The Many Lives of James Lovelock, by Jonathan Watts review - 'Lovelock is interestingly ambiguous'

Unfortunately for his defenders, Lovelock increasingly spoke of Gaia in quasi-religious terms, even “praying” to it, and crediting the planet with agency, even suggesting Covid was a shot across the bow, and that Gaia would “try harder” the next time. It seems a useful shorthand as long as one remembers it is a shorthand, a point made deftly to me as a student when a lecturer said that if the Earth was an organism, he didn’t want to be there when it procreated. Science may have moved on from Archimedes, but biography has not progressed far from Plutarch. We still look for a moral. Lovelock is interestingly ambiguous – an environmentalist grounded in petro-business, supposedly a Quaker but happy to work for MI5. There are quasi-Freudian touches – how did having a difficult mother influence his feminised conception of the planet? – and some good anecdotes (especially his collaborator and lover, Dian Hitchcock, who introduced herself saying “Do you realise your name is a polite version of mine?”)

There are lessons to be learned in points like Lovelock’s early concerns about a New Ice Age. Yes, his thought altered and refined: the quote – “when the facts change I change my mind – what do you do, sir?”, erroneously attributed to John Maynard Keynes – is still true. It might make some of his acolytes wince to read about Lovelock’s admiration for Margaret Thatcher (indeed, his early versions of Gaia are practically laissez-faire) and his cosy relationship Nigel Lawson. There is always a note of exculpation, leavened with naivety. If Gaia was an easy subject for mythologising, so too was Lovelock. Watts, who is usually, as befits a science journalist, balanced and meticulous cannot quite escape the allure, describing him as “a man who seemed to be a Doctor Who, Ezekiel, Galileo, Gandalf, Chauncey Gardiner, Q and the Goblin in the Gasworks” (the last is a story written by a young Lovelock, and the Q is the James Bond boffin not the Star Trek trickster demi-god).

What can be taken from Lovelock’s life is an awareness that complex problems rarely have simple solutions, and those who proffer them usually knaves. Perhaps it would be a good gesture for the Book Festival to give free tickets to the members of Fossil Free Books.

The Many Lives of James Lovelock, by Jonathan Watts, Canongate, £25. Jonathan Watts is appearing at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 25 August