Homage to Gaia

by James Lovelock

  in the North Wing of the General Hospital. From its fourth floor windows those patients capable of looking out had a view westwards across the Vale of Taunton to the Brendon Hills and northwards to the Quantocks. Few took advantage of it, for in June 1986 the vista, which should have lifted their spirits, served only to depress them. Rachel Wylde was no exception. She gazed with blank eyes at the sodden landscape while the raindrops pattered against the windowpane of Ward 3 and trickled downwards in slow, interminable tears.

  Not bad for a coincidence: the year and month were wrong and Ward 3 was on the ground floor, but what a surprise to read, while preparing my mind for major surgery. Every week someone wins the lottery at comparable odds against, so coincidences like this must happen every so often. But just as the winner is happily amazed at the news of the win, so was I by this coincidence at such a time.

  Next morning, which was Monday, I woke earlier than usual, and shaved and showered before anyone else was up, which would be about 5.45 am. I helped to take the morning teacups around the ward, went back to bed, and read again for a while. The tall figure of Robert Conway came up to me and said, ‘So you are for the big one this morning, Jim, and you are the first on the list and will be going along to the theatre at about 9 o’clock.’ At about 8 they brought me two 10 mg Valium tablets as the favoured premedication of that time. Soon, it seemed, the porters came with their trolley, or what the Americans call a gurney, to take me to the theatre. They wheeled me along the short distance to the theatre, and in the anteroom the anaesthetist chatted to me as he prepared his intravenous cocktail of anaesthetic. He then inserted a cannula with a syringe port into a vein on my hand: this welcome invention saves repeated puncturing of veins to deliver doses of any drug or antibiotic. Soon, he injected his mixture into this device while we went on chatting and then suddenly I was away. I came to in the recovery room adjacent to the theatre, and soon I felt the familiar touch of tubing on my thigh and put my hand down to confirm it. Yes, there it was, a catheter tube leading from my penis. Strange, I thought, then Paddy came over and said in a matter-of-fact voice. ‘We decided after all not to do the big operation and just completed the urethrotomy.’ I should have sung my praises to him there and then. Where would I have been in five years’ time with nothing to bring to my second marriage but a withered member?

  From now on visits dropped back to four weeks or so, but another problem arose: that of repeated bladder and kidney infections. A kidney scan and a kidney function test using radioactive technetium, soon revealed the damage done to my left kidney by the tractor accident at the beginning of 1982, and it looked as if it needed removing. Sister Chant told me that Paddy was one of those surgeons who operated only when it was wholly necessary. I had good reason to believe this, and I could see that he was loath to remove the damaged kidney and preferred to try to coax it back to life.

  One day, whilst busy preparing a lecture that I had agreed to give in Vienna in a few weeks’ time, Dr Lightfoot, the pathologist at Taunton, called. ‘Can you drop everything and come to Taunton at once?’ he asked. ‘What, now, this afternoon?’ ‘Yes, it is urgent that you do. Do you want us to send an ambulance to bring you in or can you drive?’ ‘Oh, I’ll drive in, but what’s the fuss?’ said I. ‘You have a Pseudomonas infection and it should be treated without delay.’ Feeling as well as I was used to feeling, I chose to drive in to Taunton, having packed my pyjamas and dressing gown and other odds and ends.

  Dr Lightfoot came to visit the ward as soon as I was in bed to explain the need for urgent action. Pseudomonas aeruginosa, a bacterium that I had previously regarded as a friendly benign inhabitant of the natural scene, was also, he said, a deadly pathogen. It could cause a septicaemia that could kill within hours. One disadvantage of a medical background is that they never spared me this kind of detail, nor would I want it otherwise. Even so, it was sobering in the way of Ogden Nash’s verse:

  This creature fills its mouth with venom and walks upon its duodenum.

  He who attempts to tease the cobra, is soon a sadder he and sobra.

  Dr Lightfoot took some blood from my arm and, shortly afterwards, injected me with the antibiotic tobramycin. He said I could go to lecture in Vienna but immediately afterwards I must return to Taunton to have my diseased kidney removed. I must also inject myself twice daily with the antibiotic. I wish that I had been well enough to enjoy my visit to Vienna. As it was I gave my Gaia talk to a receptive audience at Laxenberg Castle and then returned to Musgrove Park, where Paddy O’Boyle removed the offending kidney. During the ten-day stay in Ward 3 afterwards, my mind was filled with the thought that shortly after I returned home to Coombe Mill, a team would arrive from the BBC to film a Horizon programme on Gaia. This was, of course, a wonderful opportunity to put my case before a large, even global audience. I was concerned that I should be fit again and able to do it with vigour. For the ten days after the surgery, they gave me the antibiotic piperacillin by intravenous drip; at that time, it was the antibiotic of choice for Pseudomonas infections. Towards the end of my stay in Ward 3, Dr Lightfoot brought the good news that I was free of infection. A friendly local taxi driver, who provided blankets to keep me warm over the seventy-mile journey home, fetched me from Musgrove Park Hospital. Two days later, the Horizon producer, John Groom, arrived with his team of cameramen and sound technicians, and began to put me through my paces. They were considerate of my condition but, consummate technicians that they were, the film was what mattered, and these were still the days when the BBC’s science flagship programme, Horizon, was elitist, and about science. The 1985 Horizon programme was fine and was shown worldwide. It did much to bring Gaia into perception as a scientific topic and it did so without denying the value of Gaia as a unifying sign and concept for a holistic view of the Earth.

  I continued to visit Taunton, now at intervals of six months or so, for the fine-tuning by dilatation or urethrotomy of the strictures still left by those miserable events at King’s College Hospital in 1982. In 1985 Robert Conway showed me how to dilate my urethra by inserting a catheter. Since then, I have dilated myself at intervals of two weeks, and Paddy tells me that I shall probably have to do this for the rest of my life. He also told me how fortunate I was to have no more than this to do. Many others who have suffered similarly are doomed to a restricted life with a permanent supra-pubic catheter. He did not say that my good fortune was due to his patient skill as a surgeon, but I know that it was. The philosopher Rousseau also had a stricture and needed to catheterize himself regularly. He, unfortunate man, had to use willow twigs, not smooth plastic tubing.

  Institutions large and small can become recognizable as entities, and their names are memorable. They take on a quality that gives pride to those that serve them. Ward 3 at Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton, is just such an entity, and had been for all of the years that I knew it. My strongest memory is of laughter. Extraordinary in a place where blood and pain are all too common, yet it exemplified the hospital wisdom that the happiest ward to be in is men’s surgical. Some time ago, when I visited my friend Henry Bentinck in his carpeted room at the Nuffield Private Hospital in Taunton, I was glad that my next stay was in Ward 3 not there. I do not think Henry minded, but not for me a lonely private room in a hotel for the sick.

  I am aware that the nursing profession is changing fast. As the staff nurse at Taunton put it to me on my last visit there in 1995: ‘Make the most of us now—next time you come here the nurses will all be graduates and they will not look after you as we do.’ I hope that the consequences of this facet of women’s liberation are not as dire as she predicted.

  Had my urethral misfortune happened in America I would probably have sued for damages. Why did I not sue here in the UK? My answer is that in America, the courts are the natural means of redress, and here they are not. In America, there was no health service. I would have been obliged to pay for the repair work done during those numerous hospital visits and my own resources would have vanished in the cost of
the first few of them. There would have been no option but to sue, and even with adequate cover, the insurance company would have insisted on my suing. Here in the UK, the heart surgery and the repair of my urethra cost me nothing. As far as I could see, the damage was a result of ‘industrial action’ by the trade union, not negligence on the part of the surgeon or the hospital. As far as my heart is concerned, the surgeon truly gave me a new lease of life; what ingratitude it would have been to sue.

  Lynn Margulis paid a visit later in the year and brought with her a wonderful gift. She came as a member of the committee of the Commonwealth Fund, a fund that had, as its chairman, the famous author and physician, Lewis Thomas. She brought from him the invitation to write a second book on Gaia and the offer of $50,000 for doing so, as a grant. This meant that I could set aside much of the next two years to write The Ages of Gaia. What other recompense did I need?

  12

  Three Score Years and Ten and then the Fun Begins

  As I moved to the end of my sixty-ninth year, thoughts of the biblical life span of seventy years were much in my mind. The quest for Gaia seemed to have stalled at San Diego, Helen was now failing, and I was due for more corrective surgery at Taunton hospital. The prospect was grim, but then suddenly in April 1988, things changed and this is what this chapter is about. But the title is, I admit, outrageous. I chose it deliberately to cock a snoot at the dull grey pessimistic world I then seemed to inhabit. I am aware that some may see it as unkind and discourteous to Helen’s memory, but this is not my intention. I want to show that life can indeed begin again at seventy, and this is how it happened.

  In the autumn of 1987 Wilfrid Grenville-Grey wrote me to say that he and Mrs Orchard would like to visit and discuss my appearance at the Global Forum, due to be held in April the next year. This was a meeting that I had somewhat regretfully agreed to attend and to deliver a fifteen-minute speech. They never came, but I imagined them to be seriously Anglican, and these suspicions were confirmed when I read in their letter that they intended to visit me by travelling from Paddington to Liskeard in Cornwall. Nobody but liberal church people would take such a circuitous route to reach Coombe Mill. In my imagination, Wilfrid had the demeanour of at least a Dean; Mrs Orchard, his companion, the church lady dressed neatly in twin set and pearls, and sensible shoes. Both of them I imagined to be officers of one of the flagships of what was then middle-class England, the Anglican Church.

  I had more than three weeks after returning from San Diego to prepare my talk, and somehow the disappointment of the Gaia meeting there drove me to put my heart into it and give them their money’s worth. On Sunday 10 April I arrived by train from Exeter to Reading, took the coach to Heathrow, and went on to the Post House Hotel where the delegates were. After checking in at the hotel desk, and before going to my room, I had to register for the conference and receive my badge and programme. A sprightly middle-aged woman, Margaret Rogers, greeted me. I did not know it then, but meeting her was the start of a complete change in my whole lifestyle. She was a smartly dressed English lady who could have understudied for Miss Marple, and she did nothing to dispel my image of the conference as comfortably Anglican.

  Next morning after breakfast, along with other delegates, they whisked me away to Oxford on a set of buses. My seat companion was a young rabbi from Israel who I found easy to talk to, and I was surprised to discover that his wife had attended the Henrietta Barnett School in Hampstead Garden Suburb at the same time as my daughter, Christine—and later I found that they knew each other. The absurd familiarity of this link seemed to melt the jagged edges that separated our wholly different cultures, and I enjoyed talking with him all the way to Oxford. We soon arrived and were disembussed at Christ Church, an Oxford college founded as Cardinal College by Wolsey in 1525, but refounded as Christ Church in 1546 by Henry VIII, after Wolsey had fallen from royal favour. It is a splendid college with its vast quadrangle, its Tom Tower, and its own cathedral. Happily on this cool but sunny April morning, I stood by some steps in the quadrangle, soaking up the sun, and watched a woman walk diagonally across from some offices on the far side of the quadrangle. She came up to me and introduced herself. ‘I am Sandy Orchard,’ she said. Now, she was no middle-class Anglican churchwoman, she was an American; but she spoke softly with an accent that was more transatlantic than those of New York or Boston. Her trim figure put her in my mind as somewhere in her early forties. She read my name badge and immediately we began to talk about her interest in Gaia. I asked her whether she was free for lunch so that we could talk some more. She said, ‘Yes, meet me here at 12.30.’ But it was not to be: the surge of arriving delegates overwhelmed her wish. She shared with Wilfrid Grenville-Grey, of the London office, the task of arranging and running the conference. The New York organizers of the Global Forum, led by Akio Matsumura, Dean Morton, and Cecile Reyes, were in charge.

  After lunch, I returned to the conference office and soon found that, as a speaker, I rated VIP treatment and was booked into a suite at the Randolph Hotel, about half a mile away. I walked out through the gateway under Tom Tower and onto St Aldate’s where the traffic noise was almost physically painful after the quiet of the quadrangle. It remained so as I made my way through the thronged streets to Carfax, past the shops and buses to the Randolph on its corner facing the Ashmolean Museum. Oxford, like Calcutta, seems always overripe with human life, especially along that fecund axis linking Christ Church to the Randolph.

  There was a conference reception that evening with the Great and the Good in attendance. These included: the Chancellor of Oxford University, Roy Jenkins, who came in his gown, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Robert Runcie. I missed this colourful opening ceremony but I joined the throng at the reception. Here, I spoke briefly to Mrs Orchard again, but retired to the Randolph early to be in good shape for my speech next day.

  In the morning, I made my way the short distance up St Aldate’s to Oxford Town Hall, a dreadful building for a city otherwise blessed with glorious architecture. I cannot think how the city fathers could have made so wretched a place their town hall. I sat, along with the other speakers, at one end of the large hall and, of course, public address systems were necessary, as few speakers had voices that could reach the far end of the building unaided. James Morton, Dean of the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York, and the famous scientist, Carl Sagan, shared the platform with me. Hardly had I finished the first words of my speech when the public address system died. Dean Morton said, ‘Go on and shout, you can be heard even if the public address system doesn’t work.’ I replied, ‘With a voice like yours I could, but not with mine.’ For a moment I felt utterly betrayed, then, after some seconds of agonized confusion, the sound system came on again. I should have started again at the beginning but I did not, and continued my speech as if the interruption had not occurred. I was surprised to find that it went over reasonably well. I sat down and listened to Carl Sagan’s speech. They had allowed him forty-five minutes to speak and he thrilled them with a modern version of a hellfire sermon, with nuclear winters and atomic fire standing in for the devil and damnation. The gathering, being mostly of the religious, loved it, and were taking notes, no doubt to weave into their own sermons later. It was growing ever more clear to me that 1988 was continuing as a bad year for Gaia. Both the scientists and the clerics, it seemed to me, had lost the enthusiasm that had greeted Gaia’s debut in 1979. Schooldays had taught me to emulate the stick insect when things are bad and to disappear into the background looking like a twig. There would be other opportunities, I thought, to fight for Gaia, but certainly not here. I had lunch with some of the delegates, and in the afternoon attended a few working groups, before retiring to the Randolph to change for dinner.

  Dinner was again in the refectory at Christ Church, a room with all the splendour and certainty of its founders. Opposite me on the long table were the once Rector of the United Nations University, Soedjatmoko, and sitting next to him, Dean Morton of the Cathedral of St John
the Divine. Sandy, that is to say, Mrs Orchard, was sitting next to me. I had been looking forward to having a talk with her, a continuation of our discussion in the quad, but again it was not to be. Soedjatmoko and Dean Morton, both exuberant extrovert characters, dominated the conversation in the liveliest of manners, and it was an enjoyable dinner, but not the one that I’d expected. After dinner, however, I took Sandy along the few short steps from the refectory to the cathedral at Christ Church, where an old friend of mine, another Lindisfarne Fellow, Paul Winter, was giving a small concert of his music. We sat on excruciatingly uncomfortable pews and although we had had no more than a few uninterrupted minutes together, I saw Sandy as a stunningly attractive woman and longed to hold her hand. I discovered later that she felt just the same urge, but during the concert we sat in our discomfort and listened to the music. Afterwards, with great relief, we stood and then went over to meet Paul Winter, who immediately embraced us both. He is the friendliest of men, and he gave us that feeling of being a part of his world as if we had a private invitation to meet him backstage. We walked from the cathedral; I had nothing planned, but hoped something pleasant would happen and then, as so often happens at conferences, a woman I had never before met, came up and started talking seriously and intensely about Gaia. I had to be polite and turn to her and, when I looked round, Sandy had gone. I discovered later that she felt she would be intruding if she stayed; if only she had known. After five or ten minutes, I pleaded the need to return to the hotel to do some writing, and went back to the Randolph.