Then we retired to the sitting room for coffee. I was standing alone against a wall taking in the faces of politicians and others I recognized but did not know. Then, suddenly the Prime Minister moved rapidly across the room and said, ‘Professor Lovelock, I’ve been so looking forward to meeting you’, and at once started a conversation that seemed to go on for at least fifteen minutes. It was mainly on the environment and she wanted to know what I thought should be done about it. I expressed my views as forcibly as I could. I was delighted to find that she had read my book and had questions on it. When she left, I found myself surrounded by other people. Her obvious interest in this otherwise unknown man stirred the gathering. They plied me with questions about what we had discussed. There were several consequences of this meeting; perhaps the most important was the invitation to a seminar at Downing Street hosted by the Prime Minister.
On 26 April 1989 I was back at No. 10 Downing Street, this time for the seminar on climate change. Margaret Thatcher is one of the few politicians with an informed scientific understanding of the natural environment. She had the advantage of training in science at Oxford, where she took an MA and BSc. Her subject, chemistry, is the most transdisciplinary of the sciences: to be a good chemist you need a working knowledge of both physics and biology. Most physicists and biologists can get by very well in the smaller world of their own discipline alone. Margaret Thatcher had the wisdom to see, as she put it, that the environment would usurp the political agenda in the next decade. When she said this in her speech before the Royal Society on 27 September 1988, few believed her. That she was right can be seen from the column inches of newsprint and the media time now spent on topics like pollution, Greenpeace, El Niño, fuel-efficient cars, the greenhouse effect, etc. No noticeable environmental disaster has yet happened, but it would be a brave forecaster who predicted that we would not have one in the next one hundred years.
Number 10 is just like that fictional time and space machine, the Tardis, created by Terry Nation in the television series, Dr Who. A small door with a constabulary presence opens into the vestibule, which itself leads to an endless series of connected rooms and corridors. I seem to recall on one occasion entering at No. 10 and leaving from part of the Cabinet offices in Whitehall. This time they took me to a conference room equipped with rows of chairs and a raised platform, on which the Prime Minister and a few members of the Cabinet sat. There was an overhead and a slide projector. It was, in fact, just like any other small, select, scientific meeting room. The familiar faces around me of British and American atmospheric scientists heightened the feeling of familiarity. Among them was Robert Watson, part of the American contingent, and I remember Sir Crispin Tickell and Sir John Houghton from our country. Margaret Thatcher handled the meeting as if she had spent her life in science. Robert Watson said to me afterwards that it seemed as though she had been running scientific meetings all her life. He added, ‘Is there a head of state anywhere who could take on a group like this and make you feel that she knew what she was talking about?’ There were about three set-piece lectures on the greenhouse problem, but we spent most of the time in a general discussion of the problems that lay ahead and what could be done about them. At the end of the meeting, Sir Martin Holgate made a concise and accurate summary.
The meeting closed at about 1 pm and we all went to lunch in one of the dining rooms of No. 10. This room was set out with a series of round tables, each seating about eight. There was a Cabinet minister or senior politician at each of them. I was lucky enough to be at the Prime Minister’s table, along with Sir Crispin Tickell, Lord Marshall, Lord Porter and Sir James Goldsmith. During lunch Margaret Thatcher asked, ‘Do any of you know if there is anything in cold fusion?’ Without thinking, I answered promptly, ‘Prime Minister, there is nothing in it. Pons and Fleischman have made a mistake, and I think I know what it was.’ Lord Porter immediately intervened, ‘You cannot say things like that, Lovelock. They are distinguished scientists. Fleischman is an FRS and they have both published peer-reviewed papers on cold fusion.’ I think I replied, ‘In ten years it will all be forgotten.’ Then Margaret Thatcher added, ‘Good, then we can ignore cold fusion.’ (Those who want to know more about my reasons for doubting cold fusion should go back to the first section of Chapter 10.) The discussion moved on. Looking back, I am sorry that I was right, for cold fusion would have been a great boon. After lunch, there was an opportunity to chat with the other participants, and we left by yet another exit to avoid the press. It did not work: they quizzed me but I could say very little. The meeting was held under Chatham House rules; that is to say, we could quote what we had said ourselves, but not repeat anyone else’s comments. The Prime Minister sent a hand-written letter of condolence when Helen died, and later that year a friendly postcard when she visited the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. For the brief time during the last months of her premiership, I enjoyed the warmth of her patronage.
Together with Professor Sam Berry and Lord Nathan, the Cabinet Office sent me to Brussels in 1989. We were the UK representatives at an EEC meeting on environmental ethics. We met and dined in an old Belgian palace in its own grounds, not the high-rise faceless monument of the Berlaymont. I think I contributed very little to the proceedings on ethics. I left the expression of our private discussions on the subject to Lord Nathan, a distinguished lawyer, and to Sam Berry, unusually both a theologian and a professor of biology. Gaia is not about human affairs, except where, like now, they impinge upon the health of the planet. Gaia requires us to live sensibly with the Earth, and this would require that we restored the natural habitats we have destroyed to feed people. This requires politically difficult choices, such as giving up meat eating or reducing our numbers to a third or less. I could not think of any way to introduce topics like these into the serious discussions in Brussels. They were wholly about human affairs, and when they did talk about the environment, it was in human terms, such as how to deal with urban pollution. At lunch at the palace, I sat opposite Jacques Delors, the formidable chief officer of the EEC. I had a strong impression, as he gazed across the table at me, that he was daring me to speak on Gaia. Sadly, I did not take the opportunity offered. After lunch, they took us back in VIP style to the Brussels airport and there the three of us shopped. Sam and I took back engraved glass figures of birds; mine was an owl. Sandy met me at the London City airport and we returned to our flat in St Mark’s Road.
Following this turbulent start, my seventh decade has calmed into the happiest years of a lifetime. The highlights were the receipt of four International Prizes, several honorary degrees and four visits to Japan; I will conclude this chapter by telling you about them.
My relationship with academia has been an uneasy one. I was on the inside as a Professor in the 1960s at Baylor College of Medicine and loosely attached as a visiting professor for twenty-five years at Reading University and for shorter spells at the University of Houston and the University of Washington in Seattle, but I am too much a loner ever to feel a part of collegiate life. Therefore, I have been humbled and made grateful by the generosity of academics at the eight universities that awarded me honorary doctorates; Exeter, Kent, East Anglia, Edinburgh, Colorado, East London, Stockholm, and Plymouth. The most exciting of these was the high ceremony of the Doctor of Science degree I received from Stockholm University in 1991. The pageantry, the sounds of gunfire and trumpet calls, the award of the degree and the gold ring that I have worn ever since, made me aware that I was truly married to science. I remembered with affection my many friends among Swedish scientists and my visits to their country.
In the spring of 1990, a telephone call from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences brought the stunningly joyful news that I was to receive the Amsterdam Prize for the Environment at a ceremony in The Hague in October of that year. My friend and colleague Sir John Cornforth had put my name forward several years previously but I had never expected the prize and it was the first intimation that the 1990s were to be the decade wh
en my researches during the long years in the wilderness of independence were recognized. Following a letter of invitation from Mr. AH Heineken, chairman of the Amsterdam Foundation for the Environment, Sandy and I travelled to the Netherlands a week before the ceremonies. Professor Kuenen who represented the Academy and was our close friend and guide throughout our stay in the Netherlands met us at Schipol Airport. I lectured at universities at Groningen in the north and Rotterdam in the south, and I received the prize from Prince Claus of the Netherlands at an immaculate ceremony in the Knight’s Hall of the Binnenhof at The Hague. Sandy and I enjoyed a private banquet afterwards with the winners of the other Amsterdam Prizes, hosted by Mr Heineken. My prize lecture was entitled ‘In Search of the Superorganism’ and given at a meeting of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.
The pursuit of prestigious prizes has never been part of my life as a scientist: had it been I would never have chosen to work independently. The award of the Amsterdam Prize warmed and contented me and I expected no more, but in August 1996 a fax from the Volvo Foundation invited me to call them about some important news; it was that their Jury had selected me to receive the 1996 Volvo Environment Prize. The citation singled out the ECD and its applications as my contribution to environmental science that had brought me the Prize, but to my delight, they also mentioned Gaia. We flew to Brussels in October, where I delivered my lecture and received the prize from Princess Désirée, Baroness Silfverschiöld of Sweden. I was deeply moved to be so recognized, and especially since I worked outside the main body of science. What made the Volvo Prize ceremony so memorable for me was the number of scientist friends who took the time and expense to come to Brussels on that day.
In December 1995 our now deeply respected fax machine presented a message from the Nonino Foundation asking if I would accept the decision of their jury to award me the Nonino Prize, and if so would I come with Sandy to Percoto in Italy where the ceremony would take place. We flew to Venice in January 1996 and Antonella Nonino welcomed us and took us in her car to Percoto where we stayed with the Nonino family for four days before the ceremonies. It is a great privilege to live with a family in a distant country, and there is no better way of getting to know and understand another culture. As we shared meals with the Nonino family and talked with them late into the evening, we learnt a great deal more about Italy than years of visits had provided. The Nonino Prize, a literary and philosophical award, was for my first book, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. The Foundation awarded the prize at a wonderful ceremony held at the Nonino Grappa distillery. Their grappa was a blithe spirit of quality equal to, or better than, the best of single malt whiskies, and made by a family enterprise. Other winners of the prize included the cultural historian, Edward Said, the Italian author, Gian Luigi Beccaria and the horticultural scientist, Furio Bianco. At the banquet afterwards we met past winners and such luminaries as the conductor Claudio Abbado.
The most extraordinary events of my seventh decade took place in that distant land, Japan, and somehow they typify the extravagant joy that came after three score years and ten. Those who have travelled this far with me will be aware of my lack of respect for time and I am starting my account of Japan with our last visit there in 1997. I have to do this to avoid what would otherwise be an anticlimax.
The culminating event of our Japanese period came modestly. In May 1997 the fax machine at Coombe Mill gurgitated a sheet of paper from the Asahi Glass Foundation. They were frequent correspondents, and often sought nominations for their prestigious Blue Planet Prize. I walked over to Sandy, holding the fax in my hand, as she was discussing the day’s meal with Margaret Sargent. Not wishing to disturb them, I started to read the fax when a sentence leapt at me from the page: ‘Let us know if you are willing to accept the prize and are free to come to Tokyo in November for the ceremonies.’ I was overjoyed and blurted out to Sandy, ‘It has happened again, another prize!’ The previous year, in similar circumstances, our fax had delivered the news of my award of the Volvo Prize for the Environment.
It was wholly unexpected and left us in a happy daze trying to come to terms with our good fortune. The Asahi Glass Foundation established the Blue Planet Prize in commemoration of the 1991 Rio Conference on the Global Environment. They award two Prizes annually, one to the organization and one to the individual that did most, in the opinion of their jury, to further the aims of the Rio Conference. I was moved and honoured to have my work on the ECD and on Gaia singled out as worthy of the Prize, and in October 1997 we flew from Heathrow in two adjacent seats in the first-class cabin of a British Airways 747 on our way to Tokyo. The twelve-hour flight, mostly over what was once the Soviet Union, would have been hard for me to endure in the economy section of the plane. In our section, with seats that reclined completely to form a bed, it was a pleasant interlude. We arrived at Narita at about midday local time, and were met by the Foundation’s representative, Mr Nobuaki Kunii, and taken to a fine suite in Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel.
The organization chosen to receive the 1997 Prize was the environmental charity Conservation International, whose representative was Dr Russell A Mittermeier. We each received the Prize at an impeccably staged ceremony in the Imperial Hotel, and for me it included a congratulatory letter from my past Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, read out in the preamble to the award. The British Ambassador to Japan, Sir David Wright, then gave his panegyric, and to my delight read a congratulatory letter from our present Prime Minister, Tony Blair. Dr Jiro Furumoto, Chairman of the Foundation, handed us the Prize—a glass sphere with an emblem engraved on it to represent humankind. It was as well that we had rehearsed it in the morning, for it was so heavy that we feared to drop it and see it roll onto the feet of their Royal Highnesses, the Prince and Princess Akishino. All went well and we were introduced to their Highnesses at the reception afterwards. My granddaughter, Mary Flynn, and so many of our Japanese friends of earlier visits were there to join with us in celebrating that wonderful occasion. It was a fitting conclusion to four visits to Japan initiated by that singular and honourable man, Hideo Itokawa. We dearly wished that he could have come to the ceremonies but, sadly, he had suffered a stroke a year earlier.
After the Prize ceremonies, we spent several more days in Japan. Our friend Yumi Akimoto, President and CEO of Mitsubishi Materials Corporation, had organized a meeting on Gaia science, and we spent a productive day with Japanese scientists. The following day, Yumi and Sadako took us to see a traditional Kabuki play, and it moved us deeply. Sandy and I were delighted to go and enjoy our friends’ company, but I wondered, before we arrived at the theatre, if it would be one of those quiet cultural affairs where one politely watches an incomprehensible display of costumes. We should have known our hosts better: the Kabuki consisted of a series of entrancing and captivating parables, acted out so well that our lack of Japanese was no handicap. The play gave us a feeling for Japanese history and made us realize how much we in England have lost in the dubious deconstruction of our past.
We went on to see our friends Yasuaki and Keiko Maeda at the Osaka Prefecture University in Sakai, and there renewed our acquaintance with Dr Kozo Ishida of the Horiba Company, before leaving from Kansai airport on the long Trans-Siberian journey home.
An earlier visit to Japan was in 1993, when the Japanese Atomic Industrial Forum invited me to present a paper at their meeting in Yokohama. I was glad to have a chance to express in public my strong support for nuclear energy. I expect that some time in the next century, when the adverse effects of climate change begin to bite, people will look back in anger at those who now so foolishly continue to pollute by burning fossil fuel instead of accepting the beneficence of nuclear power. I often think of the Green Movement as some global over-anxious mother figure who is so concerned about small risks that she ignores the real dangers that loom. As in the biblical fable, we strain at the gnats of Chernobyl, and swallow the camel of massive pollution by our carbon-burning civilization. It was after the meeting tha
t we first met Dr Yumi Akimoto, who, I was delighted to find, shared my views not only on nuclear power but on Gaia as well. He has expressed them in his book, Towards an Elastic 21st Century. We went with him to his home in Kamakura, where he and his wife, Sadako, made us most welcome. I learnt from Yumi that he had been a naval cadet on an island in Hiroshima Bay when the first nuclear weapon exploded in anger. He saw the mushroom cloud and had a real sense of what a nuclear war means, but in no way did the experience diminish his support for nuclear power. He shared with me his view that the best way to dispose of the huge stockpiles of weapon-grade plutonium and uranium would be to burn them in power stations. After our morning of discussion, Yumi and Sadako took us to the shrine at Kamakura followed by a wonderful traditional Japanese meal.
Homage to Gaia Page 53