EAt the end of 1971, the “Shackleton” crossed the Atlantic from north to south – a routine voyage to supply a British Antarctic station. On board, however, was a man who went to the bow of the ship several times a day, filled a syringe with air there and then disappeared into a cabin. There was a contraption that James Lovelock had built himself and at his own expense. With this he was able to determine the tiniest traces of a chlorofluorocarbon (CFC), which was used in spray cans at the time. He was able to prove that these substances accumulated in the entire earth’s atmosphere.
Lovelock published his findings in 1973, and a year later it was found that CFCs deplete the protective ozone layer. Lovelock was not involved in the Nobel Prize that was awarded for it in 1995. That pained him, but hardly surprised him. Born in Hertfordshire in 1919, the Briton was never part of the academic establishment. He had studied chemistry, received his doctorate with a medical thesis, and was employed at the National Institute for Medical Research in London for a while. But he mostly worked as a freelance inventor and engineer: for research institutes in the United States, for companies like Shell or Hewlett Packard and for the British secret service. For NASA he developed instruments with which planetary missions such as the two Viking probes that landed on Mars in 1976 analyze foreign atmospheres.
Both fans and opponents misunderstood him
Contact with planetary research brought the practitioner to a theoretical idea for which he soon became more famous than for his contribution to the clarification of the ozone hole problem: the Gaia hypothesis. Couldn’t it be, he wondered, that the earth not only creates its biosphere, but that it reacts back on the geochemical requirements of the planet’s habitability and thereby maintains or even optimizes them?
This idea, which has also been propagated in books since 1978, found many and many different supporters. Those looking for life in space rejoiced at the possibility of no longer having to see the terrestrial biosphere as a product of a series of cosmic coincidences. The burgeoning environmental movement loved Lovelock for his view of the Earth system as a multi-interconnected entity, and their esoteric fringes inspired the mythological name, which incidentally comes from Lovelock’s friend and writer William Golding: Gaia stood for them as an attempt to overcome what was perceived as one-sided scientific view of nature. It was overlooked that Lovelock’s view was actually primarily that of an engineer who thought in control loops. The esoteric and nature-romantic reception did not exactly help the acceptance of the idea in academic research. On the contrary, Lovelock was soon accused of anti-Darwinist activities, and in 2009 an American paleontologist published an anti-Lovelock entitled “The Medea Hypothesis”.
For Bruno Latour he is the new Galileo
More recently, support has grown again after Lovelock’s followers among geoscientists showed how Gaia and Darwinian evolutionary biology can be thought of together. More recently, the Gaia hypothesis has also found its way into thinking about humans as a factor in natural history in the Anthropocene. In particular, the philosopher Bruno Latour refers to James Lovelock, whose importance for a new view of the earth and the history of the earth he even compared to Galileo Galilei’s for the implementation of the heliocentric worldview.
Lovelock himself did not take part in such flights of fancy. He was always very interested in nature – like his compatriot JRR Tolkien, he lamented the destruction of the landscape in his native southern England – but he was and remained a technology optimist who, to the horror of some of his supporters, firmly advocated the use of nuclear energy. Otherwise, he reckoned that Gaia, the self-regulating planetary system, would also cope with man-made climate change and other environmental degradation—with or without us. Because Gaia is about life, not about the survival of a certain life form.
In his last book in 2019 he even thought about whether Gaia’s reaction to the destruction of the environment by humans could not consist in replacing it with its own technology. Machines and computers could inherit us. Organic life, including us, would then be tolerated, like we let weeds proliferate on railway embankments today, but would no longer be an optimization goal. “We have played our part,” Lovelock writes calmly, and “just as we will not mourn the extinction of our ancestor species, so will cyborgs not mourn when we humans die out.” James Lovelock died at his home in Dorset on Tuesday. It was his 103rd birthday.