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The extraordinary life of the global figure in modern environmentalism and co-creator of Gaia Theory, as confided to award-winning journalist Jonathan Watts
Based on over eighty hours of interviews with Lovelock and unprecedented access to his personal papers and scientific archive, Jonathan Watts has written a definitive and revelatory biography of a fascinating, sometimes contradictory man.
James Lovelock is best known as the father of Gaia Theory, the idea that life on Earth is a self-sustaining system in which organisms interact with their environments to maintain a habitable ecosystem.
Lovelock’s life was a chronicle of twentieth-century science, and somehow he seemed to have a hand in much of it. During the Second World War he worked at the National Medical Research Institute, where his life-long interest in chemical tracing began. In the 1960s he worked at NASA. He worked for MI5 and MI6 during the Cold War. He was a science advisor to the oil giant Shell, who he warned as early as 1966 that fossil fuels were causing serious harm to the environment. He invented the technology that found the hole in the Ozone layer. And all of this shaped Gaia Theory – a theory that could not have been developed without the collaboration of two important women in his life.
Drawing together the many influences which shaped his life and thinking, The Many Lives of James Lovelock is a unique biography of one of the most fascinating scientists of the modern age.
“This splendid, balanced biography testifies to the pros and cons of scientific mavericks”
guardian
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“Utterly fascinating – a beautifully braided account of the life of a maverick, prophetic genius. Jonathan Watts has turned Lovelock’s greatest idea into literary form, giving us a Gaian biography in which Lovelock’s discoveries are understood as always occurring in relation – to people, to places and to the Earth itself”
Robert Macfarlane
“In this comprehensive biography, Jonathan Watts presents a well-researched chronicle of a complicated life, marked by professional success, controversy and some personal failings. Watts tells Lovelock’s story with admiration and compassion, but also with an honesty that embeds both success and failure in the complexities of being gifted, and human”
times Literary Supplement
“In his tender and searching new biography of Lovelock, based on eighty hours of interviews with his subject, Jonathan Watts, global environment editor at the Guardian, embraces this multiplicity. [ … ] If you want a rounded sense of the man, this book provides one beautifully”
economist
“An exploration of James Lovelock’s career, scientific work and personal life [that] doesn’t pull its punches … Despite covering more than a century’s worth of material, Watt’s biography is a zingy read, keeping an energetic pace without feeling superficial. Those interested in the environment, the history of science and the human drama behind scientific discoveries will all enjoy the ride”
nature
Jonathan Watts
Jonathan Watts is a journalist based in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. He is global environment editor at the Guardian and founder of the Rainforest Journalism Fund and the Amazon-centred news website sumauma.com. He has won numerous environmental and science journalism awards and is the author of When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save the World - or Destroy It.
Twitter @jonathanwatts