Science can still be a vocation, not just a career. Something that can even be done at home.

From Resurgence Issue 187

SCIENCE HAS BEEN MY lifelong passion. It started when I was a child growing up in the South London district of Brixton. I got to know and love science by visits to the Science and Natural History Museums and from books lent by my local library. At first I read the science fiction of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne but soon my thirst for knowledge about science led me to textbooks on astronomy, chemistry and physics.

London was then a dense city and was surrounded by deep lush countryside. At weekends my father would take me by train or by tram into the hills just south of the city. Here we walked and here I grew to know and love the natural world. My father was a true countryman and although poorly educated was intelligent and curious. He knew the common names of almost every species of plant, animal or insect we encountered. I learnt from him a respect for living things. He had the mind of an ecologist and recognized the interconnection between the plants and insects.

By the time I reached puberty my one wish was to spend the rest of my life as a scientist and so begin to understand the natural world. Of course, to achieve this ambition I knew that I would have to submit to a long and tedious education. In the 1930s there was no chance of diving straight in as an apprentice. Faraday did it in the previous century but it was no longer possible. To become a scientist without becoming at least a university graduate was as unthinkable as practising medicine without a medical degree. With thoughts like these in his mind my headmaster told me when I left school, ‘‘You are a fool, Lovelock, to take up science as a career. It is only for those with genius or those with sufficient wealth to achieve a university education. You have neither of these and when you come to marry you will realize that you have chosen a way of life that will never support a wife and family.’’

These harsh words were well meant at the time, which was near the end of the 1930 great depression. Graduate chemists were being hired by some companies at zero salary on the grounds that they were gaining industrial experience. The reason I am here now and not spending my last years in poverty is that my childhood had prepared me for the opportunities when they came.

My first employment on leaving school was with a firm of consulting chemists in London. I chose them because the work was interesting and challenging. The firm, called Murray, Bull and Spencer, was run by a pair of academics from London University. Their field was organic chemistry and photochemistry; they specialized in solving problems for the photographic industry and indeed for anyone who sought their services. They took boys straight from school and trained them to be technicians. They warned that there was no future for me in their firm. Humphrey Murray, the principal, was quite open about this, but redeemed what would now seem a heartless attitude by paying for his apprentices to attend London University as evening class students. He made it clear that there were no jobs for graduates in the firm and that as soon as I had my degree I must leave.

More important for me than the formal education was his personal insistence that the analyses I did were serious and not student experiments to emphasize a point of teaching. I grew to regard accuracy in measurement as almost sacred. As Humphrey Murray frequently told me, lives and jobs can depend on the right answer. It was so different from the university laboratory where students are taught that understanding the experiment is more important than mere technical competence. The hands-on experience I gathered as an apprentice to this wise man was a priceless gift that has served throughout my life as a scientist.

MY SECOND OPPORTUNITY came in 1939 when war was declared and all London colleges, including my evening class college, were closed. I was offered a scholarship on the results of my first year at the London College. This allowed me to enrol for the second two years of my degree as a full-time student at Manchester University. Here, the professor of chemistry was Alexander Todd, probably the best chemist in the uk. He was also a young man in his thirties, full of idealism and a fine professor to his students. He also treated us like apprentices and would spend a great deal of time talking to us personally as we worked in the laboratory.

I had an unpleasant surprise one month after starting at Manchester. I was called to the professor’s office. Todd looked at me straight in the eye and said sternly, ‘‘I will not have cheating, Lovelock.’’ I was amazed and confused but he went on to say, ‘‘Look at the results of your gravimetric analyses. You have reported exactly the concentrations of bromide ion in the two solutions you analysed. You may not know it, but students almost never get the right answer to gravimetric analyses, and certainly never twice running. There is only one possible explanation: you must have looked up the answers in the class book that the demonstrator foolishly left in the lab.’’ By then he was in full flood, telling me of my wickedness and the consequences for my career if I did not mend my evil ways. After he ran out of breath, I said, ‘‘But I didn’t cheat.’’ It took nearly thirty minutes to convince him that I was, after two years’ apprenticeship, a professional at this analysis. It was for me a routine task and one I expected to get right. The exchange left us both wondering a little what university training was really about.

After graduating as a chemist I took a job at the National Institute for Medical Research, in London. This was an élite scientific establishment where were gathered some of the best scientists in the country and here I was able to continue my apprenticeship for the next twenty years.

Until the 1950s it was usual for scientists to make or at least design their own instruments. Most laboratories then had a workshop with metal-working tools, lathes and milling machines, and scientists were expected to be able to use them. Electronic devices were made by hand using thermionic vacuum tubes manufactured for use in radio and sound equipment. Because we made our own equipment we understood its limitations and capabilities. Such insight is denied most scientists today who use commercial instruments without understanding what goes on inside the decorous case of their chromatograph, spectrometer or other device. The greatest advantage to come from making one’s own apparatus is that sometimes it is an invention whose novelty makes it years in advance of anything available in the marketplace.

At the National Institute it was the tradition never to read the literature, especially textbooks, before doing an experiment. Senior scientists warned that our job was to make the literature, not read it. It was a recipe that worked well for me. Had I read the literature of ionization phenomena in gases, before doing my experiments, I would have been hopelessly discouraged and confused. Instead, I did some experiments. Fortunately we were not hampered, like now, by a well-intentioned but hindering health and safety bureaucracy. Scientists who used dangerous chemicals or radioactive materials were expected to be personally responsible. There was some risk but I doubt if, under the stifling restrictions of today, I would have had the persistence to carry on with so uncertain a project as the infant Electron Capture Detector (ecd).

My first detector was a simple cylindrical ion chamber, about two millilitres in volume and contained a one billion Bequerel strontium 90 source of beta radiation. I remember bending the stiff and fiercely radioactive foil behind a sheet of thick glass until it fitted the detector cavity. Once enclosed, it was made safe by the thick metal walls of the detector. In the middle of the cavity was a small collecting electrode, connected to a home-made electrometer. The chamber was polarized by connecting the outer case to a voltage source. At that time Poly-tetrafluoroethylene was not available and we used an automobile spark-plug as the insulator that held the anode. The electrometer was quite literally home-made — it used a pair of vacuum tubes in a balanced cathode follower circuit and I made it on our kitchen table. I purchased the electronic components from suppliers of surplus equipment.

I was fascinated by the strange behaviour of the infant ecd but a full investigation of its scientific basis was far from that of the problem I was expected to work on. It says much about the quality of the Director of the Institute that I was allowed to spend any time on it at all. The physics of thermal energy electrons was hardly what the physicians running the Medical Research Council expected of me. I recall asking Sir Charles Harington, ‘‘Can I spend some of my time finding out how the Electron Capture Detector works?’’ I added, ‘‘There is no certainty that it will be of practical use but to me it is fascinating science.’’ He replied, ‘‘I am happy to leave it entirely to your own judgement. This is a scientific Institute and so long as what you do is good science I am not much concerned about whether or not it has an immediate medical value.’’

While I was improving and trying to understand the mechanism of detection by electron capture, serious scientists were applying the detector to the practical analysis of pesticide residues in foodstuffs. In the usa, Watts and Klein of the Food and Drugs Administration (fda), and in the uk Goulden and his colleagues at Shell, together established the base data about pesticide residues. This basic information about the distribution of halogenated pesticides soon became the hard facts of the environmental movement. When it was realized that pesticides like ddt and Dieldrin were distributed throughout the global environment, when it was shown that they were in the fat of Antarctic penguins and in the milk of nursing mothers in Finland, there was recognition that pollution was no longer just a local problem; we humans were affecting the environment on a global scale. The data about the distribution of pesticides and their poisonous effect on birds of prey led Rachel Carson to write her seminal book, Silent Spring — a book that warned the world of the ultimate consequences if these chemicals continued to be used by farmers in their unceasing battle against all forms of life that are not livestock or crops. It was a book that was bound to affect the course of politics and in many parts of the world her gloomy forecast of a silent spring has come true. Not as she predicted by pesticide poisoning alone but simply by habitat destruction.

When I first heard that the electron capture detector was being used this way, I was delighted. I shared with Rachel Carson her concern over damage to natural ecosystems. Some parts of the chemical industry reacted in a shameful and foolish way by trying to discredit her as a person. It did not work; in fact it made Rachel Carson the first saint and martyr for the infant and innocent Green movement. All seemed set for the Green movement to lead us into a seemly and sensible way of living with the natural world. As you know, it did not happen like this. Sadly, the environmental agenda has had to proceed at the normal slow pace of human politics.

IN APRIL 1961 I RECEIVED a letter from Dr. Silberstein, Director of Space Flight Operations for nasa. It was an invitation to join with them in their exploration of the moon. We have to remember that in 1961 space flight was barely a few years old. Many scientists still looked on it as fanciful and a waste of time and money. To me, who had grown up on science fiction, the invitation was like a dream come true. I shall never forget sitting with American colleagues around a table at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (jpl) in California discussing how best to analyse the surface of the moon. We then went on to consider practical details of the instruments that were going to be sent there on rockets. I had to pinch myself to confirm that it was not all a dream.

Soon, though, lunar exploration became commonplace, and the new excitement was in planning an automated laboratory to send to Mars. With the Moon the question was, is it safe for astronauts to walk on its surface? With Mars the question was, is life there? In the early 1960s not much was known about Mars. Its surface was poorly visible through telescopes and it was easy to imagine that the seasonal wave of darkening that moved across the planet was due to the growth of vegetation.

My colleagues at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and in American universities were all busy designing instruments to test for life or lifelike chemicals on the Martian surface. And they were trying to put into practice in an automated form the very procedures that they were familiar with in their own laboratories here on Earth. Some of these experiments involved applying Martian soil to culture media to see if organisms would grow; others looked for metabolism to see if oxygen was produced in sunlight, or CO2 in the dark. I found this detailed reductionist approach to life detection for Mars unconvincing. It could fail to detect the presence of life for many reasons. It might not be bacterial, the experiment might land at a barren site — or Martian biochemistry might be different. I suggested a more general experiment, such as a top-down view of the whole planet instead of a local search at the site of landing. The experiment I proposed was simply to analyse the chemical composition of the Martian atmosphere.

If the planet were lifeless, then it would be expected to have an atmosphere determined by physics and chemistry alone and be close to the chemical equilibrium state. But if the planet bore life, organisms at the surface would be obliged to use the atmosphere as a source of raw materials and as a depository for wastes. Such a use of the atmosphere would change its chemical composition. It would depart from equilibrium in a way that would show the presence of life.

Dian Hitchcock joined me then and together we examined atmospheric evidence from the infrared astronomy of Mars. We compared this evidence with that available about the sources and sinks of the gases in the atmosphere of the one planet we knew bore life, Earth. We found an astonishing difference between the two atmospheres. Mars was close to chemical equilibrium and dominated by carbon dioxide, but the Earth was in a state of deep chemical disequilibrium. In our atmosphere carbon dioxide is a mere trace gas. The coexistence of abundant oxygen with methane and other reactive gases, is a condition that would be impossible on a lifeless planet. Even the abundant nitrogen and water are difficult to explain by geochemistry. No such anomalies are present in the atmospheres of Mars or Venus; their existence in the Earth’s atmosphere signals the presence of living organisms at the surface. Sadly, we concluded, Mars was probably lifeless.

The first sight of the Earth from space as a dappled white and blue sphere filled our minds with wonder and delight. We saw, for the first time, how beautiful it was and began to regard it as an icon like those of the great religions. In a similar way the top-down view of atmospheric chemistry gathered at jpl was for me, in scientific terms, a revelation of the Earth. The analysis revealed the atmosphere as a gas mixture like that of the intake manifold of an internal combustion engine: oxygen and combustible gases mixed. Different from the exhausted, carbon-dioxide-dominated atmospheres of Mars and Venus. Much more than this, I knew that the chemical composition of the atmosphere was stable for long periods compared with the residence times of its gases. One afternoon in 1965 at the jpl in California, when thinking about these facts, the thought came to me in a flash that such constancy required the existence of an active control system.

Then, I lacked any idea of the nature of the control system, except that the organisms on the Earth’s surface were part of it. I learnt from astrophysicists that stars increase their heat output as they age and that our Sun has grown in luminosity by 25% since life began. I realized that, in the long term, climate also might be actively regulated. The notion of a control system involving the whole planet and the life upon it was now firmly established in my mind. Sometime near the end of the 1960s I discussed this idea with my near neighbour, the novelist William Golding. He suggested the name Gaia as the only one appropriate for so powerful an entity.

I FIRST STATED THE Gaia hypothesis in 1972, in the journal Atmospheric Environment. My proposal was ‘‘The biosphere interacts actively with the environment so as to hold it at an optimum of its own choosing.’’ The proposal was based on arguments drawn from the atmospheric chemistry of the Earth and Mars. Soon after, I began a collaboration and friendship with the biologist Lynn Margulis that has continued to this day. Lynn, from her wide knowledge and deep understanding of organisms — especially micro-organisms, put flesh on the bare bones of my physical chemistry. We restated the hypothesis as ‘‘The Earth’s atmosphere is regulated by life on the surface so that the probability of growth of the entire biosphere is maximized.’’

I now realize that both statements were misleading. Worse, enthusiasts of the idea began to speak of the Earth as a living organism — not as we said, ‘‘The Earth behaves like a living organism.’’ These misunderstandings led to heavy criticism from biologists, which still persists twenty-five years later. Sharpened by these criticisms, the Gaia Hypothesis evolved. Now it can be stated as the theory of an evolving system: a system made from the living organisms of the Earth and from their material environment, the two parts tightly coupled and indivisible. This evolutionary theory views the self-regulation of climate and chemical composition as emergent properties of the system.

This is not a new theory of evolution. Leonardo da Vinci in 1690 and James Hutton in 1788 both intuited it and saw the Earth as a super-organism whose proper study was by physiology. Alfred Lotka also expressed it in 1925 when he clearly stated that the evolution of the organisms could not be separated from the evolution of their physical environment. Vladimir Vernadsky and G. E. Hutchinson were close to its expression in the middle of this century. Gaia theory is not contrary to Darwin’s great vision. The new theory couples the evolution of the organisms by natural selection with the evolution of their material environment.

My colleague Andrew Watson succinctly expressed the step that distinguishes Gaia theory from previous evolutionary theories. He did so in a debate before the Linnaean Society in December 1989. It lies in the tightness of the coupling between the organisms and their physical environment. Almost everyone, he observed, now accepts that life profoundly influences the environment: this is now the conventional wisdom among geochemists, and a considerable change from their view pre-Gaia. It is equally obvious, he continues, that life is influenced by and adapts to the environment. This is the older wisdom that has prevailed throughout this century. Therefore, he says, life and the environment are a coupled feedback system, where changes in one element will affect the other and this may in turn feed back on the original change. The real debate then is how important and how tight is the coupling? Does it, as we believe, confer new properties on the system, such as enhanced stability or behaviour like a living organism?

GAIA ASSERTS THAT this close coupling of organisms and their environment is strong enough to have greatly influenced the way in which the life-environment system on Earth and on other planets with life has evolved. It is strong enough that we will not properly understand Earth history until we think of the system as just that, a whole system, and stop trying to understand its parts in isolation from one another. Gaia theory is testable and is developing normally in the Earth sciences and in time will either be accepted or rejected on the evidence.

Among the insights that come from a Gaian approach is that planetary life can never be sparse. A planet with sparse life could never self-regulate. We should keep this in mind as we destroy the natural ecosystems of the Earth to provide farmland for ourselves. The geophysical and geochemical evolution of the terrestrial planets is progressive and towards states like those of Mars and Venus now. During this evolution there will be a period when conditions are favourable for life. This is a window of opportunity and in it organisms must reach a sufficient abundance to affect and couple with geochemical evolution. If they fail, planetary conditions will continue to change inorganically until the point is reached when life is impossible, as it is now on Mars and Venus.

Thinking about Gaia led me to explore the natural world. I was curious to know how elements like sulphur and iodine, which are scarce on the land surface but plentiful in the oceans, are transferred back from the sea to the land in sufficient quantities to keep the land fertile.

The opportunity to start exploring came in 1968 when we purchased a holiday cottage in far western Ireland on the shores of Bantry Bay. It was sited on the slopes of Hungry Hill, a small mountain of warm sandstone slabs made famous in the book of that name by Daphne du Maurier. It looked out over the broad Atlantic. Here, during walks along the beach, we collected the different species of macro-algae — seaweed. We put the specimens into empty jars and later examined their volatile emissions, using a simple gas chromatograph. I knew from earlier research by Haas, Challenger and the Japanese scientist, Ishida, that algae emitted dimethyl sulphide (dms). I was astonished to find that methyl iodide was also emitted by most of the large algae, although the long straps of laminaria were the richest source. Methyl iodide is toxic and carcinogenic, and quite unexpected outside the laboratory of an organic chemist. So is bromoform, another unlikely product of ocean organisms found in the northern oceans by Elizabet Fogelquist.

Summer holidays at Adrigole led serendipitously to another discovery about atmospheric sulphur and halocarbons. On days when the air drifted from the East, from Europe, it became hazy and the visibility range fell from over fifty kilometres to less than one kilometre. I wondered if we were seeing a polluted air mass that had travelled intact more than 1,000 kilometres to western Ireland.

I had the idea that it should be possible to decide if the haze was a natural phenomenon, or was Man-made, by measuring the level of chlorofluorocarbons (cfcs), the aerosol-propellant gases in it. The cfcs are unique among chemicals in the atmosphere in being unequivocally of industrial origin. Other chemicals have both natural as well as Man-made sources. My idea was that if the haze was pollution, it would come from an urban industrial area and in it there would be more of these cfcs than in clean Atlantic air. On the first few days of our holiday the air was sparkling clear, and I was surprised to find a small but easily measurable quantity, 50 parts per trillion (ppt) of F11 in the air. A few days later, the wind shifted and an easterly drift of air blew from Europe. With it came the haze and the confirmation of my idea about the origin of the smog, for in the hazy air there was 150 ppt of F11, three times as much as in the clear air. So the haze was Man-made. Later investigations showed it to be photochemical smog, rich in ozone and to have come from southern France and Italy, having drifted in the wind nearly 1,000 miles, carrying the exhaust fumes of the millions of cars of European holiday- makers.

There this small investigation might have ended, but being curious and having no employer to tell me what I should be doing, I wondered about the 50 ppt of cfcs in the clean Atlantic air. Had it drifted across the Atlantic from America or, more excitingly, were the cfcs accumulating in the Earth’s atmosphere without any means for their removal? To find out, the only thing to do would be to travel by ship to the southern hemisphere and back, and measure the cfcs as the ship travelled across the world. I had another reason to make the voyage: I wanted to know if there were molecular species of the elements sulphur and iodine, released from the oceans in sufficient quantities to account for the rate of mass transfer of these elemental cycles. I tried for grant support to make these investigations but without success. Being an independent, the lack of support was not a deterrent, and my wife agreed to support the expedition from our housekeeping budget.

The apparatus I used was so simple I was able to make it in a few days. It ran without failure throughout the six-month voyage on the Shackleton. The total cost of the research, including the apparatus, was a few hundred pounds. But the discoveries of the voyage required three Nature papers for their publication.

This journey of research revealed the global presence of the chlorofluorocarbons, carbon tetrachloride and methyl chloroform. Also the unexpected presence of methyl iodide, dimethyl sulphide and carbon disulphide. It now seems that the environmental significance of these sulphur emissions may be as important as is that of the cfcs.

Sherry Rowland and Mario Molina used my data in their historic Nature paper. They made public their concern about the potential of the cfcs to deplete stratospheric ozone. At first I was sceptical. I did not doubt the excellence of the science, or the validity of the hypothesis that the cfcs would accumulate and become an ever-increasing source of stratospheric chlorine. Nor did I doubt that this chlorine would react with and deplete ozone. Indeed, in 1974 I took samples of stratospheric air and was able to confirm the Rowland Molina hypothesis that the stratosphere was a sink for the cfcs. What I did doubt was that the 50 ppt of F11, and the 80 ppt of F12, in the air in the mid 1970s were, at that time, a significant threat.

It is normal in science for new hypotheses to have a hard time — as I well knew from the opposition to the Gaia hypothesis. At the time, it seemed that monitoring, not a ban, was needed. Looking back, I realize I was wrong to oppose an early ban on the release of cfcs to the atmosphere. I underestimated the time needed for the international understanding that led to the Montreal agreement on the cfcs.
In 1978 our holiday cottage at Adrigole became the site of the first station of what was to become the gage global monitoring network. I showed that a conventional laboratory gas chromatograph equipped with an ecd could be used to monitor cfcs automatically. I used a Hewlett Packard model, which ran without problems for a year. Our neighbour, Mr. O’Sullivan, looked after the instrument. The success of this trial run led to the establishment of a network of five monitoring stations in Barbados, Oregon, Samoa, Tasmania and Adrigole. These have successfully monitored the atmosphere ever since. From the results the probable atmospheric lifetimes of the cfcs have been calculated.

The monitoring of the cfcs raised the need for accurate measurements. Up until then the difficulties of analysis by electron capture were dismissed with the thought that there are no bad instruments, only bad analysts. In other words, however unusual the relationship between sample size and signal, careful calibration can always get results. But calibration with a gas at a concentration of a few parts per trillion is easier said than done.

My personal solution to this problem was twofold. First I calculated from first principles the number of electrons that had reacted with fluorocarbon in the detector. This provided an absolute analysis and calibration was not needed. I was fairly sure that this method would not be in error by more than 20%. It turned out later to be only 5% in error. At the time, other scientists were sceptical of my coulometric analyses. So my second step was to move my home and laboratory to a remote country region close to the Atlantic Ocean. Here I converted a barn into a 50-m3 exponential dilution chamber. This chamber verified the secondary standards used in the first years of global monitoring. For the fluorocarbons, at least the analysis by electron capture detector is now tamed. Both calibration in the chamber and coulometry agree, and with absolute accuracies of 5% and at a precision of 0.5%. Weiss with consummate professionalism has now carried these analyses to an accuracy of better than 1%.

Liss and Slater, in 1974, used the Shackleton data to estimate the flux of dms and halocarbons from the sea to the air and vice-versa. Later in the 1970s the German scientist, Andi Andreae, made a series of careful and accurate measurements of the dms abundance in both the air and the seawater over many parts of the world. Most of our knowledge of the distribution of this gas now is thanks to this careful research. My search for dms was inspired by Gaia theory. I wanted evidence for or against the self-regulation of the sulphur and iodine cycles by some process involving the biota. The very idea was strongly resisted by some scientists who saw it, I think wrongly, as anti-Darwinian.

Happily, interest in dms was not stopped by doctrinal arguments of this kind. In 1986 I was invited to spend a month at the University of Washington in Seattle. While there I spent some time with Robert Charlson who was interested in the significance of cloud condensation nuclei (ccn) in the atmosphere. These are, for the most part, especially over the open oceans, tiny droplets of sulphuric acid and its ammonium salts. I asked him why he was so interested in them, and his reply astonished me. Without the ccn, he said, there could be no clouds. Of course, I knew that small droplets of pure water will always have a higher equilibrium vapour pressure than larger droplets. I had never put together in my mind the obvious fact that natural selection among cloud droplets would leave only the larger ones which would rapidly fall out from the air as rain. In other words, without the nuclei there could be no clouds as we now know them. At first I protested that there are surely always enough sea salt and other water soluble particles floating in the atmosphere to act as nuclei.
Dr. Charlson explained to me that for the greater part of the Earth’s surface, that is to say over the open oceans, the numbers of sea salt particles are too small to account for the abundance of ccns. There were sufficient droplets of sulphuric acid and ammonium sulphate but there was no way that these could have come from either industrial or volcanic sources. Where did they come from? Such particles cannot travel far over the ocean, which means that they must be produced locally.

It was one of those happy moments in science when truth suddenly dawns. The atmospheric oxidation of dms could be the answer. We moved on to discuss these ideas with Andi Andreae, who knew much more about the abundance of dms in the atmosphere than we did. Our conclusions were published in a paper in Nature in 1987.
My interest in Gaia led me to seek mechanisms for climate control. Together with Whitfield and Watson in 1983, I had proposed the pump-down of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere by biologically accelerated rock-weathering as one possible mechanism. I wondered if the association between ocean algae, clouds and climate could provide another. At first it did not look like a promising candidate, but there is now strong evidence for the link between algae, clouds and climate. Kump and I showed in 1995 that this is most evident in the cooler parts of the world where the sea temperature is less than twelve degrees C. So complex is the connection between cloudiness and climate that it will take time to resolve. The vigour of the debate and the world-wide research interest in dms seem to me to indicate the value of Gaia as a different way to view the world. Whether or not it is a fact seems less important.

I hope that I have shown that science can still be a vocation, not just a career. Something that can even be done at home, in the way an artist or novelist works. Doing environmental science this way and with walks through the countryside and on the seashore has kept me in touch with the natural world. I have tried to show how the ecd influenced the development of the environmental movement and how this simple detector has taken me literally around the world in search of new information.  •

The above is extracted from the acceptance speech given at the Blue Planet Prize award ceremony held in Tokyo on 29th October 1997. Two Blue Planet Prizes are given by the Asahi Glass Foundation each year. The winners receive 50 million yen each.

James Lovelock’s latest book is Gaia, the Practical Science of Planetary Medicine (Gaia Books, £16.99).

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