A couple of times in the course of my lunch with Professor James Lovelock, I catch our waitress cocking an eyebrow at me in mild surprise. As instructed by Lovelock’s publisher, I asked for the quietest table in the restaurant. But, between us, my guest and I manage to make enough noise – mainly hoots of laughter – to attract the attention of other diners.
If they could hear the rest of our conversation, they would be even more surprised. ”Humanity will be reduced to a few breeding pairs.” ”An enormous food shortage will kill off most people.” ”Watch the Dutch. Half of northern Europe will be under water, and there’s Holland behind a 10ft surrounding wall carrying on business as usual.” More laughter. Lovelock is a very jolly prophet of the apocalypse.
Lovelock is one of the best-known figures of the environmental movement. But his career has been far broader than that description might suggest. In the 1960s, he was engaged by Nasa to develop sensitive instruments to carry on spacecraft to analyse extraterrestrial chemistry. He has also helped to save the world once, by inventing a device used to discover and measure the persistence of man-made ozone-destroying chemicals in the atmosphere, which was essential to preventing the growth of the hole in the ozone layer.
But Lovelock describes these as his ”potboilers”, freeing him to do the work that made him famous: the Gaia hypothesis, which postulates that the world acts as a single, self-regulating system, which can be thought of as rather like a living organism. Each part of the organism, each living thing, has an effect on the whole; if any one part should move out of harmony, this triggers reactions from other systems that eventually compensate to bring the whole system back into equilibrium.
For many in the scientific establishment, this was a step too far. The hint of mysticism in the Gaia hypothesis outraged them. Lovelock was first ignored, then fiercely attacked.
Gaia, however, is back in vogue. Lovelock contends, with some justification, that the central idea of Gaia - the interdependence of the many complex systems that make up life on our planet - is now a routine matter of study, but on university curricula it goes by the name ”earth systems science” rather than that of a Greek goddess. And the great preoccupation of earth systems science at present is the future of the planet under man-made climate change.
By burning fossil fuels, human beings have disrupted the ebb and flow of the earth’s natural climate systems. The excess carbon dioxide we have put in the atmosphere cannot be absorbed by nature, and the result is the warming of the air, land and sea. Worse, the complex interlocking of natural systems, which we are only beginning to understand, is such that the effect of our greenhouse gas emissions is amplified by nature itself. For instance, the warming following from our current activities may cause swathes of Amazon rainforest to die off, depriving us of a vast sponge that absorbs carbon, so leading to much more warming in a runaway effect, cooking the planet and us with it. Seen in this context, Gaia looks much less outlandish. Global warming has, at least partly, brought Lovelock in from the cold.
He is too much the nonconformist, however, to fit comfortably into any movement. ”I’m a loner, work on my own, not terribly tribal,” he says happily, ordering a medium rare steak from what he commends as a very English menu. This is gratifying, as I have chosen this restaurant after guessing that Lovelock, who eulogises the English countryside, would prefer traditional cuisine. For this reason, I have the most English dish I can find on the card - steak and kidney pudding. Lovelock approves. ”That’s what I’d have had,” he says, ”if it had been a pie.”
There are very few freelance scientists – the huge expense of equipment, the need to parcel out difficult research among large teams of specialists, and the funding model all militate against this, keeping scientists tied to universities or corporate R&D departments. But Lovelock, now 87, has worked alone since the age of 40, mostly out of a laboratory in an old barn near the Devon/Cornwall border. Being a loner has given him ”wonderful freedom”, he says. ”There are very few scientists who have the chances I’ve had of working entirely independently, and not being constrained by the need to do work that will bring my next grant in. I would never have been allowed to develop Gaia at a university or a government department or an industrial one. You could only do it alone.”
Lovelock also sits uneasily in the green ranks. His vision of the future is too bleak for many, and his suggested remedy breaks the biggest green taboo. Lovelock thinks only nuclear power can save us, and advocates the immediate construction of a new generation of nuclear plants across the globe. Even that, he says, may not be enough to save us from the ravages of climate change. ”I think we passed the point of no return some time ago - we don’t know when,” he says.
We raise our glasses, of house red and white wine (”I think we can, don’t you? I don’t have much on this afternoon” – his meeting with David Cameron has been cancelled). Lovelock elaborates on his prediction: ”If we get away with 20 per cent survival by the end of the century, we’ll be doing terribly well. I can’t be certain, I’m a scientist. You can’t be certain in science, but that’s the probability.”
Yet Lovelock’s views can seem infuriatingly contradictory. As an advocate of more nuclear power - ”bury the waste in my garden if they’re worried about it”, he hoots with laughter - he is clearly no technophobe. But he rejects putting up wind turbines around England, partly for technical reasons - nuclear power is more efficient - but also on aesthetic grounds.
In my review of his last book, The Revenge of Gaia, I was scathing about his willingness to see London flood sooner than countenance windmills. As he tucks with relish into the bloody steak (”delicious”), and as I try to make an impression on the mound of suet before me, I use a little more tact. I am puzzled, I tell him, because it seems difficult to square his predictions of calamity with an opposition to wind farms when economists are arguing we need wind farms, nuclear power and various other measures to reduce emissions.
Lovelock stands firm. ”We’ve little enough countryside left. If we are likely to be one gigantic town - which is the way things are going - we need it. I don’t like to see the countryside despoiled by wind farms, that’s all. I think it would be better to go on burning coal [as the UK’s contributions to global emissions are small].”
You get the impression that people are not too essential to Lovelock’s appreciation of the planet. This is not to say he is misanthropic - far from it. It’s just that he sees things on a different scale to most people, and in his eyes the planet can do perfectly well without us - and will do so in the future. ”We’re an enormous asset to the earth. I think that’s a thing that is forgotten. I get romantic about Gaia, it’s been around for about three and a half billion years, and only has about another half a billion to go - an ancient system, about as old as I am - and, near the end, it has produced a species which is intelligent, can communicate and can affect its own environment.”
For these reasons, he says, ”our main objective is to keep civilisation going.” We have, he estimates, about 30 years to do so. The chances are, he says, ”not very high. But, dammit, it’s worth trying”.
Taking such a long view - or ”being ridiculously old” as he puts it - enables Lovelock to remain calm in the face of the overwhelming odds. ”It’s a very grim story, but I’m not a pessimist,” he says. ”We’ve been through this many times before.” From a Gaian point of view, 20 per cent survival of the species is not at all bad. People will regroup, and the population will continue at a level more compatible with Gaia.
Blackberry-and-apple crumble arrives for both of us. A waiter leans in to pour custard over it. ”That takes me back to when I was a young ’un,” Lovelock tells him.
Part of Lovelock’s optimism springs from having experienced the second world war as a young man. ”Every man and woman in the street knew something nasty was up ahead. But the politicians just had their Munichs. Peace in our time. Many of us were sceptical, we thought something pretty awful was going to happen, but when it did happen, everybody suddenly grew happier, they found that instead of life being somewhat aimless, as it is now, they all had very positive things to do. It was very exciting. If you were young, it didn’t seem all that bad.”
But most people would regard the war as a terrible event. ”Not those who were in it,” he says. ”I think that’s the natural way to look at it from outside, with hindsight.” In Lovelock’s view, climate change ought to be treated as a new war.
Should people carry on having children, if the world that awaits them is so full of horrors? ”Oh, yes. Dash it all, if our ancestors long back faced with similar things hadn’t had children, we wouldn’t be here at all. That’s why I’m not a pessimist.”
Our crumbles are finished, and most of the human race has been obliterated. ”We’d better have a coffee,” Lovelock says, though a stiff brandy might be more in order. What would he do if he were young now, I ask? ”If I were selfish, I’d move to Canada.” (Not New Zealand, he advises, because of the pressure of population in Asia.)
He laughs again. And as we part, my mind struggling against the predictions of cataclysm, I too feel oddly cheerful.
Fiona Harvey is the FT’s environment correspondent
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Shepherd’s, London SW1
1 x steak
1 x steak and kidney pudding
2 x vegetables
2 x blackberry-and-apple crumble
2 x glass of house wine
1 x coffee
1 x tea
Total: ₤88.88
