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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 hypothesis, 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 hypothesis – a hypothesis 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.
Jonathan Watts is a journalist based in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. He is a 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.
"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
"Jonathan Watts' meticulously researched episodes of Jim's life combine to reveal the person and luminary. Just as a master portrait records much more than a visual appearance, Jim emerges like a verbal hologram from the text. For those of us who sorely miss him as a friend and colleague, it's a great comfort to know that he lives on in these pages"
– Professor Chris Rapley, UCL and former Director of the Science Museum
"A wonderful book. It captures the friend and mentor I knew. It also taught me a few things I didn't know about him"
– Tim Lenton, Professor of Earth System Science at Exeter University
"Jim Lovelock was always full of surprises – and wow, a few more pop up here! Watts's biography is deeply intimate, but also steps back to reveal how the personal details connect and build into Lovelock's huge influence on science and environmental thinking. A fascinating picture of an astonishing life"
– Richard Betts MBE, Chair in Climate Impacts, University of Exeter and Met Office Hadley Centre
