The Many Lives of James Lovelock | How To Academy

Wed, 30 October 2024

6:00 pm - 7:00 pm BST

The Many Lives of James Lovelock

Jonathan Watts in Conversation With Hannah MacInnes

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.

Tickets to this event are free for subscribers of How To +.

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

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Jonathan Watts

Global Environment Editor, Guardian

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.

Hannah MacInnes

Presenter, Podcaster and Host of How To Academy’s live programmes.

Hannah MacInnes is a broadcaster and journalist. Alongside hosting How To Academy’s live programmes and podcast, she presents a cultural show on Times Radio and interviews on-stage at a number of other major literary events. She is the host of The Klosters Forum Podcast series and has written for the Radio Times, the Evening Standard and TLS. Before going freelance she worked for 8 years at BBC Newsnight, as Planning Editor and as a Producer / Filmmaker.