He Knew He Was Right: The Irrepressible Life of James Lovelock and Gaia, by John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin, Allen Lane, 240 pages, $42
A curious and disturbing contradiction sits at the heart of He Knew He Was Right: The Irrepressible Life of James Lovelock and Gaia .
In part, the book is a superb piece of science writing, replete with deeply satisfying, detailed accounts of key findings of the past century that underpin the formation of James Lovelock's remarkable Gaia theory.
The theory, once hotly controversial and now widely accepted across scientific disciplines, is that the Earth's living and non-living components work together as a single system to keep the planet's conditions suitable for life. Lovelock developed it in the 1970s, published it in 1979 and defended it until the mid-1980s when it ceased being heretical.
Gaia stood in contrast to prevailing hypothesis that the planet's non-living components - air, water, soil, rock, light, heat - shifted around until they somehow became conducive to life. Instead, Lovelock said, life itself helped shape the conditions that allowed it to be.
That was novel. But its implications were stunning. Central to Gaia is the idea that the planet is a self-sustaining system. When part of the system goes out of whack, others kick in to set it right.
Think of the human body (as Lovelock did) keeping its body temperature within a narrow range. It has mechanisms to cool down and heat up - including two kinds of shivering, burning calories, sweating - that it employs to keep things within the correct register.
In the planet's case, say when there's too much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, life's own processes adjust to take carbon dioxide out of the air. That could mean more activity from plankton, trees growing bigger, and a whole bag of other tricks that would work together toward the same end.
Of course, if these mechanisms fail or are thwarted, then the planet's (or indeed, the body's) imperative is to find an alternative system that it can make work, and lurch painfully into it. Then its components work together to topple the old and create the new.
In other words, a system needs to be a system and will find a way to be stable come hell or high water. Not only that, but as with any system, Gaia has critical thresholds. When those are crossed, the result is abrupt, non-linear change. In planetary terms, those have been the previous five mass extinctions of life over the past 3.5 billion years.
This matters because it helps us understand the significance of the fact that many of Earth's important chemical and biological characteristics are changing unusually rapidly right now, mainly having to do with carbon dioxide pumped into the atmosphere by the inefficient burning of fossilized plants and animals (a.k.a. fuels). There are too many molecules of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, and that is interfering with the planet's ability to control the temperature of its air and ocean and the pH balance of the ocean, among other things.
It's not that Gaia can't deal with this. As Lovelock would say, she has many times before. It's just that Gaia's ability to maintain stability is being compromised by the rapidity of the changes and, so far, there are extremely worrisome signs that she might switch into another mode altogether, one that puts life as we know it on the planet at risk. Not to mention human civilization.
So as He Knew He Was Right documents with such stirring lucidity, Lovelock developed a unifying, interdisciplinary scientific theory which, for the first time, can help humans understand the implications of what we are doing, and, theoretically, to turn back. And because it's Lovelock, a Brit trained in the best of European and North American academic and industrial labs, the science underpinning Gaia is impeccable, robust, fascinating.
And here lies the contradiction. On one hand, the book is a beautiful dissection of the complexities of Gaia and the context in which she came to be, and on the other hand, it is a disappointingly shallow and fawning biography of her brilliant inventor. So deep, complex, contextualized science about a grand holistic theory, and hagiography of the man behind it.
What a book this would have been had famed science writers John and Mary Gribbin, who tell us at the outset that they are long-time friends of Lovelock, applied their substantial skills of investigation and explanation to his story, too.
The parts about Gaia invite the reader to think big, bold, way outside the box. The parts about Saint Jim, as I unfortunately came to think of him, are stifled, caged, unsatisfactory, sieved. The deficiencies of the latter are all the worse for the brilliance of the former.
The authors resolutely refuse to give any context about the man, writing as if this were his own verbatim tale of his life with only cursory nods to any other ways of seeing him. Often, they write as his apologists, even going so far as to mention that Lovelock, nearing 90, is still bitter about such-and-such slight from decades ago and why he should be.
It's not that one wants dirt on the icon. Far from it. It's just that the book leaves the sense that it hasn't captured Lovelock, hasn't come close, and that somewhere in there is a towering figure of modern science it would have been splendid to get to know.
Alanna Mitchell's second science book, Sea Sick: The Global Ocean in Crisis, has just been published.