Homage to Gaia (45 page)

We decided to put our ideas in print as an article in
Nature.
We sought the help of Bob’s graduate student, Steven Warren, and the eminent geochemist, Andi Andreae, who knew more than anyone else about the DMS emissions from the oceans. Moreover, the editor of
Nature
at that time, John Maddox, had written to me to express his regret that
Natur
e
had
turned down the Daisyworld paper. He invited me to send the next Gaia paper to him personally. I sent our paper to
Nature
with
a covering letter to the editor marked ‘Personal’. True to his word, after a proper round of peer review, the journal published our paper as a lead article. I consider it one of the most important scientific papers I have participated in. So did the scientific community, for two years later, they awarded the four of us the Norbert Gerbier Prize of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). This paper was the turning point for Gaian fortunes, and has started a
scientific enterprise linking algae to the climate and chemistry of the atmosphere that must now employ hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists worldwide.

It was natural for me to think that the success of the cloud algae research would make Gaia a respectable name in science, but the conference held in San Diego in March 1988 by the American Geophysical Union soon dispelled this illusion. The distinguished climatologist, Stephen Schneider, and the MIT professor, Penelope Boston organized this meeting on Gaia against considerable opposition from conventionally minded geophysicists who thought that to hold such a meeting would bring disrepute to the society. Naïvely, I saw their conference as a wonderful opportunity to establish the scientific respectability of Gaia. I spent many weeks putting all I knew, as succinctly as possible, into my paper ‘Geophysiology—the Science of Gaia’ and was given the opportunity to open the meeting. They heard my paper almost without comment. Lynn and Greg Hinkel followed it with a paper entitled ‘The biota and Gaia: 150 years of support for environmental science’. Lynn and I had by now established a double act in which she argued from biology and I argued from physical chemistry. The audience listened politely but said little. Then came David Abraham’s moving philosophical paper, and a long run of papers which had little to do with Gaia directly. There were some good sound criticisms by Ken Caldiera and Dick Holland, but most speakers chose a topic connected with their own work.

One delegate, my friend Ann Henderson-Sellers commented: ‘This meeting is like the parable of the three monkeys. One sees no Gaia, one hears no Gaia, and one says no Gaia.’ This went on until the session on Wednesday evening when a young physicist, James Kirchner, gave his talk ‘The Gaia Hypotheses: are they testable? Are they useful?’ In the manner of a skilled barrister he took selected quotes from my early papers and from my first book. He ignored their context and used the quotes to ridicule and diminish Gaia theory. He ignored entirely the paper I had just given at the meeting. I listened with growing chagrin as he proceeded with forensic skill to dissect, sterilize and destroy the separated parts of Gaia. I should have risen and replied vigorously, by arguing that Kirchner’s arguments were sophistry, not science, and that Gaia can only be considered as a whole system, but I am not a natural debater. All I could do when I went to the lectern to reply was to congratulate him on his skill and ask for time to think before I replied. James Kirchner’s was by far the
best presented speech, and so strongly influenced the meeting that, from then on, few took Gaia seriously. Richard Kerr, writing in
Science,
shared Penelope Boston’s view that the jury was still out, but D Lindley, a staff writer for
Nature,
confirmed my own opinion that Kirchner’s speech carried the meeting. The organizers invited me to speak after the conference dinner and, sensing the mood, I asked, ‘Is Gaia just a spoof?’, and received a burst of laughter. I went on to say that I would be proud if one day Gaia was described as Popper had described the Theory of Evolution: merely a research programme in metaphysics. My after-dinner speech won a standing ovation, but it was for me as a good loser, sadly not for Gaia who I thought I had betrayed. You will find our speeches in the book of the meeting edited by Stephen Schneider and Penelope Boston:
Scientists
on
Gaia.
From then on scientists rarely ever spoke of Gaia, but the science of Gaia—the understanding of the Earth through geophysiology, flourished. It was the Gaia legend that languished. My memories of the San Diego meeting are sad and were made more so by a telephone call from Cynthia Garrels to tell me that her husband and my friend and supporter Bob Garrels had died.

One reason why Gaia has had a hard time is that few scientists have a proper grasp of self-regulating systems; these are often transdisciplinary and modern scientists are most often specialists. There are notable exceptions, and the first to come to mind is Christian de Duve, the Belgian biologist whose enthralling book
Vital
Dust
presents the most convincing account I have read of the events in the evolution of life starting from Earth’s primeval surface chemistry. Inventors intuitively understand self-regulation but such understanding is denied to some of our most competent analytical mathematicians. One of the first successful self-regulating devices was James Watt’s steam-engine governor. This simple device regulates the speed of an engine by means of a pair of spinning balls mounted on a vertical shaft. The rotation of the shaft causes the balls to spin out and move a lever that partially closed the valve supplying steam to the engine. If the engine went too fast, the balls swung further out and shut off the steam, if too slow they fell inwards and increased the supply of steam. It worked wonderfully well and was demonstrated at a Royal Society Conversazione in London during the 19th century. Among the audience was James Clerk Maxwell, perhaps the greatest physicist of his time. He is reported to have said three days later that he was kept awake trying to analyse mathematically Watt’s invention; he had no
doubt that it worked but analysis eluded him. If it was too difficult for Maxwell to analyse then it is hardly surprising that the more complex system Gaia is not immediately obvious to most scientists.

In October 1988 Sandy and I were in New York for the launch of my second book,
The
Ages
of
Gaia.
Ed Barber of the distinguished American publishers, WW Norton, was our host, and the Commonwealth Fund, who supported me while I wrote the book, had arranged a party to celebrate its publication. Among the guests was the United Kingdom’s permanent representative on the UN Security Council, Sir Crispin Tickell. I was delighted to meet him, for I recalled with pleasure the kind letter he had written after the publication of my first book. We tried to talk, but were frustrated by the noise of the reception and the effort of eating while trying to hold in one hand canapés and a glass of wine. We arranged to talk under quieter conditions over breakfast. Sandy and I were staying at the Algonquin, and next morning, in a quiet alcove chosen by the head waiter, we enthusiastically exchanged our ideas on climate change and Gaia. From our meeting came a lasting friendship. Sir Crispin has done more than anyone to make the idea of Gaia acceptable, especially among the powerful and influential circles in which he moves. As I mentioned earlier, TH Huxley, who did so much to establish Darwin’s science, was his great-great-grandfather. I am deeply grateful to have so staunch a friend. He told us that he would be retiring from his Ambassadorial post in the autumn and would be returning to England to become the Warden of Green College, Oxford. As Warden, he founded the Green College Centre, and so gave Oxford a global presence in environmental affairs. He also endorsed the College’s invitation to me to become an Honorary Visiting Fellow. My battles for Gaia have taught me the value of an elevated position in the very human affair of science. For this I shall always be grateful to him and to Sir John Hanson, his successor as Warden, for sustaining my Fellowship.

In the summer of 1988, the publishers Jos and David Pearson of Gaia Books asked me if I would write a book on Gaia for them. I gladly accepted their offer as the chance to put on paper my ideas about planetary medicine. It would be a book about the Earth that saw it as sufficiently alive to suffer disease and then try to understand the Earth system through the perturbations of its maladies. I gave the book the title
The
Practical
Science
of
Planetary
Medicine.
Not an exciting title but alternatives such as ‘Earth Medicine’ all seemed even
more misleading. Gaia Books published it in the United Kingdom in 1991 and it is the book that I think best expresses the practical science of Gaia. The American publishers Harmony Books issued it in the United States under the title
Healing
Gaia
because they were sure that my choice of name was wrong. It turned out that they were even more wrong and booksellers put the book on their New Age shelves along with books on astrology, aromatherapy, and the usual range of New Age topics, where it languished.

A Norwegian gentleman, Knut Kloster, gave Gaia the best chance of decent development as a unifying theory. He made a gift of £75,000, which I used to fund three international scientific meetings on Gaia in Oxford. He made the gift in unusual circumstances, and so unconditionally that I give an account of it, together with my proper thanks, in the Preface and Acknowledgements.

Sandy and I discuss plans for action in bed after a cup of tea at about 6 o’clock in the morning or sometimes we do so on a walk in the Devon countryside. It was in one of these discussions that we decided on the best way to achieve his, and our, objective of achieving scientific credibility for Gaia. We must organize and then hold a special kind of scientific meeting in a recognized scientific venue. I asked Sir Crispin Tickell, the Warden of Green College, if we could hold our meeting there. He gave enthusiastic support to the idea, but warned that we should need to share the meeting with St Anne’s College. They were close by and had ample accommodation for the delegates and a larger lecture theatre than Green College. It seemed there could be no better place to invite distinguished scientists to talk about Gaia. Among Sandy’s many talents, that of meeting organizer is supreme, and in this, the Green College Centre members, Rachel Duncan and later Susan Canney, gave their unstinted help and advice. This left me free to think of a topic and the participants for our first Oxford meeting. The topic we chose was ‘The self-regulating Earth’. This was not so Gaian as to frighten the horses, so to speak. But all of those who chose to come to it would know that it was a Gaian meeting. The model for our meeting was that of a Gordon or its German equivalent a Dahlem conference: a small, tight gathering of active scientists working in the Earth science field. We were able to gather together fifty of the world’s best scientists in this area, prepared to talk in an open way about the Earth as a self-regulating entity. It was not to be one of those cosy gatherings of the faithful; we included sceptics as well as supporters of Gaia. To our surprise and pleasure, almost all of
those we asked said they would come, and did. Knut’s gift, and an additional grant of £5,000 from Shell Research Limited, covered the cost of the meeting.

We had a strong sense that the conference had achieved its purpose. It enlightened scientists whose horizons had until then been limited by the walls of their disciplines. Many came to us afterwards and said that it had been quite different from the so-called interdisciplinary conferences where experts speak each in his own arcane jargon but no one hears, and the conference concludes with an anodyne plenary statement. Our conference did not end with an anodyne plenary session, but in the lecture hall at Green College in a heated debate. The subject was ‘Who owns Gaia: the scientists or the public?’ We had as a guest debater the eminent environmentalist Jonathon Porritt. He strongly opposed the notion that Gaia should become the property of scientists only; he felt that its value as a unifying influence was far too great. When I said, tentatively, that perhaps we should talk about Geophysiology rather than Gaia to make it more acceptable to mainstream scientists, Mae-Wan Ho, one of the participants, challenged me. She was clearly distressed at the thought that the word Gaia should be so turned down. The science journalist, Fred Pearce, reported our meeting in
New
Scientist.
The title of his article ‘Gaia, Gaia don’t go away’ says what he and many at the meeting thought. The extraordinary range of its power to inspire confirms the importance of this larger influence Gaia has provided for artists, writers, poets, painters, sculptors and musicians. Few other theories have inspired the composition of a Mass.

Students and postgraduate scientists at Oxford and from elsewhere were present at the meeting and there was little doubt that it served to restore interest in Gaian science. In the letter we sent to Knut to account for our use of his gift we said, ‘We left Oxford feeling that we had been privileged to participate in a rare event and one that would change us all and perhaps start the process of a better understanding of the Earth.’

The success of the first Oxford meeting encouraged us to organize another for April 1996. This time we hoped for a larger biological interest and chose for the title, ‘The evolution of the superorganism’. We were fortunate to have John Maynard Smith as the opening speaker. John was until a year or so before the meeting a vehement critic of Gaia. He still thinks it ‘an awful name for a theory’ and wishes that I did not refer to the Earth as living, but he was prepared to treat
it as a scientific topic and this is all we asked. John came to stay with us at Coombe Mill before the meeting and, as we talked, we realized that our differences were less about the science of Gaia than the semantics and the use of metaphor. Neo-Darwinist biologists had had their own difficult times fending off creationists, traditionalists and proponents of group selection. To John, Gaia had seemed at first just another of these false theories: the New Age religious faith in an Earth Mother was anathema to him. I am deeply grateful to John for having come and spoken at our meeting in Oxford and later for giving my successor Tim Lenton strong support in his battles with referees.