James Lovelock, the brilliant British ecologist, whose work is essential to today’s understanding of man-made pollutants and their effects on the climate, and who drew intellectual Scientific fantasies with his Gaia theory, which depicts the Earth as a living being, died on Tuesday, his 103rd birthday, at his home in Dorset, southwest England.
His family confirmed the death in a statement on Twitter, saying that until six months ago he was “still able to walk along the coast near his home in Dorset and give interviews, but his health deteriorated after a bad fall.” early this year.”
Dr. Lovelock’s breadth of knowledge extends from astronomy to zoology. In the last years of his life, he became a famous proponent of nuclear energy as a means to help tackle global climate change and a pessimist about humanity’s ability to survive. a rapidly warming planet.
But his global fame rests on three main contributions, which he developed during a decade of particularly rich scientific discovery and curiosity that spanned the late 1950s through the latter half of the 1960s.
One was his invention of the Electron Capture Detector, an inexpensive, portable, sensitive device used to help measure the spread of toxic man-made compounds in the environment. The device provided the scientific basis for Rachel Carson’s 1962 book, “Silent Spring,” a catalyst of the environmental movement.
The detector also helps provide the basis for regulations in the United States and other countries that ban hazardous chemicals such as DDT and PCBs, and that drastically reduces the use of hundreds of other compounds as well as public exposure. contact them.
Later, his discovery that chlorofluorocarbons – compounds that power aerosol canisters and are used to cool refrigerators and air conditioners – were present in measurable concentrations in the atmosphere. leading to the discovery of holes in the ozone layer. (Chlorofluorocarbons are now banned in most countries by a 1987 international agreement.)
But Dr. Lovelock may be most widely known for his Gaia theory – that the Earth acts, as he puts it, as a “living organism” that can “regulate its temperature and chemistry in a state of being in a state of being”. comfortable stability.”
The seed of the idea was sown in 1965, when he was a member of a space exploration team recruited by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and stationed at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
As an expert on the chemical composition of the atmospheres of Earth and Mars, Dr. Lovelock wondered why Earth’s atmosphere was so stable. He hypothesized that something must regulate heat, oxygen, nitrogen, and other ingredients.
He later wrote: “Surface life is subject to regulations.
He presented this theory in 1967 at a meeting of the American Astronaut Society in Lansing, Mich., and in 1968 at a scientific meeting at Princeton University.
That summer, the novelist William Golding, a friend, suggested the name Gaia, after the Greek goddess of the Earth. Mr. Golding, author of The Lord of the Flies and other books, lives near Mr. Lovelock in south-west England.
Some scientists have welcomed this hypothesis as a thought-provoking way to explain how living systems affect the planet. However, many others call it the New Age pablum.
The hypothesis may never gain credibility and move into the scientific mainstream without the contribution of Lynn Margulis, a prominent American microbiologist. In the early 1970s and in the decades that followed, she collaborated with Dr. Lovelock on specific studies to support this concept.
Since then, several scientific meetings on Gaia theory have been held, including one at George Mason University in 2006, and hundreds of papers on aspects of it have been published. Mr. Lovelock’s theory of a self-regulating Earth is considered central to understanding the causes and consequences of global warming.
His electron-capture detector was created in 1957, while he was a scientific officer at the National Institute of Medical Research at Mill Hill, north London. It was published in 1958 in the Journal of Chromatography.
When combined with a gas chromatograph, a chemical mixture separator, the detector is capable of measuring minute concentrations of chlorine-based compounds in the air. It ushered in a new scientific era in the spread of compounds and helped scientists identify the presence of toxic chemicals at small levels in soil, food, water, human and animal tissues. objects, and the atmosphere.
In 1969, using his electronic receiver, Dr. Lovelock further discovered that man-made pollutants were the cause of smog. He also discovered that a family of persistent man-made compounds called chlorofluorocarbons could be measured even in clean air over the Atlantic. He confirmed the global spread of CFCs during an expedition to Antarctica in the early 1970s, and in 1973 published a paper about his findings in the journal Nature.
Dr. Lovelock prides himself on his independence from universities, government and corporations, even though he makes a living from all of them. He likes to be frank, straightforward, deliberately provocative and cautious. And perhaps not coincidentally, he was less successful when he used his work for financial gain and stature in the scientific community. The electron capture detector, arguably one of the most important analytical tools developed in the 20th century, was redesigned and commercialized by Hewlett-Packard without any licensing agreement or money. Copyrighted by Dr. Lovelock.
And although Dr. Lovelock has identified the presence of CFCs in the atmosphere, he also explains that at concentrations in parts per billion, they pose an “inconceivable danger” to the planet. . He later called that conclusion “a gratuitous mistake.”
A year after his paper in Nature, Mario Molina of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and F. Sherwood Rowland of the University of California at Irvine published a paper in the same journal detailing the sensitivity of the plant. ozone layer on Earth with CFCs. In 1995, they and Dr. Paul Crutzen, of the Max Planck Institute in Germany, were awarded Nobel Prize in Chemistry for their work in alerting the world to the thinning of the ozone layer.
Bill McKibben, author of “The End of Nature” and a scholar living at Middlebury College in Vermont, said: “He had a wonderful mind and an independent will. “He credibly played a vital role in literally saving the Earth by helping to find out that the ozone layer is disappearing. Gaia theory is his most interesting contribution. As global warming emerges as the biggest problem of our time, Gaia theory has helped us understand that small changes can alter a system as large as Earth’s atmosphere. “.
James Ephraim Lovelock was born on July 26, 1919, at his grandmother’s house in the Garden City of Letchworth, about 30 miles north of London. His parents, Tom and Nell Lovelock, were shop owners in Brixton Hill, south London. James lived with his grandparents for his first year but moved with his parents to Brixton Hill after his grandfather died in 1925.
In London, he was a low-achieving student but an avid reader of Jules Verne’s books and the scientific and historical texts he had borrowed from the local library.
Lovelock often proclaimed his steadfast independence to his mother, an amateur actress, secretary and businessman whom he considered an early feminist. His interest in the natural world came from his father, an outdoorsman, who took his son hiking in the countryside and taught him the common names of plants and animals. and insects.
In 1939, James enrolled at the University of Manchester, was granted conscientious objector status, which allowed him to avoid military service at the start of World War II, and graduated in 1941. He quickly was hired as a junior scientist at the Medical Research Council, a government. agency, where he is in charge of hygiene to prevent the transmission of infectious agents.
One of the young people who also joined the institute was Helen Hyslop, a receptionist. The two married on December 23, 1942, and the first of their four children, Christine, was born in 1944. Later had a daughter, Jane, and two boys, Andrew and John. In 1949, Dr. Lovelock obtained his Ph. in medicine from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Helen Lovelock, who suffered from multiple sclerosis, died in 1989. He later married Sandra Orchard, an American. They met when she asked him to speak at a conference, he told British magazine The New Statesman in 2019.
Dr. Lovelock’s survivors include his wife; his daughters, Christine Lovelock and Jane Flynn; his sons, Andrew and John; and grandchildren.
Dr. Lovelock is the author of “Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth” (1979), among other books. Another work, “Gaia’s Disappearing Face: The Final Warning” (2009), argues that the Earth is rapidly reaching a state of permanent heat faster than scientists thought. His autobiography, “Home to Gaia: The Life of an Independent Scientist”, was published in 2000.
Among his many awards are two of the most prestigious in the environmental community: the Amsterdam Prize for the Environment, presented by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the Green Planet Prize, awarded awarded in 1997 and is considered by many to be the environmental equivalent of the Nobel Prize.
Dr Lovelock caused a stir in 2004 when he declared nuclear power the only practical alternative to fossil fuels capable of meeting humanity’s large-scale energy needs while deflation. greenhouse emissions.
In the last years of his life, he expressed a pessimistic view of global climate change and the human ability to avert an environmental catastrophe that could kill billions of people.
He told New Scientist magazine in 2009. “The reason is we won’t find enough food unless we synthesize it.” The number of people left at the end of this century will probably be a billion or less. It happened before. Between the ice ages there were bottlenecks when there were only 2,000 people left. It happened again.”
