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Thursday, Jan 8, 2009
The scientist who first theorized that our planet is a biological organism, not merely a rock, discusses life on Earth and the possibilities for its future.
Aug 17, 2000 | James Lovelock is an independent atmospheric scientist who lives and works deep in the English countryside. He has a knack for making discoveries of global significance. Lovelock is the inventor of the electron capture detector, a palm-size chamber that detects man-made chemicals in minute concentrations. In the late 1950s, his detector was used to demonstrate that pesticide residues were present in virtually all species on Earth, from penguins in Antarctica to mother's milk in the United States. This provided the hard data for Rachel Carson's landmark 1962 environmental book, "The Silent Spring," which launched the international campaign to ban the pesticide DDT.
In the late 1960s, Lovelock sailed from Britain to Antarctica and with his detector discovered the ubiquitous presence of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), man-made gases now known to deplete the stratospheric ozone layer.
Today, Lovelock is best known as author of the "Gaia hypothesis," named after Gaea, Greek goddess of earth. The hypothesis states that the global ecosystem sustains and regulates itself like a biological organism rather than an inanimate entity run by the automatic and accidental processes of geology, as traditional earth science holds. In essence, Lovelock's hypothesis sees the surface of the Earth as more like a living body than a rock or a machine.
He first conceived the Gaia hypothesis while working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., in the mid-1960s, where he was designing life detection instruments for NASA's Mars Viking probes.
How, Lovelock asked himself, if he were on Mars, could he tell there was life on Earth? By the Earth's atmosphere, which defies all natural expectations. Free oxygen accounts for 20 percent of the atmosphere, when the laws of chemistry say that this highly reactive gas should combine and settle down. How fortunate for life, most of which depends on oxygen for survival.
Lovelock concluded that life -- microbes, plants and animals constantly metabolizing matter into energy, converting sunlight into nutrients, emitting and absorbing gas -- is what causes the Earth's atmosphere to be so, well, lively. By contrast, the Martian atmosphere is essentially dead, settled into a low-energy equilibrium with little or no chemical reactions. So he recommended that NASA save its money and scrub the Viking mission. Carl Sagan, his officemate, did not agree but Sagan's then wife, microbiologist Lynn Margulis, took Gaia to heart.
Lovelock and Margulis, considered coauthor of the Gaia theory, soon discovered other bits of "good fortune." Although the sun has strengthened steadily, the Earth's surface temperature has stayed comfortable for life for hundreds of millions of years. The same for oceanic salinity, which remains far below the saturation point and well below concentrations lethal to aquatic life, even though millions of tons of salt run off into the oceans and seas each year.
In 1988, the American Geophysical Union sponsored a highly controversial international scientific conference on the Gaia hypothesis in San Diego, and since then, scores of articles on Gaian science have been published in Nature, Science and other scientific journals, as have dozens of books.
Today, Margulis is one of the most honored scientists in the world; she received the President's Medal of Science in 1999. Lovelock, now 81, has gone from outsider to grand old man, receiving a slew of environmental and scientific awards and honors in the United States, Europe and Japan. He is an honorary visiting professor at Oxford University. This past June in Valencia, Spain, I caught up with him and his wife, Sandy, at the second AGU conference on the Gaia hypothesis.
Your first book, "Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth," was a bestseller, embraced by radical environmentalists, goddess worshippers and New Age philosophers -- but not scientists, most of whom dismissed your ideas. Do you think that if you had named it the "Lovelock Hypothesis," or the "Biogeochemical Hypothesis," things would have gone smoother?
Undoubtedly, though I don't regret the name Gaia for a moment. It was suggested by William Golding (Nobel Prize-winning author of "Lord of the Flies"). Gaia embraces the intuitive side of science as well as the rational. It makes the theory a personal presence, more accessible to the nonscientist. Vaclav Havel, who's considered something of an intellectual saint here in Europe, has embraced Gaia philosophically.
Still, it has been a bruising battle. I've devoted most of my working life to Gaia. Most of my research has been self-funded. I could never get a grant. No surprise, though. If you start any large theory, such as quantum mechanics, plate tectonics, evolution, it generally takes about 40 years for mainstream science to come around. Gaia has been going for only 30 years or so.
In your new book, "Homage to Gaia," which will be published this fall, you write that after first viewing photographs of Earth taken from space, you came to see our planet "as much more than just a ball of rock moistened by the oceans or a spaceship put there by a beneficent God just for the use of humankind. I saw it as a planet that has always, since its origins nearly four billion years ago, kept itself a fit home for the life that happened upon it and I thought that it did so by homeostasis, the wisdom of the body, just as you and I keep our temperature and chemistry constant." Is this still your vision of Gaia?
Yes. Life clearly does more than adapt to the Earth. It changes the Earth to its own purposes. Evolution is a tightly coupled dance, with life and the material environment as partners. From the dance emerges the entity Gaia.
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