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 21st 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.
Let me start by telling you about my childhood and the events that shaped my evolution as an independent scientist.
1
Childhood
The March family, that is to say, my mother’s relatives, grew up in east London, north of the Thames. My grandmother was a Chatterton and, according to the family, she was a descendant of the notable Victorian, Daniel Chatterton; how true is this claim I do not know, only that a photograph of him was in the family collection, now sadly gone. I loved my grandmother dearly and she was, for all emotional and practical purposes, the mother figure of my childhood. My true mother was as confused by women’s issues and their struggle for recognition as are many women today. I think that I was an unwanted child, an accident of the celebration of armistice night on 11 November, 1918. My mother then had a responsible and fulfilling job as personal secretary to what we would now call the CEO of Middlesex County Council. It stretched her very capable mind and gave her status far beyond the working-class expectations of her childhood. She had a powerful intellect, but with little chance to reach her potential, she was bitter and resentful. As the eldest of a large family, she had, when a child, to take full responsibility for her younger siblings. The bitterest blow for her came when she won a rare scholarship from
her primary school in Islington to a grammar school. She could not take it because the family needed her earning power at thirteen to survive. Instead of an enlightened education that was, she thought, her due, she spent her days in a pickle factory sticking labels on the jars. She graduated to another menial job in the Middlesex County Council, but her intelligence liberated her for a brief period in the First World War, when the male employees went to feed that vast human mincing machine of the trenches.
Grandfather March was a skilled craftsman, a bookbinder, so skilled indeed that Winchester Cathedral chose to exhibit one of the books he bound. The family came from somewhere near Dagenham in Essex. I often wondered if they were Jewish: my great-grandmother’s name was King and March could have once been Marx. They had many Jewish characteristics, including a love of music and an unnatural skill at card games. Great-grandfather March was a sergeant in the mounted police, hardly a Jewish occupation, but maybe things were different then. The family fortunes improved when my grandfather took a job with the Cockerel Press at Ewell in Surrey. The village of Ewell was then at the borders of the London conurbation and effectively in the countryside. Here my mother, who commuted to work by train, met my father, who travelled on the same train to the South Metropolitan Gasworks at Vauxhall. They fell into a long, intense, but unrequited love. My mother told how they walked and sat in Nonsuch Park at Ewell and held hands; that was the limit of their physical contact. My father was then in his mid-30s but married and with two children. His wife had been committed to a lunatic asylum after the birth of their second child when she developed a malign post-partum depression. In the early 20th century, extra marital liaisons met with stern disapproval, even among the rich. In the lower classes, there was an overwhelming sanctimonious righteousness about adultery, whatever the circumstances; it was a sin, and sins were worse than crimes. The cruel dogma of those times kept my father celibate but he was fortunate to have my Grandmother March’s approval and the unfulfilled relationship between my mother and father continued until 1914, when his first wife died and they were able to marry.
My father was too old by then, about his mid-40s, either to be a volunteer or later a conscript for the war and with both of them working and living in a flat in Mandalay Road, Clapham, they had a happy start to their marriage. My father had a natural appreciation of the beauty of artefacts, as well as of natural things, and he developed an intense feeling for paintings. My mother had a passion for classical music. Their life during the First World War in London must have been idyllic, for they were in love and fulfilled by all that that great city had to offer. There was negligible bombing in the first war so that life in London went on more or less as usual, except for food and material shortages. I have no idea what method of contraception they used. They never talked on such intimate subjects, not even years later. I only know that whatever it was, it failed in November 1918. The last thing my mother wanted then was a child. I was born close to 2 pm in the afternoon of July 26, 1919, during a thunderstorm and at my grandmother’s house in Letchworth Garden City, which is about 30 miles north of London. Pregnancy and the return of men from the war put an end to my mother’s employment with the Middlesex County Council.
My mother and father then chose to take on a risky venture. They rented a shop on Brixton Hill and opened it as the Brixton Hill Galleries. Between the two wars, Brixton retained remnants of the wealthy suburb that it once was, and they hoped and believed that it would stay wealthy enough to sustain a demand for paintings and other works of art, and that this would give them a start in the life of their choice. The shop was, in fact, in a flawed position for such an upmarket enterprise. On the right-hand side was a small post office and beyond that a huge junk shop. The owner, Mr Callaby, had an extensive collection of second-hand iron goods stretching right out across the wide pavement in front of the shop—tin baths, mangles with an iron frame and wooden rollers and boxes full of oddments. On the left of our shop was an engineering workshop, Venners, and next to this a vast Victorian pub, the Telegraph. Beyond the Telegraph was a noisome alley, dark and narrow, running between tall buildings and with one courtyard leading from it. Here families lived in one-room cold-water flats, under conditions of Victorian poverty. As a small boy, I often visited the Voysey family who lived in one of these flats. The son was my friend and the mother a cheerful kindly young woman. They seemed to have no possessions, no furniture apart from boxes, and they appeared to live on bread and dripping. What little they had they shared generously, and the mother was always curious about my doings and what I thought and how we lived. The alleyway led from Brixton Hill to New Park Road—a typical London street. There were small industrial premises, among them paint shops smelling strongly of organic solvents. Across the street were rows of once agricultural cottages with long gardens in front of them. Branching off were new streets of semi-detached suburban houses that developers had built. There was little or no traffic and it was a playground for the children and the street gangs of those times. By a curious coincidence, the shop was to be, in a few years, the home of the Liss family. I first met my friend Peter Liss, now a distinguished scientist and professor, at the University of East Anglia in the 1970s. He was the first to realize the significance of my measurements taken aboard the Shackleton during its voyage to Antarctica in 1971.
To make a living selling paintings in such a neighbourhood was a heroic enterprise, and my mother’s and father’s entire energies went into it. My father wisely kept his job with the Gas Company, now as a collector of coins from gas meters. It says something of those days that Tom Lovelock, in spite of carrying a heavy leather bag full of coins through one of the rougher areas of London, was never mugged. He was not particularly burly, 5’9” tall, slim and bespectacled. Even so, would-be assailants would have had a tough time, for he was both brave and skilled as an amateur boxer. My parents had no time to care for a baby and were glad to leave me in the willing arms of my grandmother, Alice Emily March.
Grandmother March was a small plump cockney woman endowed with a surfeit of love. My great fortune was to have spent the first five important years in her care. Her children were by then all adults and astonishingly well married for a family of working-class girls. One of them, Kit, was married into the famous Leakey family, to Hugo, a cousin of Louis Leakey of Kenya fame. Her other daughter, Ann, was married to a New Zealand tobacco company executive, Howard Mason. Florrie was married to John Leete, who owned a prosperous tailor’s shop in Hitchin, the nearby market town. Their only son, Frank, was away at a job in London.
William Golding once said to me that the education of a child requires above all things, love. So long as there is love, either given or obviously around, the child will grow in knowledge. He was then talking to me about the education of my youngest boy, John. Sadly, he was born with a mental handicap and Bill had suggested that we send him to a Rudolph Steiner school on just those grounds. Looking back on my own childhood, I now know how much I personally owe to those heavenly years of loving at Norton Croft.
Grandfather March must have done well in the latter part of his life, to judge by the house that we lived in at Letchworth. Norton Croft was a detached four-bedroom villa in the characteristic Letchworth Garden City architecture—echoes of William Morris. There was a large well-kept garden at the back and across the quiet road was an open piece of wood and heathland, Letchworth Common. The road itself, Icknield Way, was tree-lined with grass verges and ran along the route of an ancient trackway that linked the communities of Neolithic south-eastern England. For me as a child, the place and the house were a perfect habitat. Grandmother March—Nana—as we called her, bustled, cooked, hugged, laughed, and was the ideal mother. My real mother, Nell, her eldest daughter, was away in London trying, like the good feminist that she was, to prove herself in a man’s world. It was a good bargain. Grandma was brimming with maternal love and here at last was the first grandchild on whom she could lavish it.
The six years I lived at Letchworth forme
d my life. They were the years of warmth, safety and health. They were years where, unfettered by schooling, I could let my curiosity run free. Without doubt, I was a spoilt child, and sometimes dangerously mischievous. When I was about four or five years old, Grandmother March enrolled me in a small nearby school. It did not last long. One unwise teacher showed the class the various poisonous plants that grew on the Common. She had bunches of hemlock, dog’s mercury, and deadly nightshade. I was fascinated and curious to know what would happen if any of these were eaten. During the break, I seized a bunch of black deadly nightshade berries and tried to persuade the girls in another class that they were good to eat. Fortunately, a teacher came in and stopped my apprenticeship to the Borgias from going any further. They sent me home in disgrace, but I can remember no punishment. Perhaps Alice could not believe that her Jimmy was responsible for such a dastardly deed. My father and grandfather had reinforced my interest in elementary pharmacy by pointing out the harmful plants during walks. Perhaps the first years of childhood are not the best time for this kind of teaching.
The real and the fantasy worlds had yet to separate. Once I stood outside the tobacco and sweet shop on the corner of Letchworth Parade. I asked passers-by for a penny, two halfpennies, or four farthings because my father was out of work, and I needed the money to repair my electric train. This unusual pitch worked and a seemingly endless flow of coins came my way. I could have added to the family income but, undisciplined as I was, I ran in with each gift to the shop and bought sweets. It was not long before the shopkeeper grew suspicious and soon they took me home again in disgrace. Our neighbour, Mrs Stallybrass, was a retired schoolteacher and she took me in hand as a part-time pupil. I spent happy afternoons in her sitting room or in her garden learning simple arithmetic and general knowledge, but she never taught me reading or writing.
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