Hugely influential scientist-philosopher who changed our view of life on Earth

As the British research vessel RRS Shackleton steamed toward Antarctica in 1971, scientist James Lovelock was a familiar presence on deck along with his invention: an ultrasensitive instrument that could detect virtually any trace of pollutants and other environmental toxins.

Even in the most remote reaches of the South Atlantic, Lovelock’s device found that the air carried chlorofluorocarbons then used in aerosols, refrigerants and other commercial applications.

It was a moment where the major threads of Lovelock’s groundbreaking work and theories began to braid into one.

He was already exploring his hypothesis that

Earth itself is a fully interwoven ecosystem – ‘‘like a gigantic living thing’’ – that can self-regulate to sustain life.

The readings from the ship brought a sharper edge to his Gaia theory, named after the Greek goddess who personified the Earth. It showed no place on the planet was untouched by man-made threats to the environment, findings that helped launch Lovelock’s reputation as a planetary caretaker with an ailing patient.

‘‘The biosphere and I are both in the last 1% of our lives,’’ Lovelock told the Guardian in 2020. It was an environmental warning repeated in many variations during a more than 80-year career of remarkable scientific range and originality – winning him widespread praise as a visionary and scorn as a doomsday fatalist. These overlapping roles – inventor, researcher, moralist, provocateur – were worn with pride by Lovelock, who died at his home on England’s southwest Dorset coast, on his 103rd birthday.

Lovelock used his sweeping Gaia theory as an entry point for specific challenges to ease a planet under stress. He broke with eco-allies to promote nuclear power and backed agrogiant farming and genetic modifications for more sustainable crops. He shrugged off policies on renewable energy and carboncutting goals as too incremental. Just ‘‘faffing around’’, he said.

In the end, it’s up to humanity to make huge and revolutionary accommodations to live with Earth – ‘‘an ultra-hi-tech, low-energy civilisation’’, he wrote – or the planet to find a way to live without humans.

James Ephraim Lovelock was born in Letchworth Garden City, about 30 miles north of London, and lived his first years with his grandparents, then joined his parents in London, where his father ran an art shop and his mother worked in the town offices.

His early interest in nature came from hikes with his father, who taught him the names of various plants and bugs. He graduated from the University of Manchester in 1941 during World War II, but he was given conscientious objector status because of his family’s pacifist Quaker beliefs.

He joined the government-run Medical Research Council, where he would spend the next two decades. As he took on more projects, he realised the equipment of the era was not up for the tasks. So he designed his own, leading to more than 60 patents ranging from a method to freeze bull sperm to a bloodpressure gauge for scuba divers.

In 1957, he hit on his most far-reaching invention: the electron capture detector, a portable device that could detect infinitesimal evidence of man-made chemicals such as pesticides. It was among the most important analytical instruments of the 20th century. The detector’s data became part of the scientific underpinnings for Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring, which helped launch the environmental movement, and later were cited in the banning of chemicals such as pesticide DDT and polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBS.

In 1961, Lovelock was recruited by Nasa for projects including looking for life on Mars. The first stirrings of the Gaia theory came as he and a Nasa colleague noticed the stability of the atmospheres on Mars and Venus, while Earth was ‘‘in a deep state of disequilibrium’’, he wrote in Gaia: The Practical Science of

Planetary Medicine (1991). ‘‘It was that moment that I glimpsed Gaia,’’ he wrote.

Lovelock began unveiling the theory in the late 1960s in academic papers and conferences. The response was mostly dismissive and some researchers wrote him off as pushing Age of Aquarius quasi-science with a gloss of Earth Mother spirituality.

‘‘I have a suspicion that the Earth behaves like a gigantic living thing,’’ Lovelock said in a 1969 speech, and a few colleagues, among them evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis, became early acolytes and helped bring Gaia into widespread acceptance and the bedrock principles of a discipline known as earth system science. Lovelock remained a tireless champion of Gaia, giving interviews just weeks before his death.

His final years were spent vacillating between optimism about mankind’s resilience and dread about its refusal to deal with the perils at hand. ‘‘The Gaia hypothesis is for those who like to walk or simply stand and stare, to wonder about the Earth and the life it bears, and to speculate about the consequences of our own presence here,’’ he wrote in Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth, his seminal 1979 book. ‘‘It is an alternative to that pessimistic view which sees nature as a primitive force to be subdued and conquered.’’ – The Washington Post