Gaia guy goes global

It is difficult to be taken seriously as a scientist when you are also persistently being cast in the role of celebrity guru. Holding onto your scientific credentials becomes even trickier if you don't seem to mind playing the Ghandi of the environmental lobby.

Yet first and foremost, James Lovelock is a scientist, a searcher for the truth. He is happy to tell it the way he sees it, even when expressing the truth is unpopular or unpalatable to his peers.

Lovelock has attracted world celebrity as the creator of Gaia, a cosy view of the world which when distilled by his supporters holds that the earth and everything on it including humankind interact as a kind of superorganism. Gaia as it has come to be understood is a benign place where the Earth cares for us and works to make certain that the world is a nice place for us to live.

This isn't strictly how Lovelock himself would put it, but his soft focus, quasi-religious Gaia theory found immediate favour amongst the public when it emerged in the 1970s. In those tie-dyed, smoked out, get-intouch-with-yourself days, people were happy to accept the notion of a caring, sharing mother Earth, Gaia, who watched over us like a Madonna. Her kindness and generosity could be seen in the bounty of nature and all she asked in return was that we keep in tune with her ways and avoid defacing her gifts by polluting the planet.

Lovelock did not discourage this interpretation and in fact has encouraged it ever since. Writing as an elder statesman of environmentalism in the Guardian in 1999 he describes the gift of the Earth, our inheritance. "We need to regain our ancient feeling for the Earth as an organism and to revere it again," he said. "Gaia has been the guardian of life for all of its existence; we reject her care at our peril."

It is this sort of mumbo jumbo that has so antagonised a great majority of the world's working evolutionary biologists who dispute his theories of Gaia. It also serves to blur the fact that Lovelock really is a man of science, an experimenter who measures the natural world with as much dedication as any Nobel laureate could muster.

Born on July 26th, 1919, Lovelock spent his early childhood in a flat on Brixton Hill not far from the famous London prison. It must have been something of a bohemian existence. His father Tom worked for the Gas Company, collecting coins from the gas meters while his mother Nell ran their shop, the Brixton Hill Galleries.

As they worked, he spent most of his first five years in his grandmother Alice March's care. He took to the sciences early when he received a box filled with electrical odds and ends for Christmas 1923. "It was the best of all the Christmas gifts," he writes, and so began his career as an inventor.

Gaia represents one focal point of his life and career, a body around which he orbits like the earth about the sun. Another pivot was the invention of an important scientific device, the electron capture detector (ECD). He dedicates a full chapter to its genesis and it weaves in and out of the book as often as Gaia itself.

He describes using the ECD while on board the Shackleton, a research vessel on its way to Antarctica. He hitched a lift as far as Montevideo, taking measurements of CFCs on the way. The data he put together on that trip with the help of the ECD documented how the ozone destroying gases, CFCs, have been distributed around the world and was the starting point for research that would demonstrate how this gas was producing the ozone hole. He also tells how the patent rights were "stolen" from him by the US Government who claimed them as the funder of his ECD researches when he worked at Yale. He also describes using the ECD during his many visits to Ireland. The family bought a cottage at Adrigole on the Beara Peninsula and spent at least two or three months here every year from the mid-1960s to the late 1970s. His son-in-law eventually bought the property so it remains attached to the family.

Another theme, which is central to any understanding of Lovelock, is his decision to go "independent", to conduct his researches free of the encumbrances and responsibilities associated with working in an institute or university. He believes working as an independent scientist left him free to pursue new science and to explore areas from which he would have been excluded as an employee. As a result it demands even more of Lovelock's telling than Gaia.

The autobiography proceeds in remarkable detail as he catalogues the eight decades of his life. His narrative covers his time as a student, marriage to first wife Helen and second wife, Sandy, after Helen's death. It covers his life as a working scientist in great detail. At times the story he tells can be charming and engaging, for example when he describes the war years. Other times the high level of detail could become a bit burdensome.

Yet this is a worthwhile and entertaining read and one which provides a Book of Genesis for environmental activists. It details the arrival of one who would save the Earth and talks about the birth of Gaia, a mother to us all.

Dick Ahlstrom is the Science Editor of The Irish Times