Homage to Gaia

by James Lovelock

  A recent radio programme illustrated this difference. In it, a panel of critics reviewed some recently reissued classics. These included Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall and Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s The Worst Journey in the World. These two books moved me deeply in my late teens. The critics praised them as good writing, but they puzzled over the world described. In particular, they could not see why Cherry-Garrard made and suffered his agonizing journey through the Antarctic winter. They found the English stiff upper lip difficult to understand and could see no place for it in their ‘postmodern’ world. I wonder if the difference between my world of the 1930s and theirs now reflects the changing role of women. The past was male-dominated; women were not treated fairly and their opinions less often heard, but now that women’s place is recognized and most of the past injustices are remedied, there are unexpected adverse consequences. Most women, for excellent biological reasons, can never sympathize with the yearning for adventure that captures the minds of men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. They cannot understand that need of young men to pit themselves against the odds. Through their scorn at young men’s behaviour, women have made adventure a pejorative, and cosseted safety desirable. On the other hand, the growing influence of women must lessen the chances of war. Sixty years ago, when I was twenty, there were few problems in the world but political ones. Today, our problems are global and environmental. Local tribal problems are still with us, but increasingly they grow irrelevant. Is this a consequence of women having a fairer say in national and global affairs?

  Coombe Mill

  In the hot summer of 1976 we were lucky to be in the relative cool of western Ireland. The summer provided near-perfect holiday weather, and a rare drought in that normally damp and misty region. There were even tankers delivering drinking water to farms around west Cork, something that probably had never happened before. We returned to a still hot, dusty, burnt, and burning England. Forest fires were frequent, and a pall of smoke seemed always to be drifting from the New Forest, south of Bowerchalke. Lester and Phyllis Machta had occupied our Bowerchalke house while we were in Ireland and had just returned to America. They said that it had seemed hotter in England than Washington that summer. Lester is a distinguished meteorologist, so I took this comment seriously. Not surprisingly, our garden had suffered from the heat. There was a ban on the use of hosepipes and remedial watering had been insufficient.

  Early in September a visitor called. He was a tall active man who had retired to a village cottage in Bowerchalke, now converted to a level of comfort well above that its past owners could ever have anticipated. He wanted to ensure that Bowerchalke won the National Best Kept Village award. ‘Lovelock,’ he said, ‘your garden is rather untidy. Do you think that you could make an effort to clear it up a bit? The judges come round next week and we do want Bowerchalke to win the competition this year.’ I must have looked astonished; in fact, I was taken back to my school days, to the time when a master or a prefect would say, ‘Lovelock, we expect you to play in the B team on Saturday. It is an important match for the school so see that you’re there.’ Quietly, we ushered Mr Bellringer out. We were enraged and had no intention whatever in meeting the newcomer’s need to live in the village distinguished by the Best Kept Village Award. I realized that we were among the last representatives of Bowerchalke as it had been. Only five years earlier, it had been a village community with its own cricket team, good enough to beat that of the county Somerset. It had a good school, run by a competent teacher, and a well-run village pub. All these had gone, and now it was little more than a gentrified nest of middle-class strangers. It was time to move. A trip to Boston beckoned, so there was no time immediately to do it. Even so, I knew that I did not belong in the Wiltshire countryside any longer.

  Helen and I decided to act after Christmas 1976. We did so by scanning the property section of our favourite Sunday paper, not then converted, as now, into a kind of up-market tabloid. There was a mill for sale on the North Devon coast, and after telephoning the agents we took off for Devon early in January. It was just what we had in mind—a big enough house with ten acres of land, about one mile from the coast. We made our offer immediately, waited, and then were disappointed to hear that the owners had decided not to sell after all. The agent was a friendly and intelligent young man from Fox’s, an Exeter estate agency. He had made his own judgement about our characters and our needs and he said, ‘Sad about Gooseham Mill but we have another one rather like it, twenty-five miles south of here. Would you care to see it?’ We did; we liked Coombe Mill at once and offered to pay the full price and in cash. The owner, Mr Cheeseman, asked if we could buy it immediately and as I had no desire whatever to be driving 280 miles from Wiltshire to Devon and back looking at other possible properties, I said yes. To Mr Cheeseman we must have been the purchasers he dreamed of. We even bought his furniture so that we could move in whenever we wanted. He had tried, unsuccessfully, to convert the property into a water garden and make a living from it, and was desperately short of funds. He needed to settle his debts and we were the fairy prince and princess who had come to his rescue.

  Helen was by now so disabled that our Bowerchalke house was difficult for her, still more was the climb from the village road to the house and, but for our immediate neighbour, Dorothy Golden, nearly all of her village friends had gone. The newcomers were not accessible, and she was as keen to move as I was. By April we had moved to Devon and we put our house in Bowerchalke in the hands of house agents. It soon sold, almost exactly at the price we had paid for Coombe Mill. The cottage in the garden sold separately for £12,000 and was a bonus. These seemed good prices to us but in two years, they doubled, such was the financial mismanagement of the Heath government.

  In early December 1976 Helen and I went off to Ireland for ten days so that I could finish, in the peace and quiet of Ireland, the last chapter of my book, Gaia. We drove from Bowerchalke in a new large Volvo car, a spacious and comfortable 164 model. As we drove into Wales to Swansea to catch the ferry for Cork, the weather worsened. Bursts of rain driven by gale-force southwesterly winds made driving difficult and we were glad to reach the port and drive onto the ferry. We had a small comfortable suite on the upper deck but we knew it was going to be a rough night ahead, and it was. We had little sleep as near hurricane-force wind and waves battered the ship, and the cold front passed just as we arrived in Cork. We drove across County Cork to Glengarrif, which is at the landward end of Bantry Bay. On the last ten miles before our cottage there was a high place on a narrow coastal road, and here a fierce gust from a line squall passing rapidly across the bay hit the car. It wrenched the steering wheel from my hand, and almost immediately, we hit a large rock head-on. Neither of us was hurt and our valuable IBM memory typewriter still sat on the backseat. The doors clicked open as usual and I went back to the road to seek help. A post office van stopped and offered to tow us back onto the road. I gratefully accepted, but when the driver looked at the front of the car, he said, ‘You’ll never drive that car again.’ We looked down and saw one of the front wheels bent into the shape of a U and the front of the car looked squashed. He said he would call a taxi for us from the next post office, and he did. It was my first and only serious car accident. The Volvo advertisements telling of cars that could survive the most severe crashes were true. We had walked unharmed from a collision with a rock hard enough to wreck the car completely. In some ways, the crash was a blessing. It made me stay put in Adrigole and finish the writing, and by the time we left by taxi ten days later, the work was ready for the publisher.

  The two years from 1977 to 1979 were the quietest in all my time as an independent. To travel anywhere was now much more difficult. It was an hour’s journey by car to Exeter station and Plymouth airport, and then three or four hours to London. I still had my four sponsors: Shell, HP, MOD, and NOAA—but the settling in at Coombe Mill occupied most of my time. We had to build on to the house rooms for a lab and an office for Helen, and I had to d
ecide what to do with the fourteen acres of land we had just purchased. In 1979 my book was published and my first warning of the way life would change came with a telephone call as we sat at lunch late in September. When I picked it up I heard an American voice say, ‘I am Jim Morton, Dean of the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York. I have just read your book and I like it. Would you care to address a small group here at the cathedral on it?’ I was due in New York next month anyway, as part of the book promotion, and was glad to say yes. Meanwhile I checked on St John the Divine to make sure that it was what he claimed it to be, and found that it was indeed the largest Protestant cathedral in the world. It was part of the Episcopalian church in America, which is the equivalent of the Church of England here.

  When I took the taxi to Amsterdam and 110th St one Saturday in late September, I saw how large it was, especially as I walked along its side on the way to the Deanery, which was a pleasant house in the gardens of the cathedral. I knocked, and soon Mrs Morton welcomed me, showed me to my room, and asked me to join the family at tea. Dean Morton, a tall handsome figure in clerical gear, came in. He had the air of someone who would perform miracles, someone who could charm the birds from the trees. My natural caution began to sound alarm bells and not without reason. ‘Jim,’ he said, ‘I have arranged for you to give the sermon at tomorrow morning’s service in the cathedral. It will all be properly done, and you’ll be introduced by the Bishop.’ I have wondered since if he saw me as terrified, like a rabbit before the fox, which he was. Wasps, the yellow-jacket kind, and giving lectures are the two things I most fear, and here was I condemned to giving a sermon in a WASP cathedral at the Sunday morning communion service. ‘My talk is entirely secular,’ I croaked, hoping that this might give me some means of escape. ‘Oh that’s of no consequence,’ boomed the Dean. ‘Tell it just as you did in your book and they will love it.’ Saturday night passed in agony of anticipation and Mrs Morton sensed some of my anxiety and was wonderfully comforting to me at breakfast. It occurred to me that this kind of shock quite often happened in that household.

  We all moved into the cathedral where the huge congregation was gathering. ‘It’s going to be a full house,’ said the Dean, as he led me to the robing room. I was slightly relieved to be there, for my interest in what went on behind the scenes anywhere, especially a cathedral, took my mind off the ordeal ahead. They soon disguised me in flowing colourful robes, which helped quite a bit. Their anonymity made me feel less exposed. The Dean rehearsed me through my movements before stepping up to the pulpit. ‘Just walk behind the Bishop and me down the nave and you will be directed to your seat. Then your cue to walk up to the pulpit will be the end of the hymn, “Morning has broken”. Wait for the Bishop to introduce you and then off you go.’ As always, the ambience of the cathedral moved me deeply, and I was interested to see that nearly half of the congregation was black. I did later discover that the cathedral was on the edge of Harlem. All too soon, we rose to sing that gorgeous hymn about the blackbird. As the organ sounded its closing chords, I felt a gentle push and I walked across to the pulpit and climbed the stairs. I was now above the congregation, and in a position that commanded, as well as detached one from, the surroundings. Never before had I realized what a well-chosen vantage point the clerics have for preaching. The Bishop, across from me in the other pulpit, began his welcome and introduction, smiled at me, and sat down. I was on. My sermon seemed to go well, and twenty minutes later, I was back in my seat. ‘Just what I’d hoped you’d say,’ said the Dean. ‘You’re a natural speaker.’ I think he meant it, for this was the first of four occasions when he invited me to give sermons at the cathedral. The most terrifying of these was when he asked without warning one Sunday morning if I would appear in the pulpit with Father Thomas Berry to give a joint sermon on the subject of Jacob’s ladder. Somehow, it worked, as I took a physical interpretation, with the ladder as the flow of photons bringing benefice from the sun to the Earth and Father Berry kept the theology right. I was so glad to have had the chance to meet this modern St Francis and to share his feeling for the Earth.

  I had expected, even hoped, when I wrote Gaia that it would be criticized, even denounced, by the churches that would see the worship of the Earth as heresy. Yet, here was I giving a Gaia sermon at the morning communion service in a Protestant church. Soon I was to experience real denunciation as the fiery biologists castigated Gaia, and me, from their lecterns in the universities. The neo-Darwinists were like the Nonconformist hell raisers of Victorian times.

  During the year following the publication of Gaia, I was astonished to receive twice as many letters from the religious and the philosophically interested as from scientists. Hugh Montefiore, then the Bishop of Birmingham, wrote to me asking which I thought came first: life on Earth or Gaia. This was not an easy question to answer. My attempt led to a friendship that has persisted. Hugh is President now of our charity, Gaia, and a welcome guest to Coombe Mill. His thoughtful question should have come from a biologist, but in recent times, leading biologists seem to be in a pseudo-religious phase, and churchmen are growing open minds. Hugh Montefiore published a book, The Probability of God, a title any physicist would have approved, and the book was for me refreshingly free of dogma. I have thought since childhood that there are no certainties; this, if you like, is a scientist’s creed. I found it odd that the biological scientists who attacked Gaia spoke with near dogmatic certainty, something I had not heard since the days of the Sunday Schools where I was an unwilling pupil. Geological critics were better scientists, and argued from the interpretation of facts. I remember when I first lectured on Gaia at Mainz in Germany, the geologist Wally Broecker rose from the audience at the end of my talk to say, ‘And there’s not more than one chance in a hundred that your view of the Earth is right.’ Now here were the words of a true scientist critic and I was proud that our work on Earth sciences, his and mine, were both recognized twenty-three and twenty-four years later by the award of the Japanese Blue Planet Prize. Perhaps the most rewarding letter about the book was from Crispin Tickell, then chef-de-cabinet to Roy Jenkins at the European Union in Brussels. Later, as Sir Crispin Tickell, he was our Ambassador to Mexico, and then our Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York. I am glad that Gaia brought us together, and paved the way to a friendship with this remarkable man and his wife Penelope.

  When Helen and I first moved to Coombe Mill in early 1977, we wondered how we could ever manage its fourteen acres of farmland. Helen loved gardening, but was disabled, and could not possibly cope with so large a garden. I was no gardener at all; indeed, I detest gardening. At first, we tried growing and selling the grass of the meadows. Local farmers were prepared to come and cut the grass and pay us a modest sum for it. This seemed a noticeable improvement on suburban life, where it may be necessary to pay to have the grass cut. Then in the autumn of 1977, a man with a tractor and a hedge-cutter appeared on the 250-yard road that led to Coombe Mill. He trimmed the hedges meticulously, backed round, and drove out, waving to us as he went. We asked our neighbour, then Dennis Fry, at Huntsdown Farm, who it could have been. ‘Oh, Mr Rockey,’ he said. ‘He cuts the hedges every year.’ This was even better. My worries about how to do it myself, what equipment to buy, were over. Only slight doubts remained about how was I to get in touch with Mr Rockey to pay him. Dennis said not to worry, he would turn up when he wanted paying—and he did, in January 1978, with his bill of £10.00. I wondered how it could be worth his while to do such good work for so little.

  We were settling in to Coombe Mill and it was looking after us. I still had fanciful notions about using the land productively. I thought of growing lettuces and salad vegetables in hundred-yard lengths of polyethylene tubing. The field behind the house sloped gently down. My idea was to glue the seeds to a long string passing down each of these plastic tubes, inflate the tubes and feed the plants with a solution of nutrients pumped continuously. When fully grown I could seal the lettuces mechanically in their
compartments and so provide sterile vegetables never touched by human hand or by the excrement normally applied as nutrient. Not pressed for money, as I still worked for my customers Hewlett Packard, Shell and NOAA, I did not become a lettuce farmer. I did try growing potatoes by simply pegging down a large sheet of black plastic on an area of grass. Then I cut crosses in the plastic in the form of a square matrix and placed seed potatoes beneath each cross. To my delight, it worked. Without light, the grass underneath the plastic died and formed mulch in which the potatoes grew. Months later, when the previously healthy looking plants above ground started to wilt, I lifted the plastic sheet, starting from one corner. Underneath were fine potatoes and I reached down to pick them. Hastily I backed away, for not only were there potatoes, there were adders, the one venomous snake we have in England, slithering around them. I lifted the whole sheet and left the reptiles to dissipate. My plastic sheet had provided a wonderful habitat for snakes. Field mice abounded in the grass around my plastic potato plot, and they would come to feast on the potatoes but instead fed the adders, who stayed warm, safe, and well fed.

  So successful was this experiment in ecological farming that I planned to extend it in the next year 1979 but the winter of 1978/9 put paid to that ambition. Just before Christmas the north wind reached storm force and brought with it particles of snow so fine it was almost an aerosol. It was a full blizzard and impossible to walk against. It blew most of the night and we endured it without heat or electricity. The next morning brought blue skies and thick snow cover and was colder than I could ever remember. The outside thermometer registered – 19°C, and it was so cold that many plants and animals around died, and I never saw the adders and the grass snakes at Coombe Mill again. The worst of the cold for the humans at Coombe Mill were the burst pipes in the roof and the inch-thick layer of snow dust everywhere across the roof space. I had to sweep it into plastic bags using a dustpan and broom. The winters of the late 1970s and early 1980s were severe in our region. The snowfall one year was so heavy that the small lanes of Devon filled from hedge top to hedge top. The worst of the snowfall was about two miles to the east and north of Coombe Mill. We could just manage to drive to the village, but snowdrifts ten or more feet high blocked the roads to the north and the east.