Homage to Gaia

by James Lovelock

  A Norwegian gentleman, Knut Kloster, gave Gaia the best chance of decent development as a unifying theory. He made a gift of £75,000, which I used to fund three international scientific meetings on Gaia in Oxford. He made the gift in unusual circumstances, and so unconditionally that I give an account of it, together with my proper thanks, in the Preface and Acknowledgements.

  Sandy and I discuss plans for action in bed after a cup of tea at about 6 o’clock in the morning or sometimes we do so on a walk in the Devon countryside. It was in one of these discussions that we decided on the best way to achieve his, and our, objective of achieving scientific credibility for Gaia. We must organize and then hold a special kind of scientific meeting in a recognized scientific venue. I asked Sir Crispin Tickell, the Warden of Green College, if we could hold our meeting there. He gave enthusiastic support to the idea, but warned that we should need to share the meeting with St Anne’s College. They were close by and had ample accommodation for the delegates and a larger lecture theatre than Green College. It seemed there could be no better place to invite distinguished scientists to talk about Gaia. Among Sandy’s many talents, that of meeting organizer is supreme, and in this, the Green College Centre members, Rachel Duncan and later Susan Canney, gave their unstinted help and advice. This left me free to think of a topic and the participants for our first Oxford meeting. The topic we chose was ‘The self-regulating Earth’. This was not so Gaian as to frighten the horses, so to speak. But all of those who chose to come to it would know that it was a Gaian meeting. The model for our meeting was that of a Gordon or its German equivalent a Dahlem conference: a small, tight gathering of active scientists working in the Earth science field. We were able to gather together fifty of the world’s best scientists in this area, prepared to talk in an open way about the Earth as a self-regulating entity. It was not to be one of those cosy gatherings of the faithful; we included sceptics as well as supporters of Gaia. To our surprise and pleasure, almost all of those we asked said they would come, and did. Knut’s gift, and an additional grant of £5,000 from Shell Research Limited, covered the cost of the meeting.

  We had a strong sense that the conference had achieved its purpose. It enlightened scientists whose horizons had until then been limited by the walls of their disciplines. Many came to us afterwards and said that it had been quite different from the so-called interdisciplinary conferences where experts speak each in his own arcane jargon but no one hears, and the conference concludes with an anodyne plenary statement. Our conference did not end with an anodyne plenary session, but in the lecture hall at Green College in a heated debate. The subject was ‘Who owns Gaia: the scientists or the public?’ We had as a guest debater the eminent environmentalist Jonathon Porritt. He strongly opposed the notion that Gaia should become the property of scientists only; he felt that its value as a unifying influence was far too great. When I said, tentatively, that perhaps we should talk about Geophysiology rather than Gaia to make it more acceptable to mainstream scientists, Mae-Wan Ho, one of the participants, challenged me. She was clearly distressed at the thought that the word Gaia should be so turned down. The science journalist, Fred Pearce, reported our meeting in New Scientist. The title of his article ‘Gaia, Gaia don’t go away’ says what he and many at the meeting thought. The extraordinary range of its power to inspire confirms the importance of this larger influence Gaia has provided for artists, writers, poets, painters, sculptors and musicians. Few other theories have inspired the composition of a Mass.

  Students and postgraduate scientists at Oxford and from elsewhere were present at the meeting and there was little doubt that it served to restore interest in Gaian science. In the letter we sent to Knut to account for our use of his gift we said, ‘We left Oxford feeling that we had been privileged to participate in a rare event and one that would change us all and perhaps start the process of a better understanding of the Earth.’

  The success of the first Oxford meeting encouraged us to organize another for April 1996. This time we hoped for a larger biological interest and chose for the title, ‘The evolution of the superorganism’. We were fortunate to have John Maynard Smith as the opening speaker. John was until a year or so before the meeting a vehement critic of Gaia. He still thinks it ‘an awful name for a theory’ and wishes that I did not refer to the Earth as living, but he was prepared to treat it as a scientific topic and this is all we asked. John came to stay with us at Coombe Mill before the meeting and, as we talked, we realized that our differences were less about the science of Gaia than the semantics and the use of metaphor. Neo-Darwinist biologists had had their own difficult times fending off creationists, traditionalists and proponents of group selection. To John, Gaia had seemed at first just another of these false theories: the New Age religious faith in an Earth Mother was anathema to him. I am deeply grateful to John for having come and spoken at our meeting in Oxford and later for giving my successor Tim Lenton strong support in his battles with referees.

  The theme of the meeting was the concept of a superorganism. Biologists recognize that the paper nests of social wasps and bees, and the concrete constructions of termites, are the expression of the plans encoded in the genes of the queens. There is strong evidence to show that these nests are in homeostasis. Not just the individual organisms, but the whole nest, material and living parts together, keeps its temperature constant when the external temperature rises or falls. In other words, the phenotype is the material boundary of the nest. Now the Earth is not the phenotype of any species of organism, but the coupling between all the individuals of the planet and their material environment results in a homeostasis similar to that of the nest. We hoped that these thoughts would stimulate discussion on the concept of biological self-regulation at all levels, from the individual organism, the nest, and the ecosystem, to Gaia.

  It was a meeting where ideas flowed freely, and for the duration of the meeting, the scientific tribes had dismantled the barricades between their disciplines. We even had a fine talk from Herbert Girardet on the city as a superorganism. On the last afternoon, we enjoyed one of those exciting moments in science, when a new and what may be a crucial thought emerges. Dick Holland had talked on the environment of the Archean period, over two billion years ago. He told us that the evidence of the rocks suggested that the CO2 content of the air must have been low, not more than one per cent by volume. If this was so, then how was the Earth warm enough to stay unfrozen when the Sun’s output of heat was much less than now? Out of the meeting came the thought: there were no algae in the oceans then, so maybe there were fewer or no clouds. The geophysicists present knew that a cloudless Earth would be twenty or more degrees Celsius hotter and confirmed the speculation. It may turn out that this does not answer the problem of the Archean climate, but the exchange was valuable. It is rare to have scientists from all branches of science talking together as friendly collaborators on a topic that extends outside their expertise.

  The second meeting ended with a small group of us gathering for the formal foundation of the Gaia Society. Sir Crispin Tickell is the President, and the University of East London generously offered the society space and funds for an executive secretary. He is Philip George and among his tasks was that of organizing the third Oxford Gaia meeting in April 1999. These conferences have succeeded in establishing Gaia theory as a serious scientific topic. The distinguished science journalist, Oliver Morton, who attended the 1999 conference, wrote in the American science magazine, Discover, ‘The idea that organisms collaborated to keep the planet habitable was once dismissed as New Age earth science. Now even sceptics are taking a second look.’

  As you now read, there are few scientists who doubt that the climate and chemical composition of the Earth’s surface are coupled with the metabolism of the organisms that inhabit it, and the German systems scientist, John Schellnhuber, called it, in a Nature article, the new Copernican Revolution. No one now thinks seriously of oxygen as anything but a product of photosynthesis by plants and alg
ae. It is easy to forget, though, that twenty to thirty years ago serious scientific papers suggested that oxygen came mainly from the photodissociation of water vapour in the upper atmosphere of the Earth and in the splendid book Earth written in 1973 by Frank Press and Raymond Siever there is no mention of life’s interaction with the composition of our planet’s surface. They shared the general view as expressed on page 489 of their book: ‘Life depends on the environments in which it evolved and to which it has adapted.’

  In those days, they had no inkling that without life our planet would be like Mars or Venus, a vast desert. They knew that life needed water, but failed to see that life has actively conserved water. In a similar way, the climate research centres of the world, which once scorned the idea of life affecting the climate, now know that they must include the organisms living on the land and in the ocean in their models. Geologists now accept that the weathering away of the continental rocks is as much a matter of bacterial and plant digestion as it is a physical and chemical process. In the thirty-five years of Gaia’s existence as a theory, the view of the Earth has changed profoundly. Yet, so far only a tiny minority of scientists realize how much Gaia theory has helped to change their view. They have adopted my radical view of the Earth without recognizing where it came from, and they have forgotten the scorn with which most of them first greeted the idea of a self-regulating Earth.

  The quest for Gaia has been a battle all the way. Our critics are beginning to admit they may have been mistaken, but still they find self-regulation and the phenomenon of emergence obscure. Yet both of these are crucial to an understanding of Gaia. They may not understand Gaia, but this does not stop them mining The Ages of Gaia for research projects in biogeochemistry or climatology. They are right to insist that a large and still unanswered question remains: if the Earth is indeed self-regulating by biological feedback, how has this come about through natural selection? I like to compare our inability yet to give an answer with Darwin’s inability to satisfy those critics who saw the amazing perfection of the eye as something that also could never have arisen by chance natural selection.

  Take the most intriguing piece of evidence for Gaia—the connection between ocean algae and climate. We still do not know how the links between climate, clouds, and the organisms evolved through natural selection. It almost certainly, when finally understood, will involve a series of small steps, not some sudden large evolutionary leap. William D Hamilton and Tim Lenton have recently proposed that algae, like most organisms, need to spread their spores from areas they have denuded of nutrients to fresh pastures. Perhaps their emission of DMS acts by stirring the wind. Sailors know that the updraft generated by condensation in a cloud can make a surface wind. Perhaps the algae have used this wind to carry their spores. Dandelions have evolved their complex micro-airships for seed dispersal. So why should not algae take the opportunity of wind raised by their own gas, DMS, to transport their spores to fresher pastures? Hamilton and Lenton published these ideas in 1998 in a paper called ‘Spora and Gaia’. It helped to convince me that I could now retire from active Gaia science, the sceptics had at last come to listen, and this is all that I have ever wanted them to do.

  It is thirty-five years since Gaia’s inception, that startling afternoon at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories, when it flashed into my mind. Writing in 1999 I see that the theory of a self-regulating Earth, able to maintain climate and chemistry always tolerable for its inhabitants, is moving into acceptance as part of scientific conventional wisdom. If they must reject Gaia as the name of their new science I hope that they will choose ‘Earth System Science’ as a sensible alternative. Whatever they call it, if I am right about the Earth’s capacity to regulate the planet, science must soon begin to take it seriously, or it may be the worse for all of us. As we discover processes by which life and the climate interact, many of them seem to act as amplifiers of global warming. Thoughtful Gaia theorists suggest that in the present interglacial warmth natural forces increase, rather than ameliorate the global warming that we have brought about.

  In any creative act—whether painting a portrait, writing a book, or developing a theory of science—an important and difficult step is knowing when to stop. Writers and painters choose their own moment to finish their work, but with theories of science, there is no personal place for stopping; they are like cathedrals in the building, something to share and hand on. When in 1997 I knew that Tim Lenton’s dedication to Gaia was as deep as my own, it was easy and joyful for me to pass it on to him. I had no doubt that the time had come for me to stop my work on Gaia science and leave its further development in the capable hands of Tim, Lynn and Stephan Harding. There is still Gaia work for me to do. I want to follow up the inspiration of that most estimable of men, Václav Havel, who saw in Gaia theory a moral prescription for the welfare of the planet itself, something for which we humans are accountable.

  10

  The Practical Side of Independent Science

  Scientists are usually pictured as serious, middle-aged men in white coats, their surroundings filled with large and complex equipment. It could be anything from astronomical telescopes to view the beginnings of space and time to electron microscopes for disentangling the intricacies of the organelles within a cell. A lot of modern science is like this, but it would be as untrue to say that all of it is ultra high-tech as it would to say that all cooking is done in the expensively equipped kitchens of a large hotel or restaurant. Home cooking with simple saucepans can make delicious food. In the same simple way, I have discovered the delights of muddy boots ecology walking with my friend Stephan Harding and the joys of field geology with Robert Garrels. There is still a place for the amateur scientist, as the sight of the Hale–Bopp comet, which enlarged our skies in 1996, confirmed. A lone watcher of the desert sky first saw its fast approach, not professionals in their observatories.

  My apprenticeship showed me that I could ask questions about the nature of things with simple and inexpensive equipment, and this knowledge gave me the confidence to set up my own laboratory in a thatched cottage in Bowerchalke. At the start, there was no need to buy more than was needed for the first research problems of my customers, and I started by setting up a small and modest workshop. In it were good quality hand-tools, a watchmaker’s lathe and milling machine, soldering and brazing equipment, and the miscellaneous items needed for electronics. As the years went by, so the range of chemicals and other consumable items increased, until I reached that happy level where anything I needed was on the shelf. My customers were also generous in providing equipment more expensive than I could have afforded. Wisely, Pye and Hewlett Packard gave me their gas chromatographs so that in them I could more efficiently try out the new detectors I invented. JPL was a wonderful source of new high-tech electronic items. Four years after starting my lab in 1964, I was able to make my own scientific apparatus, and soon I was using it to explore the trace gases of the air. Before long, these explorations led me to discover such important trace gases as CFCs, and methyl halides and sulphides in the atmosphere, and to show that they were everywhere. The harvest of this research led to the recognition of ozone depletion, and it provided supporting evidence for Gaia theory. A modestly skilled amateur could have constructed any of the equipment I made and used.

  A difficulty faced by an independent is competing with university scientists for funds. When academics bid for small contracts, they are seeking perquisites only, because their universities usually pay their apparatus and other costs, as well as their salaries. This represents a large subsidy, and their bids are always less than an independent could afford to place. The same kind of distortion of the market price occurs over attendance at commissions or giving advice to government departments. Usually, only travelling and subsistence expenses at civil service rates are payable. A visit of this kind to London from Coombe Mill, for example, always involves at least two days away with a zero income during the time of the visit. Like most professionals, I manage by never having l
ess than three main customers and this is, in any event, essential if one is to retain independence. One large customer alone, no matter how good, is inconsistent with independence, and it would be no more than exchanging one form of employment for another. One of the joys of independence is the extent to which the needs of different customers are shared in common: work done for one agency, like NASA, often cross-fertilized the work I did for another, such as Shell. Over the first fifteen years as an independent, contracts from the American agencies NASA, NOAA, the Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA), and from the UK Ministry of Defence (MOD), provided the bulk of my gross income. More importantly, good customers were interested in the science I did independently. Shell, Hewlett Packard, NASA, NOAA, and the MOD, all encouraged me in my work on Gaia theory and on the atmospheric abundance of trace gases.

  American bureaucracy can be daunting, and in my first contracts with the Jet Propulsion Labs concerning the Viking mission to Mars, JPL employed an expediter. He was a man who took my contract and me through all of the offices whose signature and approval were needed. This would have been an almost impossible task for me to do unaided, but I soon found that an American agency that needed your services pushed aside bureaucratic barriers. The possession of a provisional patent was a strong incentive for them to help in this way, because they could then say that my contract bid represented a ‘sole source’ and they could legally avoid the slow and unfavourable process of putting the contract out for bids. Of all the United States agencies, none was so helpful as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, NOAA. I suspect that Lester Machta, the head of the section I dealt with, worked hard to ensure the smooth progress of my contracts with them.

  To do science independently it is wise to form a company. Consider for a moment the difficulties of ordering from a home address, such as 15 Acacia Gardens, a few kilograms of potassium cyanide or a curie or two of a radioactive element. The police, not the van driver, would call on you the next day, but if you place a company order, they deliver it without fuss. I called my company Brazzos Limited after the river Brazos in Texas, near where we lived while in Houston, and formed it in 1964. I deliberately spelt it wrongly; the real river Brazos has only one z. My motive in choosing this devious name was not dishonest; to have a proposed company name compared with those already listed cost £25 in 1964. After two or three false tries, I resorted to Brazzos, a name I thought no one else could have chosen, and I was right. We have traded as Brazzos from then until now. Quite apart from easing the purchase of chemicals and radioactive substances, a company also helps in making contract bids. Agencies like NASA or NOAA would have had a much harder time giving a contract to a foreign individual than to a company like Brazzos Limited, since companies are internationally recognized. By the time a company is formed and provisional patents are filed, and contracts drawn up, the legal and accounting costs become a significant part of one’s overheads. To keep these costs reasonable, I found it necessary to reverse that old showbiz tag where an unsuccessful applicant for a part in a film is brushed off with, ‘Don’t call us, we’ll call you.’ I took only contracts that were offered; I never sought them.