James Lovelock, an important scientist, is a fascinating and fulfilling subject
The Many Lives of James Lovelock. By Jonathan Watts. Canongate; 320 pages; £25
To declare, as Walt Whitman did, “I am large. I contain multitudes,” is fair for a poet. But it poses something of a challenge for a biographer. The life of James Lovelock (pictured), an English scientist who, through his writings on what he called Gaia, provided new ways to think about the degree to which life on Earth makes the Earth alive, was not just long. (He died two years ago at the age of 103; for the last decades of that long life this reviewer was a friend.) It was also large, and rich in the contradictions that Whitman thought a life allowed.
In his tender and searching new biography of Lovelock, based on 80 hours of interviews with his subject, Jonathan Watts, global environment editor at the Guardian, embraces this multiplicity. Mr Watts structures his story in terms of the relationships that defined his subject’s life.
Where Mr Watts most adds to previous accounts is in Lovelock’s relationships with women: the toxic one with his mother, which led to his not marrying his first true love, and a later partnership with Dian Hitchcock. Ms Hitchcock was a consultant for NASA when Lovelock was working on instruments for space probes. It was both a love affair (one that Lovelock eventually brought to a cruel end) and a deep intellectual collaboration that has previously gone unacknowledged. She played a crucial role in developing the idea that life affects planets in ways discernible at astronomical distances; this was integral to the genesis of Gaia theory, Lovelock’s hypothesis that Earth has a self-regulating system that supports life.
Less moving, but still fascinating, is Lovelock’s relationship with Victor Rothschild, an aristocrat who worked in British intelligence and as head of research at Shell Oil. Lovelock both shaped Rothschild’s views on climate change and helped MI5 use the hypersensitive chemistry equipment he had developed to sniff out people and explosives.
Bombs turn up often; they were an outlet for anger when he blew up a gate that blocked a favourite path of his father’s, and later on they were a way of entertaining his own children. Their recurring presence makes one wish that Mr Watts had taken his organising conceit further; as he notes, the relationships that engrossed Lovelock were as often those between things as those between people. Chapters on, say, his relationship with the sea (on which he loved to voyage and beside which he loved to walk), or the sense of smell (which he deemed vital for a chemist) or the laboratory (always his fondest home) or the planet itself all would have enriched the sense of his connectedness.
Mr Watts does not take his readers very deep into the science Lovelock applied or into the ways his notion of Gaia changed over time. For the latest scholarship, Anglophone readers will need to wait for a translation of Sébastien Dutreuil’s “Gaia, Terre Vivante” (“Gaia, Living Earth”), published earlier this year in France. But if you want a rounded sense of the man, this book provides one beautifully.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline “Earth father” (Nov 7th 2024)
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