On James Lovelock, Carl Sagan’s Office Mate at NASA

This post is an assignment from the Writing course I took during my Q4 2021 sabbatical. While I discovered Lovelock years and years ago, it was only in 2019 in preparing to read at the wedding of my great friend Pierre in Brittany that I got to know Carl Sagan. It was funny to learn that they were office mates at NASA…

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The words Revenge of Gaia stared back at me. An ominous dark book cover, brightened with a picture of planet earth from space – the Earth Rise image I think. It was 2007 and I was standing in the cavernous Waterstones bookshop in central London, back ‘home’ after two years in Australia studying environmental management and climate change economics.

Asked this week about a thinker I admire, the name James Lovelock lit up in my head. It was odd, since I had not had a thought about this person for a long time,

Why James Lovelock?

I indulged for a few minutes in a moment of memory. 2007 was a period when I was going deep on environmental policy and science reading, first stumbling on Lovelock’s writing, trying to understand my own perspective on climate change and how to bring the field into my work in investments.

If you’re not British and you’re not a follower of science, you would be forgiven for not being familiar with James Lovelock – an independent scientist, an environmentalist and a futurist per Wikipedia who The Independent called ‘the most influential scientist and writer since Charles Darwin’.

You may have heard of Carl Sagan, though?

Sagan was a Pulitzer prize-winning American astronomer and planetary scientist whose work in popular science writing explored extra-terrestrial life among other areas. Sagan is perhaps most widely known for the “Look again at that dot” quotation from his 1997 book Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of The Human Future in Space. I had the great privilege of reading this passage at the wedding of Pierre and Isabelle Le Leannec in a stunning small chapel in Brittany in May 2019.

These two men sat side by side in the Jet Propulsion Lab at NASA in 1965. Can you imagine the ‘leaning back in your chair’ scientist-banter between the preened southern English and the blockier, Brooklynian-American accent? Cruelly, Sagan’s life was cut short by illness in his sixties.

Lovelock’s arc of work has continued, with an extraordinary longevity. He was 86 when he wrote The Revenge of Gaia and in 2020 released his latest assessment of the future, which turns up the dial on his optimism – called Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence. The Revenge of Gaia was a captivating and influential book for me back in 2007, a nicely written dissection of the complexity of the atmosphere and the realities of our energy system and how quickly we can shift this. I had found Lovelock to be insightful, persuasive and pragmatic.

Born in 1919, Lovelock’s work in the field of science started during the second World War. His family could not afford putting him through a University degree and so the young Lovelock studied Chemistry during the evenings (and has retained a questioning of the efficacy of the education system since). He worked in London during the day before his scientific career started with practical research, at the National Institute for Medical Research. Lovelock’s subsequent decades of practical scientific discoveries seems to have always been playing with the future. His post-PhD work on cryopreservation experiments led to his development of an instrument for gently warming frozen hamsters. Wikipedia states that this tinkering was ahead of anyone else’s innovation in microwave heat generation, though Lovelock’s ambition was larger than the microwave oven. It was in 1957 that Lovelock made his most critical invention for the development of atmospheric science, called the Electron Capture Detector – a small device used to measure atoms and molecules in gases to the precision of a part per trillion. The device came to the attention of NASA and first helped the detection of the widespread presence of chloroflurocarbons (the compounds used in refrigeration and other industrial and domestic applications) in the atmosphere. With their dramatically growing use in industrial and domestic refrigeration processes, these compounds were breaking down the layer of ozone gas (O3) in the atmosphere that impedes the wavelength of UV radiation. Now phased out courtesy of the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the Ozone “hole” is measured to be repairing gradually at present.

In the Revenge of Gaia – Gaia being a reference to the greek goddess of nature – Lovelock posits that the Earth functions as a self-regulating system, continuously adapting to keep itself in a steady balance. More simply said, the atmosphere, land, oceans and surface of earth’s crust are all interacting in their chemistry and continually adjusting and adapting to maintain a healthy steady state. This would seem common sense to me, from a basic understanding of nature and ecology, though allows for both optimism and pessimism as to how the anthropocene will play out. (The anthropocene being the current – since industrial revolution – geological era in which humans are significantly impacting the planet (the last 300 years).

Revenge of Gaia shares an insight into the arc of Lovelock’s career, as well as an accessible explanation of climate and ecosystem science basics. I perhaps most enjoyed Lovelock’s insights into non-fossil energy alternatives and the demonization of nuclear, despite being the cleanest form of energy with overblown attention to remote risks. You just don’t hear this too often in environmental circles given the Chernobyl and Fukushima disasters and the ugly and longevity of nuclear reactor waste.

I observe Lovelock to be an environmentalist in passion, deep knowledge and curiosity. Lovelock’s pragmatism, and long life of observing and understanding how humans tend to behave runs over the top of ‘purist’ green ideologies – that I appreciate but fear will not yield results. While it’s no fun to agree with Lovelock’s viewpoint that “we’re yet evolved to the point where we’re clever enough to handle a complex a situation as climate change”, I would place a healthy wager that he is right (see our emissions reductions efforts to date please, if you disagree).

Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence is adored by some and highly criticized by others, per all of Lovelock’s work it seems. But can we applaud him for the deep curiosity and far-ranging thinking still emerging while writing in his late 90s? Undoubtedly his last book, Novacene suggests that existing artificial intelligence systems will create intelligent beings that accompany us in solving the planetary crisis. The tribe of futurist and creative scientist will typically be persuaded by his contrarian and far-reaching thought over the ideological “dark green”. Novacene intrigued and I ‘one-clicked’ on a copy this week, so excited to have James Lovelock come back to mind when asked about a great thinker I admired.

I told a friend about this piece, and he asked me “Why is someone so old writing about something so new?”. I found a clue in an interview with the BBC around the time of Lovelock’s 100th birthday, in which he referred to his optimism as a phenomenon.  Regardless of what you think of Lovelock, isn’t the phenomenon of optimism worth working on to enjoy our days on this planet and to keep a healthy perspective on living lightly to help its fate?

“When I passed 100, I thought nothing but downhill now to the dust heap…it’s quite the opposite.” 

I’ll buy that, as a way to live, on top of a lifetime of a deeply curious mind.

Keep asking, thinking and writing, James Lovelock!

Sources to learn more about James Lovelock

Featured image by Sergio Souza on Unsplash