliant, revolutionary insights. One, in Hitchcock’s words, is, “We want to see whether a biota exists […] It is in the nature of single species to affect their living and non-living environments—to leave traces of themselves and their activity everywhere. Therefore we conclude that the biota must leave its characteristic signature on the ‘non-living’ portions of the environment” (97). But in the milieu of the day, Hitchcock had to cope with enthusiastic male colleagues telling her about “‘Jim’s latest ideas’ which, of course, were the ones we had worked on together” (90). When they met, Hitchcock was ignored by the establishment and, as a woman, remained so. Science “tends to be idealised as something cold, hard, rational, neutral and objective, dictated by data rather than feelings.” But not in this biography. Lovelock’s insight that humans are never totally separate from any living forms, that everything is connected and interdependent because it is all part of the same Earth system, was lived out in his own existence, whether he recognised it or not.

On the loving side of his relationships, his deep, platonic friendship with Lynn Margulis, another scientist in a male-dominated domain, “struggling to get the recognition she deserved” when “many in her field dismissed her as unorthodox or irrelevant” (152), is crucial. It was she, with her insights about microbial life, who filled a gap by giving “a bottom-up explanation of how Lovelock’s top-down theory might work in practice”. Perhaps more importantly, “she proved a critical counterweight to Lovelock’s deeply entrenched fealty to industry” (154). She also supported the (Greek goddess) name Gaia, which had been suggested by Lovelock’s neighbour, William Golding, for the “notion of a living planet” (155), persuading him to “double down on Gaia by taking their theory outside the unreceptive confines of academia to a wider public” (178). However, unlike Lovelock, she didn’t believe that Earth is alive. For her, Gaia was an enormous ecosystem. Another side of her loving colleague Lovelock appeared in 1979 when, having “taken full ownership of the theory” (182), he published “his” book Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, with credits to Shell executive spin doctor, Sidney Epton, Hitchcock, and Margulis as its three most important contributors, with grateful acknowledgements to Rothschild and Shell. Another contributor, Lorna Frazier, a “kind of ghostwriter”, isn’t mentioned. So much for personal interdependence in Gaia, the book about interdependence.

In an interdependent intellectual system, personal contradictions worked their way through to the uses of science. So, parts of Gaia “read like a free pass for industry” (183). It goes so far as to assert, “Ecologists know that so far there is no evidence that any of man’s activities have diminished the total productivity of the biosphere”. When Margulis wrote a critical review of the book using terms like “unreliable”, “many errors”, and “glib statements”, a devastated Lovelock tried to present himself as a lone battler against academic bogeymen, fretting about whether she needed to distance herself from “that wild man who clearly had not the sense to fear the vengeance of the academic Tonton Macoute” (184). Tonton Macoute, referring to Papa Doc Duvalier’s paramilitary and secret police force in Haiti, was a telling reference when Lovelock himself “was deeply involved in the Cold War and the Irish Troubles through his work for MI5, MI6 and other divisions of the British secret services” (187). And in Lovelock’s life, the man with the gunnysack was Nathaniel Mayer Victor Rothschild, third Baron Rothschild, scientist, intelligence officer, senior executive of Royal Dutch Shell and of the multinational private and alternative assets investor, Rothschild & Co, and top advisor to Margaret Thatcher (who felt there was “too much magic attached to him”). Lovelock called him a “treasured eccentric” and for others he was sinister “a master manipulator, a harbinger of neoliberalism” and even a possible Soviet agent (145).

As early as 1966 Lovelock warned Rothschild that fossil fuel combustion was leading to catastrophic pollution and that it would have to be replaced by nuclear power. Watts sums up the “client-provider and mentor-protégé relationship with Rothschild”, as revealed by their correspondence: “a fossil-fuel company came to realise it was wrecking ecosystems, degrading human health and destabilising the climate, only to cover up the evidence, downplay the risks and blame others” (109). Lovelock with his brains and charm was just the man for the job. As he was (he believed) an independent scientist, he needed a patron. And “when I went to see Rothschild, it all began to open up” (112), including access to a new client, the British Secret Service, MI5 and MI6. Another “maverick”, Rothschild could, in the words of his biographer, “put an MI5 officer in direct contact with the head of a foreign legation or with the deputy head of the atomic weapons research establishment and avoid all the time-wasting ‘official channels’” (115). He also cossetted Lovelock’s fantasy of his “independence”, which was infelicitously inextricable from his longing for recognition. Rothschild got him published in Nature, bought equipment for Lovelock’s home laboratory, but also used him to get “Shell to carry out and pay for secret-service work” (118).

When Rachel Carson published Silent Spring in 1962, warning of environmental destruction by pesticides containing dieldrin, aldrin, and DDT, Lovelock’s electron capture detector (ECD) was also detecting a dangerous accumulation of manmade toxins in air, water and soil. Shell, the sole manufacturer of dieldrin and aldrin, also had the best wherewithal for pesticide detection. Lovelock’s “ethical” response was to alert Rothschild to the book. Rothschild read it, agreed with its postulates, and did nothing. Lovelock remained silent. He felt he’d been ethical enough by telling Rothschild (of all people) about the book.

Later, when Shell was trying to get around its safety limits with petrol, which were based on lead particles and not vapour, Lovelock warned in an internal 1967 report of the risks of replacing tetraethyl lead with the more volatile and much more toxic tetramethyl lead, and the dangers of inhaling it but never published a negative paper. “I didn’t see any reason to publish that, nor did Shell. It was a practical thing” (125). “Practical”, but in what sense and for whom? In 1971, when Derek Bryce-Smith was leading a public campaign for lead-free petrol, Lovelock told him about his work but insisted that “the information on lead alkyl vapours in cars is confidential” (126). In interviews with Watts, he expressed remorse that he hadn’t done more but, with misplaced loyalty, also excused himself and Shell: “Shell’s hands were tied. They were in a cartel with Esso and others. If a company like Shell came out against leaded petrol, it could be construed badly by other companies and civil servants” (127). Watts’ comment, “Transparency was not a matter to which Lovelock was particularly well attuned” (123), is quite an understatement.

The results of this lack of transparency rippled into science. In 1975, Rothschild delivered a speech—endorsed by Lovelock—at Imperial College. It was manna from heaven for the oil industry. Ignoring “pesticides, lead, sulphur, carbon dioxide, atmospheric pollution, global cooling, climate change” (146) and all the threats he and Lovelock had been discussing for years, Rothschild blamed people! The problem was overpopulation, and never mind all the human rights issues entailed, by commission (in new forms of racism, eco-fascism, white supremacy, colonialism, sexism and classism), and by omission (holding out a free pass for even more devastation because of what he was deliberately disregarding). Rothschild used weird metaphors involving the weight of all human beings or putting everyone in a hollow ball. For Lovelock, the scientist, “fiction is more accurate though less precise than truth”, yet he excused himself scientifically: “All I wanted was to do science on my own. The science I wanted to do, not what I was told to do” (147). On his own?

Lovelock worried about Shell’s stance being badly construed, but so was his own. Now pitted against the environmental movement as he silently embraced or overtly championed the interests of the petrochemical industry, he not only struggled with the contempt of academics who despised his “non-scientific” idea of Gaia (a name described by Bruno Latour as “a poison gift from Golding” (158)) but also criticism of people who wholeheartedly embraced his dazzling idea of Gaia but condemned his use of it. The most bruising of these encounters seems to have been at the prestigious Nobel Symposium of 1976 (on human disturbance of the natural nitrogen cycle) when American cellular biologist Barry Commoner said aloud—in the presence of the King of Sweden—what others thought but probably found hard to reconcile with the brilliant idea Lovelock had cooked up with Dian Hitchcock and Lynn Margulis. “Take no notice of Lovelock. He’s a bought man of industry. He’s a spokesman for them” (188). Lovelock was wounded that his erstwhile friends believed Commoner. But wasn’t he a “bought man of industry”? Yet this is where science was also remiss in dismissing the man, dismissing the name and, in many cases, refusing to explore Lovelock’s real insight and the consequences it pointed to.

In this regard, Commoner was spot on in warning that, if its ethics and integrity are undermined, “science will become not merely a poor instrument for social progress but an active danger to man” (191). Some scientists like ecologist-philosopher David Abram understood the value of what Gaia really meant: “the uncanny coherence of enveloping nature, a secret meaningfulness too often obscured by our abstractions. This wild proliferation is not a random chaos but a coherent community of forms, an expressive universe that moves according to a diverse logic very different from that logic we attempt to impose.”

The next question is what to do with these insights? This enters the realm where knowledge is responsibility. If we understand that we are part of a “community of forms”, how do we care for this community and all its members? Lovelock himself seemed strangely unconcerned about human and animal rights in the nature he loved so much. His concern was “less with the survival of humanity than with the continuation of life itself”, so he seemed unbothered about the annihilation of nations (and this, no doubt, means other nations): “You know, I look with a great deal of equanimity on some sort of happening – not too rapid – that reduces our population down to about a billion”. He was thus referring to about 6.4 billion dead people in this 2015 statement to Newsweek. Another example of his fecklessness as a scientist was his personal laboratory. It was “independent” and, it seems, independent of responsibility. When curators at the Science Museum wanted to acquire this private test center adjoining his house, what they found was alarming: “radiation, mercury, asbestos, Semtex and just about everything you could possibly imagine” (237). But this couldn’t be made public. When Lovelock asked his secret service bosses how he should dispose of all this dangerous material, their response—“Just blow it up” (250)—shows the true limits of their scientific sense of responsibility and concern for public safety.

In quite an ambiguous paper titled “Human Rights Are Not Enough,” dated 2003, Lovelock quotes Vaclav Havel as pointing out that science has destroyed religion without offering an alternative ethical code—“no code of obligation to guide behavior among ourselves and with the Earth”—except for a belief in human rights. But he immediately continues to invoke “Gaia theory which tells us that we are part of a larger entity and that our comfort and happiness depend on our living well with the Earth and the life that inhabits it. So Gaia, in a way, gives back that sense of moral obligation that science had stripped away.” But belief in human rights and “sense of moral obligation” weren’t strong points in Lovelock’s application of his marvelous theory.

Contradictory to the end of his life, Lovelock kept a statue called Gaia in his garden. The family had spotted this concrete figure of a young nymph bearing grapes in the Cranborne Manor Garden Center and playfully bought it. Near the end of the book, there’s an image of Lovelock talking and praying to this “Ma Ga” (Mother Gaia). He was 69 and newly in love with a woman called Sandra, who was to be his second wife. Maybe this should be a warm, cosy image, but it seems sad, at least to this reader, that his bold and beautiful theory somehow becomes reduced to this symbolic personal Ma Ga figure. While his old friend Margulis stuck to science, responsible science, Lovelock drifted closer to an environment of fame and honors where his principle had become a brand name representing everything from greenwashing uses to rock groups, necklaces, toilet paper, and “even a Gaia steakhouse in New Orleans, Louisiana” (206). With Sandra’s encouragement, he became a “national treasure”, another garlanded statue. As a scientist, at least, Lovelock, the independent man who sacrificed intellectual ethics on the altar of success seems to have tried to conceal what Winnicott called a “barren emptiness behind an independent-seeming façade”.

But this is not to dismiss Lovelock or his ideas. Watt’s portrait of him raises important matters for these distressing times, among them the relationship of the individual and the system; the dangers for creative thinking and good science of official recognition and awards; the social nature of science, and especially the contributions of women to the thinking of a man on a pedestal; the commercializing of a grand concept; its objectification for personal ends where Gaia (with her woman’s name) became fragile and adaptable or a “tough bitch”, depending on who was being served; and how the best, most radical ideas get coopted to serve the very system they set out to criticize.

With this book, Jonathan Watts has gone well beyond the mere biography of a seductive individual to raise essential issues that affect every living and non-living part of this quintessentially synergistic world.

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