Obituary: James Lovelock, inventor who introduced the Gaia hypothesis to environmental science
), the year that Lovelock was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society. His legacy is enshrined in the now-standard idea of searching for signs of life on exoplanets by studying their spectra — the Lovelock test.
Lovelock was born on 26 July 1919, the result, he believed, of his parents’ celebration of the end of the First World War on 11 November the previous year. He grew up in Brixton, then a poor area of south London. Deprived of educational opportunities themselves, his parents pushed him into a grammar school, which he hated. He preferred to study popular books such as James Jeans’s 1928. To the irritation of his teachers, he did well in exams despite refusing to bow to authority.
Unable to afford university, he took a job with a photographic chemist, but attended evening classes at Birkbeck College, London, working towards a degree in chemistry. When this course was suspended after the outbreak of the Second World War, Lovelock obtained a place at what is now the University of Manchester as a full-time student, subsisting on a grant of £60 from the Kent county council and £15 per year from a charitable trust.
Instead of a quiet retirement, Lovelock embarked on an essentially new career, promoting the idea of Gaia, developing the model and, to his dismay, becoming revered by hippy ‘environmentalists’ who thought that Gaia would ‘protect us’. He responded that “the best thing for Gaia might be to get rid of us”. He was particularly thinking of global warming, on which he acted as an informal adviser to UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher in the late 1980s.
Helen , his wife of 47 years, died in 1989. In 1991, he married Sandy Orchard, planning to settle down to a quiet life that included walking, in stages, England’s 1,000-kilometre South West Coast Path. Instead, the threat of global warming prompted him to write to argue that Gaia was now in crisis. He continued to travel around the globe to promote this message, and began to slow down only after his 90th birthday.
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