Environmentalist Lovelock Speaks September 18 at CSUMB

'Father of the Green movement' to visit campus

James Lovelock is a scientist who lives and works in the English countryside. He has a knack for making discoveries of global significance. Lovelock is the inventor of the electron capture detector, a palm-size chamber that detects man-made chemicals in minute concentrations. In the late 1950s, his detector was used to demonstrate that pesticide residues were present in virtually all species on Earth, from penguins in Antarctica to mother's milk in the United States. This provided the hard data for Rachel Carson's landmark 1962 environmental book, "The Silent Spring," which launched the international campaign to ban the pesticide DDT.

In the late 1960s, Lovelock visited Antarctica and, with his detector, discovered the ubiquitous presence of CFCs (chlorofluorocarbons), man-made gases now known to deplete the stratospheric ozone layer.

Today, Lovelock is best known as author of the "Gaia hypothesis," named after Gaea, Greek goddess of earth. The hypothesis states that the global ecosystem sustains and regulates itself like a biological organism rather than an inanimate entity run by the automatic and accidental processes of geology, as traditional earth science holds. In essence, Lovelock's hypothesis sees the surface of the Earth as more like a living body than a rock or a machine.

His most recent book, "The Revenge of Gaia," was published earlier this year. It deals with no less weighty a subject than earth’s climate crisis and the fate of humanity.

He first conceived the Gaia hypothesis while working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena in the mid-1960s, where he was designing life detection instruments for NASA's Mars Viking probes.

How, Lovelock asked himself, if he were on Mars, could he tell there was life on Earth? By the Earth's atmosphere, which defies all natural expectations. Free oxygen accounts for 20 percent of the atmosphere, when the laws of chemistry say that this highly reactive gas should combine and settle down. How fortunate for life, most of which depends on oxygen for survival.

Lovelock concluded that life -- microbes, plants and animals constantly metabolizing matter into energy, converting sunlight into nutrients, emitting and absorbing gas -- is what causes the Earth's atmosphere to be so, well, lively. By contrast, the Martian atmosphere is essentially dead, settled into a low-energy equilibrium with little or no chemical reactions. So he recommended that NASA save its money and scrub the Viking mission.

In 1988, the American Geophysical Union sponsored a highly controversial international scientific conference on the Gaia hypothesis in San Diego, and since then, scores of articles on Gaian science have been published in Nature, Science and other scientific journals, as have dozens of books.

Lovelock has received a slew of environmental and scientific awards and honors in the United States, Europe and Japan.

Lovelock said the name Gaia was suggested by William Golding (Nobel Prize-winning author of "Lord of the Flies"). Gaia embraces the intuitive side of science as well as the rational. It makes the theory a personal presence, more accessible to the nonscientist, Lovelock has said.

Dr. Armando Arias, who has known the scientist since the 1980s, invited him to CSUMB.

"His thinking is truly interdisciplinary and he has had an impact on the development of social ecology, ecological psychology and systems theory in the social sciences," Dr. Arias said.

"It’s interesting to note that there were many discussions during the planning of CSUMB that centered on the application of his Gaia theory, systemic thinking and the design of a university wit integrated majors and/or majors that were interdisciplinary by design."

(Taken from a 2000 interview with Salon.com)