Homage to Gaia (63 page)

It is unusual to make close friends in the seventh decade. Perhaps our unconscious recognition that it could not be for long made it the more worthwhile. Even so, I wish that we had met earlier. The few glimpses I had of his life in Tasmania and in advertising revealed a man who was much after my own heart in other ways than Green politics. Old-fashioned dogma of the Left makes us think of Earls as belted and presiding over thousands of acres of land. In fact, Henry and Jenny's home at Little Cudworthy was comparable with Coombe Mill. He had worked as a BBC producer and had enlivened the words of commercials; I can never now browse the shelves of a supermarket without thinking of Henry's campaign for ‘Mr Kipling's exceedingly good cakes'. He had a true feeling for the natural world and was a wonderful companion to have on a walk through the countryside, someone with whom to share the pleasure of its beauty and the pain of its degradation. He was someone who knew how to be outrageous for a purpose. The Earl of Portland died in January 1997. Sandy and I take the gift of these last seven years' acquaintance with Henry and Jenny as something that has enriched our lives. We miss him sorely.

I have often walked along Whitehall from Trafalgar Square to Old Queen Street, where the Medical Research Council once had its head office. At the west end of Whitehall, not far from the Cenotaph, is Downing Street, that small street with the houses of the Prime Minister and the Chancellor of the Exchequer. One morning in the autumn of 1988, a letter arrived from Downing Street, inviting Helen and me to a dinner with the Prime Minister on the occasion of a visit by the President of Bangladesh. I suspect that this invitation came
through the suggestion of Sir Crispin Tickell. He became an advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on climate change, and through his introduction I had the chance to meet her on three occasions. Helen was too ill to travel, so in October 1988 I arrived alone by taxi at the Whitehall entrance to Downing Street. The policeman there checked my letter of invitation and pointed me towards another policeman at the door of Number 10. It seemed sad that not many years before I could have just walked up to the door and knocked, but terrorism has made this impossible. Once inside they directed me to the stairs that went to the reception room where the Prime Minister and her husband, Dennis Thatcher, received me, as did the President of Bangladesh and his wife. There were perhaps fifty in the reception room. Not knowing what lay ahead, I took an orange juice and chatted with a couple about the health service. Soon they led us to our places for dinner at the long table. The Prime Minister and her distinguished guests were at the head; I was somewhere half way down. Seated next to me was a senior civil servant from the Ministry of Health, and over dinner we talked more about the health service, a topic that you will have noticed is close to my heart. I began to think that this had been a wonderful experience, something to remember as a high point of my life. An invitation to No. 10 and a meeting, however brief, with that powerful lady who ran our country, was something to tell my grandchildren about.

Then we retired to the sitting room for coffee. I was standing alone against a wall taking in the faces of politicians and others I recognized but did not know. Then, suddenly the Prime Minister moved rapidly across the room and said, ‘Professor Lovelock, I've been so looking forward to meeting you', and at once started a conversation that seemed to go on for at least fifteen minutes. It was mainly on the environment and she wanted to know what I thought should be done about it. I expressed my views as forcibly as I could. I was delighted to find that she had read my book and had questions on it. When she left, I found myself surrounded by other people. Her obvious interest in this otherwise unknown man stirred the gathering. They plied me with questions about what we had discussed. There were several consequences of this meeting; perhaps the most important was the invitation to a seminar at Downing Street hosted by the Prime Minister.

On 26 April 1989 I was back at No. 10 Downing Street, this time for the seminar on climate change. Margaret Thatcher is one of the
few politicians with an informed scientific understanding of the natural environment. She had the advantage of training in science at Oxford, where she took an MA and BSc. Her subject, chemistry, is the most transdisciplinary of the sciences: to be a good chemist you need a working knowledge of both physics and biology. Most physicists and biologists can get by very well in the smaller world of their own discipline alone. Margaret Thatcher had the wisdom to see, as she put it, that the environment would usurp the political agenda in the next decade. When she said this in her speech before the Royal Society on 27 September 1988, few believed her. That she was right can be seen from the column inches of newsprint and the media time now spent on topics like pollution, Greenpeace, El Niño, fuel-efficient cars, the greenhouse effect, etc. No noticeable environmental disaster has yet happened, but it would be a brave forecaster who predicted that we would not have one in the next one hundred years.

Number 10 is just like that fictional time and space machine, the Tardis, created by Terry Nation in the television series,
Dr
Who.
A small door with a constabulary presence opens into the vestibule, which itself leads to an endless series of connected rooms and corridors. I seem to recall on one occasion entering at No. 10 and leaving from part of the Cabinet offices in Whitehall. This time they took me to a conference room equipped with rows of chairs and a raised platform, on which the Prime Minister and a few members of the Cabinet sat. There was an overhead and a slide projector. It was, in fact, just like any other small, select, scientific meeting room. The familiar faces around me of British and American atmospheric scientists heightened the feeling of familiarity. Among them was Robert Watson, part of the American contingent, and I remember Sir Crispin Tickell and Sir John Houghton from our country. Margaret Thatcher handled the meeting as if she had spent her life in science. Robert Watson said to me afterwards that it seemed as though she had been running scientific meetings all her life. He added, ‘Is there a head of state anywhere who could take on a group like this and make you feel that she knew what she was talking about?' There were about three set-piece lectures on the greenhouse problem, but we spent most of the time in a general discussion of the problems that lay ahead and what could be done about them. At the end of the meeting, Sir Martin Holgate made a concise and accurate summary.

The meeting closed at about 1 pm and we all went to lunch in one of the dining rooms of No. 10. This room was set out with a series of
round tables, each seating about eight. There was a Cabinet minister or senior politician at each of them. I was lucky enough to be at the Prime Minister's table, along with Sir Crispin Tickell, Lord Marshall, Lord Porter and Sir James Goldsmith. During lunch Margaret Thatcher asked, ‘Do any of you know if there is anything in cold fusion?' Without thinking, I answered promptly, ‘Prime Minister, there is nothing in it. Pons and Fleischman have made a mistake, and I think I know what it was.' Lord Porter immediately intervened, ‘You cannot say things like that, Lovelock. They are distinguished scientists. Fleischman is an FRS and they have both published peer-reviewed papers on cold fusion.' I think I replied, ‘In ten years it will all be forgotten.' Then Margaret Thatcher added, ‘Good, then we can ignore cold fusion.' (Those who want to know more about my reasons for doubting cold fusion should go back to the first section of Chapter 10.) The discussion moved on. Looking back, I am sorry that I was right, for cold fusion would have been a great boon. After lunch, there was an opportunity to chat with the other participants, and we left by yet another exit to avoid the press. It did not work: they quizzed me but I could say very little. The meeting was held under Chatham House rules; that is to say, we could quote what we had said ourselves, but not repeat anyone else's comments. The Prime Minister sent a hand-written letter of condolence when Helen died, and later that year a friendly postcard when she visited the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. For the brief time during the last months of her premiership, I enjoyed the warmth of her patronage.

Together with Professor Sam Berry and Lord Nathan, the Cabinet Office sent me to Brussels in 1989. We were the UK representatives at an EEC meeting on environmental ethics. We met and dined in an old Belgian palace in its own grounds, not the high-rise faceless monument of the Berlaymont. I think I contributed very little to the proceedings on ethics. I left the expression of our private discussions on the subject to Lord Nathan, a distinguished lawyer, and to Sam Berry, unusually both a theologian and a professor of biology. Gaia is not about human affairs, except where, like now, they impinge upon the health of the planet. Gaia requires us to live sensibly with the Earth, and this would require that we restored the natural habitats we have destroyed to feed people. This requires politically difficult choices, such as giving up meat eating or reducing our numbers to a third or less. I could not think of any way to introduce topics like these into the serious discussions in Brussels. They were wholly about
human affairs, and when they did talk about the environment, it was in human terms, such as how to deal with urban pollution. At lunch at the palace, I sat opposite Jacques Delors, the formidable chief officer of the EEC. I had a strong impression, as he gazed across the table at me, that he was daring me to speak on Gaia. Sadly, I did not take the opportunity offered. After lunch, they took us back in VIP style to the Brussels airport and there the three of us shopped. Sam and I took back engraved glass figures of birds; mine was an owl. Sandy met me at the London City airport and we returned to our flat in St Mark's Road.

Following this turbulent start, my seventh decade has calmed into the happiest years of a lifetime. The highlights were the receipt of four International Prizes, several honorary degrees and four visits to Japan; I will conclude this chapter by telling you about them.

My relationship with academia has been an uneasy one. I was on the inside as a Professor in the 1960s at Baylor College of Medicine and loosely attached as a visiting professor for twenty-five years at Reading University and for shorter spells at the University of Houston and the University of Washington in Seattle, but I am too much a loner ever to feel a part of collegiate life. Therefore, I have been humbled and made grateful by the generosity of academics at the eight universities that awarded me honorary doctorates; Exeter, Kent, East Anglia, Edinburgh, Colorado, East London, Stockholm, and Plymouth. The most exciting of these was the high ceremony of the Doctor of Science degree I received from Stockholm University in 1991. The pageantry, the sounds of gunfire and trumpet calls, the award of the degree and the gold ring that I have worn ever since, made me aware that I was truly married to science. I remembered with affection my many friends among Swedish scientists and my visits to their country.

In the spring of 1990, a telephone call from the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences brought the stunningly joyful news that I was to receive the Amsterdam Prize for the Environment at a ceremony in The Hague in October of that year. My friend and colleague Sir John Cornforth had put my name forward several years previously but I had never expected the prize and it was the first intimation that the 1990s were to be the decade when my researches during the long years in the wilderness of independence were recognized. Following a letter of invitation from Mr. AH Heineken, chairman of the Amsterdam Foundation for the Environment, Sandy and I travelled to the Netherlands a week before the
ceremonies. Professor Kuenen who represented the Academy and was our close friend and guide throughout our stay in the Netherlands met us at Schipol Airport. I lectured at universities at Groningen in the north and Rotterdam in the south, and I received the prize from Prince Claus of the Netherlands at an immaculate ceremony in the Knight's Hall of the Binnenhof at The Hague. Sandy and I enjoyed a private banquet afterwards with the winners of the other Amsterdam Prizes, hosted by Mr Heineken. My prize lecture was entitled ‘In Search of the Superorganism' and given at a meeting of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The pursuit of prestigious prizes has never been part of my life as a scientist: had it been I would never have chosen to work independently. The award of the Amsterdam Prize warmed and contented me and I expected no more, but in August 1996 a fax from the Volvo Foundation invited me to call them about some important news; it was that their Jury had selected me to receive the 1996 Volvo Environment Prize. The citation singled out the ECD and its applications as my contribution to environmental science that had brought me the Prize, but to my delight, they also mentioned Gaia. We flew to Brussels in October, where I delivered my lecture and received the prize from Princess Désirée, Baroness Silfverschiöld of Sweden. I was deeply moved to be so recognized, and especially since I worked outside the main body of science. What made the Volvo Prize ceremony so memorable for me was the number of scientist friends who took the time and expense to come to Brussels on that day.

In December 1995 our now deeply respected fax machine presented a message from the Nonino Foundation asking if I would accept the decision of their jury to award me the Nonino Prize, and if so would I come with Sandy to Percoto in Italy where the ceremony would take place. We flew to Venice in January 1996 and Antonella Nonino welcomed us and took us in her car to Percoto where we stayed with the Nonino family for four days before the ceremonies. It is a great privilege to live with a family in a distant country, and there is no better way of getting to know and understand another culture. As we shared meals with the Nonino family and talked with them late into the evening, we learnt a great deal more about Italy than years of visits had provided. The Nonino Prize, a literary and philosophical award, was for my first book,
Gaia:
A
New
Look
at
Life
on
Earth.
The Foundation awarded the prize at a wonderful ceremony held at the Nonino Grappa distillery. Their grappa was a blithe spirit of quality
equal to, or better than, the best of single malt whiskies, and made by a family enterprise. Other winners of the prize included the cultural historian, Edward Said, the Italian author, Gian Luigi Beccaria and the horticultural scientist, Furio Bianco. At the banquet afterwards we met past winners and such luminaries as the conductor Claudio Abbado.