Father of Gaia Theory, Cold War spy, environmentalist, Shell consultant, and hopeless romantic. These are the remarkable lives of James Lovelock, as revealed by the Guardian’s Jonathan Watts.
You know James Lovelock 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.
But there is so much more to tell. During his 103 years of life, Lovelock was an employee of NASA during the 1960s, MI6’s longest serving spy and a science advisor to the oil giant Shell, whom he warned that fossil fuels were causing serious harm to the environment as early as 1966. He invented the technology that found the hole in the ozone layer.
Over the course of over eighty hours of interviews with Guardian Global Environment Editor Jonathan Watts, he shared his story, providing unprecedented access to his personal papers and scientific archive.
Now Jonathan joins us to reveal the many faces of the fascinating, sometimes contradictory man, from the laboratory to the homestead. Join us for a fascinating, deeply personal dive into one of the most important scientists of the modern age.
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Praise for The Many Lives of James Lovelock:
“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
“A superbly written, beautifully balanced insight into one of the most fascinating minds (and lives) of the twentieth century. By carefully and, at times humorously, drawing out the many colours of Lovelock’s thought and life story, we get a riveting insight into some of the forces that have shaped our world today. In so doing, the biography becomes a significant contribution to ecological thought in its own right” – Melanie Challenger, author of How to Be Animal
