Homage to Gaia (52 page)

In early December 1976 Helen and I went off to Ireland for ten days so that I could finish, in the peace and quiet of Ireland, the last chapter of my book,
Gaia.
We drove from Bowerchalke in a new large
Volvo car, a spacious and comfortable 164 model. As we drove into Wales to Swansea to catch the ferry for Cork, the weather worsened. Bursts of rain driven by gale-force southwesterly winds made driving difficult and we were glad to reach the port and drive onto the ferry. We had a small comfortable suite on the upper deck but we knew it was going to be a rough night ahead, and it was. We had little sleep as near hurricane-force wind and waves battered the ship, and the cold front passed just as we arrived in Cork. We drove across County Cork to Glengarrif, which is at the landward end of Bantry Bay. On the last ten miles before our cottage there was a high place on a narrow coastal road, and here a fierce gust from a line squall passing rapidly across the bay hit the car. It wrenched the steering wheel from my hand, and almost immediately, we hit a large rock head-on. Neither of us was hurt and our valuable IBM memory typewriter still sat on the backseat. The doors clicked open as usual and I went back to the road to seek help. A post office van stopped and offered to tow us back onto the road. I gratefully accepted, but when the driver looked at the front of the car, he said, ‘You’ll never drive that car again.’ We looked down and saw one of the front wheels bent into the shape of a U and the front of the car looked squashed. He said he would call a taxi for us from the next post office, and he did. It was my first and only serious car accident. The Volvo advertisements telling of cars that could survive the most severe crashes were true. We had walked unharmed from a collision with a rock hard enough to wreck the car completely. In some ways, the crash was a blessing. It made me stay put in Adrigole and finish the writing, and by the time we left by taxi ten days later, the work was ready for the publisher.

The two years from 1977 to 1979 were the quietest in all my time as an independent. To travel anywhere was now much more difficult. It was an hour’s journey by car to Exeter station and Plymouth airport, and then three or four hours to London. I still had my four sponsors: Shell, HP, MOD, and NOAA—but the settling in at Coombe Mill occupied most of my time. We had to build on to the house rooms for a lab and an office for Helen, and I had to decide what to do with the fourteen acres of land we had just purchased. In 1979 my book was published and my first warning of the way life would change came with a telephone call as we sat at lunch late in September. When I picked it up I heard an American voice say, ‘I am Jim Morton, Dean of the Cathedral of St John the Divine in New York. I have just read your book and I like it. Would you care to address a small group here at the
cathedral on it?’ I was due in New York next month anyway, as part of the book promotion, and was glad to say yes. Meanwhile I checked on St John the Divine to make sure that it was what he claimed it to be, and found that it was indeed the largest Protestant cathedral in the world. It was part of the Episcopalian church in America, which is the equivalent of the Church of England here.

When I took the taxi to Amsterdam and 110
^th
St one Saturday in late September, I saw how large it was, especially as I walked along its side on the way to the Deanery, which was a pleasant house in the gardens of the cathedral. I knocked, and soon Mrs Morton welcomed me, showed me to my room, and asked me to join the family at tea. Dean Morton, a tall handsome figure in clerical gear, came in. He had the air of someone who would perform miracles, someone who could charm the birds from the trees. My natural caution began to sound alarm bells and not without reason. ‘Jim,’ he said, ‘I have arranged for you to give the sermon at tomorrow morning’s service in the cathedral. It will all be properly done, and you’ll be introduced by the Bishop.’ I have wondered since if he saw me as terrified, like a rabbit before the fox, which he was. Wasps, the yellow-jacket kind, and giving lectures are the two things I most fear, and here was I condemned to giving a sermon in a WASP cathedral at the Sunday morning communion service. ‘My talk is entirely secular,’ I croaked, hoping that this might give me some means of escape. ‘Oh that’s of no consequence,’ boomed the Dean. ‘Tell it just as you did in your book and they will love it.’ Saturday night passed in agony of anticipation and Mrs Morton sensed some of my anxiety and was wonderfully comforting to me at breakfast. It occurred to me that this kind of shock quite often happened in that household.

We all moved into the cathedral where the huge congregation was gathering. ‘It’s going to be a full house,’ said the Dean, as he led me to the robing room. I was slightly relieved to be there, for my interest in what went on behind the scenes anywhere, especially a cathedral, took my mind off the ordeal ahead. They soon disguised me in flowing colourful robes, which helped quite a bit. Their anonymity made me feel less exposed. The Dean rehearsed me through my movements before stepping up to the pulpit. ‘Just walk behind the Bishop and me down the nave and you will be directed to your seat. Then your cue to walk up to the pulpit will be the end of the hymn, “Morning has broken”. Wait for the Bishop to introduce you and then off you go.’ As always, the ambience of the cathedral moved me
deeply, and I was interested to see that nearly half of the congregation was black. I did later discover that the cathedral was on the edge of Harlem. All too soon, we rose to sing that gorgeous hymn about the blackbird. As the organ sounded its closing chords, I felt a gentle push and I walked across to the pulpit and climbed the stairs. I was now above the congregation, and in a position that commanded, as well as detached one from, the surroundings. Never before had I realized what a well-chosen vantage point the clerics have for preaching. The Bishop, across from me in the other pulpit, began his welcome and introduction, smiled at me, and sat down. I was on. My sermon seemed to go well, and twenty minutes later, I was back in my seat. ‘Just what I’d hoped you’d say,’ said the Dean. ‘You’re a natural speaker.’ I think he meant it, for this was the first of four occasions when he invited me to give sermons at the cathedral. The most terrifying of these was when he asked without warning one Sunday morning if I would appear in the pulpit with Father Thomas Berry to give a joint sermon on the subject of Jacob’s ladder. Somehow, it worked, as I took a physical interpretation, with the ladder as the flow of photons bringing benefice from the sun to the Earth and Father Berry kept the theology right. I was so glad to have had the chance to meet this modern St Francis and to share his feeling for the Earth.

I had expected, even hoped, when I wrote Gaia that it would be criticized, even denounced, by the churches that would see the worship of the Earth as heresy. Yet, here was I giving a Gaia sermon at the morning communion service in a Protestant church. Soon I was to experience real denunciation as the fiery biologists castigated Gaia, and me, from their lecterns in the universities. The neo-Darwinists were like the Nonconformist hell raisers of Victorian times.

During the year following the publication of
Gaia,
I was astonished to receive twice as many letters from the religious and the philosophically interested as from scientists. Hugh Montefiore, then the Bishop of Birmingham, wrote to me asking which I thought came first: life on Earth or Gaia. This was not an easy question to answer. My attempt led to a friendship that has persisted. Hugh is President now of our charity, Gaia, and a welcome guest to Coombe Mill. His thoughtful question should have come from a biologist, but in recent times, leading biologists seem to be in a pseudo-religious phase, and churchmen are growing open minds. Hugh Montefiore published a book,
The
Probability
of
God,
a title any physicist would have
approved, and the book was for me refreshingly free of dogma. I have thought since childhood that there are no certainties; this, if you like, is a scientist’s creed. I found it odd that the biological scientists who attacked Gaia spoke with near dogmatic certainty, something I had not heard since the days of the Sunday Schools where I was an unwilling pupil. Geological critics were better scientists, and argued from the interpretation of facts. I remember when I first lectured on Gaia at Mainz in Germany, the geologist Wally Broecker rose from the audience at the end of my talk to say, ‘And there’s not more than one chance in a hundred that your view of the Earth is right.’ Now here were the words of a true scientist critic and I was proud that our work on Earth sciences, his and mine, were both recognized twenty-three and twenty-four years later by the award of the Japanese Blue Planet Prize. Perhaps the most rewarding letter about the book was from Crispin Tickell, then chef-de-cabinet to Roy Jenkins at the European Union in Brussels. Later, as Sir Crispin Tickell, he was our Ambassador to Mexico, and then our Permanent Representative to the United Nations in New York. I am glad that Gaia brought us together, and paved the way to a friendship with this remarkable man and his wife Penelope.

When Helen and I first moved to Coombe Mill in early 1977, we wondered how we could ever manage its fourteen acres of farmland. Helen loved gardening, but was disabled, and could not possibly cope with so large a garden. I was no gardener at all; indeed, I detest gardening. At first, we tried growing and selling the grass of the meadows. Local farmers were prepared to come and cut the grass and pay us a modest sum for it. This seemed a noticeable improvement on suburban life, where it may be necessary to pay to have the grass cut. Then in the autumn of 1977, a man with a tractor and a hedge-cutter appeared on the 250-yard road that led to Coombe Mill. He trimmed the hedges meticulously, backed round, and drove out, waving to us as he went. We asked our neighbour, then Dennis Fry, at Huntsdown Farm, who it could have been. ‘Oh, Mr Rockey,’ he said. ‘He cuts the hedges every year.’ This was even better. My worries about how to do it myself, what equipment to buy, were over. Only slight doubts remained about how was I to get in touch with Mr Rockey to pay him. Dennis said not to worry, he would turn up when he wanted paying—and he did, in January 1978, with his bill of £10.00. I wondered how it could be worth his while to do such good work for so little.

We were settling in to Coombe Mill and it was looking after us. I still had fanciful notions about using the land productively. I thought of growing lettuces and salad vegetables in hundred-yard lengths of polyethylene tubing. The field behind the house sloped gently down. My idea was to glue the seeds to a long string passing down each of these plastic tubes, inflate the tubes and feed the plants with a solution of nutrients pumped continuously. When fully grown I could seal the lettuces mechanically in their compartments and so provide sterile vegetables never touched by human hand or by the excrement normally applied as nutrient. Not pressed for money, as I still worked for my customers Hewlett Packard, Shell and NOAA, I did not become a lettuce farmer. I did try growing potatoes by simply pegging down a large sheet of black plastic on an area of grass. Then I cut crosses in the plastic in the form of a square matrix and placed seed potatoes beneath each cross. To my delight, it worked. Without light, the grass underneath the plastic died and formed mulch in which the potatoes grew. Months later, when the previously healthy looking plants above ground started to wilt, I lifted the plastic sheet, starting from one corner. Underneath were fine potatoes and I reached down to pick them. Hastily I backed away, for not only were there potatoes, there were adders, the one venomous snake we have in England, slithering around them. I lifted the whole sheet and left the reptiles to dissipate. My plastic sheet had provided a wonderful habitat for snakes. Field mice abounded in the grass around my plastic potato plot, and they would come to feast on the potatoes but instead fed the adders, who stayed warm, safe, and well fed.

So successful was this experiment in ecological farming that I planned to extend it in the next year 1979 but the winter of 1978/9 put paid to that ambition. Just before Christmas the north wind reached storm force and brought with it particles of snow so fine it was almost an aerosol. It was a full blizzard and impossible to walk against. It blew most of the night and we endured it without heat or electricity. The next morning brought blue skies and thick snow cover and was colder than I could ever remember. The outside thermometer registered – 19°C, and it was so cold that many plants and animals around died, and I never saw the adders and the grass snakes at Coombe Mill again. The worst of the cold for the humans at Coombe Mill were the burst pipes in the roof and the inch-thick layer of snow dust everywhere across the roof space. I had to sweep it into plastic bags using a dustpan and broom. The winters of the late
1970s and early 1980s were severe in our region. The snowfall one year was so heavy that the small lanes of Devon filled from hedge top to hedge top. The worst of the snowfall was about two miles to the east and north of Coombe Mill. We could just manage to drive to the village, but snowdrifts ten or more feet high blocked the roads to the north and the east.

The heating at Coombe Mill when we bought the house was primitive and inefficient and used open fires. I wondered about some ‘Green’ form of central heating, and was inspired by an article in the
Farmer’s
Weekly
that described a grass-burning boiler. We grew several tons of grass each year, and this seemed a fine and Green way of exploiting solar energy indirectly. We installed central heating, with radiators and copper pipes joined to one of these grass-burning boilers, which I had placed in an old stone building near the house. We had grown the grass the previous summer and it was stacked in a haystack covered with plastic. A friendly local farmer had baled it for me in return for a share of the bales. The hay bales were about four feet long and eighteen-inches square. They must have weighed forty or fifty pounds each. The idea was to put a bale into the boiler, ignite one end of it and let it burn like a cigarette. In practice, it rarely ever did and more often than not, it would go out, usually at some socially inconvenient time, when we needed warmth. When I opened the boiler a vast puff of toxic smoke emerged, and it seemed to me a health hazard worse than heavy smoking. I had to wear a gas mask to tend this stove, and it slowly dawned on me that this was a mad way to live. I gave up burning grass and bought logs instead from Mr Thomas, a local forester, who always seemed to have thinnings for sale. They burnt better than the grass, but the smoke, when the boiler was open, was almost as bad. At the end of 1981, after an accident with my tractor hauling logs, I at last saw sense. I replaced the wood-burning boiler with an efficient, carefree gas burner, which is still there.