Homage to Gaia (51 page)

Critics said that my first book,
Gaia,
was bad science. They were too serious-minded to notice that it was more a love letter than a textbook. It could have been written with less metaphor and made more acceptable for scientists, but it was not a carelessly written book; there is little in it that needs changing more than twenty years on. There was one mistaken statement, but that is the nature of all new theories in science. They are not born perfect; they evolve and their rough edges wear away under the grindstone of abrasive criticism. It can be painful at the time, but like good surgery is welcomed in retrospect. The problem with Gaia is the outrage I committed by putting forward so daring a theory in a book written for non-scientists. I compounded my error by writing ‘life regulates the Earth’. I should have said Gaia is made of living organisms and the material Earth and she regulates herself. It was an easy mistake to make in the beginning, and looking back it seems a small error compared with the giant mistake of my critics. They stated, with a certainty that was near to dogma, that life had nothing to do with the Earth’s apparent capacity to regulate its climate and chemistry.

About 200 yards in front of the cottage was the shoreline, reached by a narrow track that passed through the O’Sullivans’ land. In the springtime, the path wandered through gorse bushes festooned with shining golden flowers, so abundant that their honey and coconut scent filled the air. The beach was a fairyland of rocks and rock pools, interspersed with small beaches and coves. It was ideal for swimming and there were small islands just a hundred yards or so from the shore, far enough to make swimming to them an adventure. Even in August, it was a private place for the O’Sullivan family and ourselves. Such places are almost impossible to find in England or in Europe—we are so densely populated, compared with Ireland. Like the Isles of Scilly, the far south-west of Ireland has a mild winter climate where frost and snow are rare and consequently the shoreline is more diverse and different in its wildlife. I once saw a shark head a shoal of mackerel into our cove, and the water boiled as the terrified fish sought to escape.

Most of all, for me, the coast was a place rich in varieties of the large algae or seaweed. I would wander with a book, identifying the many species that were there. Because I had a gas chromatograph in the cottage, I could collect the different species of algae in jam jars and analyse the volatile compounds they emitted. I soon found the two prize performers. The long straps of
Laminaria,
looking like old-fashioned razor strops, and the fuzzy red brushes of
Polysiphonia,
which grow as epiphytes on bladder wrack. The
Laminaria
gave forth an amazing suite of volatile bromine and iodine compounds. Methyl iodide was the most abundant among them. To me as a chemist this was extraordinary and fascinating. A toxic compound and known carcinogen, something that an organic chemist would normally lock away in the fume cupboard, was here in the most natural of scenes. I soon found that almost all seawater around Adrigole had easily measurable amounts of methyl iodide in it. Later, in 1972, I was to discover that this is true of the whole of the world’s oceans. I soon found an evil-smelling chemical, something redolent of the bad side of the chemical industry, in the Adrigole seawater, namely carbon disulphide. This foul substance is a natural product and is in the oceans everywhere around the world. The most important thing I found was the copious emissions of dimethyl sulphide (DMS) from the fuzzy alga,
Polysiphonia.
It was not a new discovery—Challenger and others had noted it earlier—but for me the discovery was important because it marked the link between the life in the oceans and the great chemical and climate cycles of the atmosphere.

One of the several reasons why I regard the Green Movement with mixed vexation and affection is their obsession with the products of the chemical and nuclear industries. To many Greens, if a chemical like methyl iodide or carbon disulphide comes from some dark satanic mill, it is by nature evil, but if it comes from organically grown or natural seaweed, it must be good and healthy. To me, as a scientist, it does not matter where it comes from; I am poisoned if I eat too much of it. Strychnine or cyanide are no less poisonous if part of a plant grown naturally on an ‘organic’ farm and no more or less poisonous if synthesized in a laboratory. The most poisonous of all substances are the toxins of micro-organisms and plants: botulinus from bacteria, ricin from the castor-oil plant, and phalloidin from the toadstool,
Ammanita
phalloides,
well-called the deathcap. Bruce Ames has wisely commented that in our normal diets, whether organically grown or from intensive agriculture, natural and just as toxic
carcinogens and co-carcinogens are thousands of times more abundant than the products of the chemical industry. I do wish the Greens would grow up and forget the simplistic untruths of their student days. It is natural when young to distrust industry and the profit motive, but when we become consumers, we are all exploiting the Earth. Each one of us is as responsible for the damage done, as are the industries that supply our needs and wants. I wish that more among the Greens would turn their faces toward the real Green problem: how can we feed, house and clothe the abundant human race without destroying the habitats of the other creatures of the Earth?

Ireland in the 1970s and 1980s had tribal affairs, not environmental ones, at the top of its agenda. Despite this, we were never, while on the Beara Peninsula, subjected to dislike merely because we were English. I even recall queuing for the Sunday papers outside Murphy’s in Castletown Bearhaven and chatting with the local IRA man. I noticed with amusement that he always bought the English
Sunday
Times,
not the Irish Sunday papers. Had we chosen to buy a cottage in one of the eastern counties of Ireland near the Border, such as Monaghan or Armagh, I suspect that we would have been less welcome. There they brought up children to hate the English, even when sitting on their mother’s knee.

The tribal instinct is so strong that young men will perform apoptosis for the love of their tribe. It must be the most powerful of instincts. It can make us embrace celibacy, it can drive us to starve ourselves to death, it destroys all feeling of compassion for our enemy. He or she is no longer human, like ourselves, but a thing to be eliminated utterly without pity. I wonder if the evolutionary biologists will assert that there is a genetic basis for tribalism. Did we evolve a trait of genocide in our ancestry? What better way to enhance our genes than to kill off all members, especially the women and children, of our opponents? Then their genes are gone forever. I find this thought hard to dismiss, awful though it is, and if true, it gives a grim slant to the religious concept of original sin. The distinguished biologist, EO Wilson, began an article in the
New
York
Times
in
1993 ‘Is humanity suicidal?’ with the thought: what a pity the first intelligent animal on Earth was a tribal carnivore. My daughter Christine once brought home a foreign student from Oxford, a boring young man who had acquired anarchism as if it were an infection like measles. When we teased him, mostly for his lack of humour, by saying that we were anarchists ourselves, he replied with a sneer, ‘You English are
decadent
;
we are the only true anarchists.’ I remember this exchange with affection as the epitome of tribal thinking.

I am an island person, and my view of the human scene is coloured by experiences in and on these British Isles. The people of these islands have seen a substantial decline in their status during my lifetime: the one-time superpower is now a small island group of separate and separating small nations on the edge of Europe. Strangely, over the same period, there has been an improvement in the standard of living of the people, and nowhere more than in Ireland. I must admit that today’s ‘wonderful’ world of ‘wow’ does not fill me with enthusiasm, but I do see that people are now better off than they were when I grew up. What I dislike is the way we have traded good manners and a sense of personal responsibility for an uncritical belief in human rights and welfare. I do not whine about how much better things once were; instead, I give thanks for having lived through the most exciting and fulfilling century of human existence. In the main, things are not now worse or better, merely different.

A recent radio programme illustrated this difference. In it, a panel of critics reviewed some recently reissued classics. These included Evelyn Waugh’s
Decline
and
Fall
and Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s
The
Worst
Journey
in
the
World.
These two books moved me deeply in my late teens. The critics praised them as good writing, but they puzzled over the world described. In particular, they could not see why Cherry-Garrard made and suffered his agonizing journey through the Antarctic winter. They found the English stiff upper lip difficult to understand and could see no place for it in their ‘postmodern’ world. I wonder if the difference between my world of the 1930s and theirs now reflects the changing role of women. The past was male-dominated; women were not treated fairly and their opinions less often heard, but now that women’s place is recognized and most of the past injustices are remedied, there are unexpected adverse consequences. Most women, for excellent biological reasons, can never sympathize with the yearning for adventure that captures the minds of men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. They cannot understand that need of young men to pit themselves against the odds. Through their scorn at young men’s behaviour, women have made adventure a pejorative, and cosseted safety desirable. On the other hand, the growing influence of women must lessen the chances of war. Sixty years ago, when I was twenty, there were few problems in the world but political ones. Today, our problems are global and
environmental. Local tribal problems are still with us, but increasingly they grow irrelevant. Is this a consequence of women having a fairer say in national and global affairs?

In the hot summer of 1976 we were lucky to be in the relative cool of western Ireland. The summer provided near-perfect holiday weather, and a rare drought in that normally damp and misty region. There were even tankers delivering drinking water to farms around west Cork, something that probably had never happened before. We returned to a still hot, dusty, burnt, and burning England. Forest fires were frequent, and a pall of smoke seemed always to be drifting from the New Forest, south of Bowerchalke. Lester and Phyllis Machta had occupied our Bowerchalke house while we were in Ireland and had just returned to America. They said that it had seemed hotter in England than Washington that summer. Lester is a distinguished meteorologist, so I took this comment seriously. Not surprisingly, our garden had suffered from the heat. There was a ban on the use of hosepipes and remedial watering had been insufficient.

Early in September a visitor called. He was a tall active man who had retired to a village cottage in Bowerchalke, now converted to a level of comfort well above that its past owners could ever have anticipated. He wanted to ensure that Bowerchalke won the National Best Kept Village award. ‘Lovelock,’ he said, ‘your garden is rather untidy. Do you think that you could make an effort to clear it up a bit? The judges come round next week and we do want Bowerchalke to win the competition this year.’ I must have looked astonished; in fact, I was taken back to my school days, to the time when a master or a prefect would say, ‘Lovelock, we expect you to play in the B team on Saturday. It is an important match for the school so see that you’re there.’ Quietly, we ushered Mr Bellringer out. We were enraged and had no intention whatever in meeting the newcomer’s need to live in the village distinguished by the Best Kept Village Award. I realized that we were among the last representatives of Bowerchalke as it had been. Only five years earlier, it had been a village community with its own cricket team, good enough to beat that of the county Somerset. It had a good school, run by a competent teacher, and a well-run village pub. All these had gone, and now it was little more than a gentrified nest of middle-class strangers. It was time to
move. A trip to Boston beckoned, so there was no time immediately to do it. Even so, I knew that I did not belong in the Wiltshire countryside any longer.

Helen and I decided to act after Christmas 1976. We did so by scanning the property section of our favourite Sunday paper, not then converted, as now, into a kind of up-market tabloid. There was a mill for sale on the North Devon coast, and after telephoning the agents we took off for Devon early in January. It was just what we had in mind—a big enough house with ten acres of land, about one mile from the coast. We made our offer immediately, waited, and then were disappointed to hear that the owners had decided not to sell after all. The agent was a friendly and intelligent young man from Fox’s, an Exeter estate agency. He had made his own judgement about our characters and our needs and he said, ‘Sad about Gooseham Mill but we have another one rather like it, twenty-five miles south of here. Would you care to see it?’ We did; we liked Coombe Mill at once and offered to pay the full price and in cash. The owner, Mr Cheeseman, asked if we could buy it immediately and as I had no desire whatever to be driving 280 miles from Wiltshire to Devon and back looking at other possible properties, I said yes. To Mr Cheeseman we must have been the purchasers he dreamed of. We even bought his furniture so that we could move in whenever we wanted. He had tried, unsuccessfully, to convert the property into a water garden and make a living from it, and was desperately short of funds. He needed to settle his debts and we were the fairy prince and princess who had come to his rescue.

Helen was by now so disabled that our Bowerchalke house was difficult for her, still more was the climb from the village road to the house and, but for our immediate neighbour, Dorothy Golden, nearly all of her village friends had gone. The newcomers were not accessible, and she was as keen to move as I was. By April we had moved to Devon and we put our house in Bowerchalke in the hands of house agents. It soon sold, almost exactly at the price we had paid for Coombe Mill. The cottage in the garden sold separately for £12,000 and was a bonus. These seemed good prices to us but in two years, they doubled, such was the financial mismanagement of the Heath government.