The Many Lives of James Lovelock by Jonathan Watts – man of many myths

Along the driveway to James Lovelock’s remote house of Coombe Mill was a warning one might hardly expect amid the tranquil Devon hills: a radiation hazard sign. It was not there simply to deter unwanted snoopers, for what lurked in Lovelock’s private laboratory adjoining his house was truly hair-raising: radioactive sources, TNT and semtex. If there had ever been a fire, Lovelock laughed, “it would’ve blown up the house”.

For most of his career, almost until he became a centenarian, this scion of the environmental movement conducted work for the British security establishment, including explosives research for the forces in Northern Ireland. When he met the queen to receive his CBE in 1990, he responded to her famous question “And what do you do?” with “I’m sorry, I can’t talk about it.” The incongruity of Lovelock and his second wife, Sandy, standing reverently in their garden before a statue representing the Earth goddess Gaia, yards away from research given to Lovelock by MI5 because it was too dangerous for official channels, exemplifies the contradictions of the man and his extraordinary life. In The Many Lives of James Lovelock, Guardian environment journalist Jonathan Watts does it justice.

Lovelock’s Gaia theory has, ever since its inception in the late 1960s, been whatever one wants to make of it: a smokescreen for polluting industries, a clarion call for environmentalists, a revolution in the earth sciences, a conceptual framework for astrobiology, a spiritual movement for reconnecting to the living earth. Remarkably, Lovelock himself embraced each of these positions at some time or another during his 103 years on the planet.

Having worked for the Medical Research Council at Mill Hill – which produced several Nobel laureates – during the war, Lovelock quit a comfortable academic position to become a freelance inventor and consultant for clients ranging from the Ministry of Defence to Nasa (especially on what became the Viking lander missions of the 1970s that searched for signs of life). In the mid-1950s he invented an instrument called the Electron Capture Detector, which allowed substances in the air to be detected with unprecedented sensitivity.

Watts does not hesitate to challenge Lovelock’s sometimes self-serving view of events, nor does he spare his subject from unflattering judgments

Those studies led him to conceive of the atmosphere itself not as an aspect of the environment to which life adapts but as a component of the “Earth system” that life is constantly shaping. In collaboration with the American microbiologist Lynn Margulis, Lovelock shaped these ideas into the Gaia theory, which suggests that the whole planet functions rather like a living organism, stabilised by feedbacks between the biosphere, oceans, atmosphere and geosphere. Using simple theoretical models, Lovelock and his co-workers showed how this “geophysiology” might work. It was Lovelock’s Devon neighbour, William Golding, who suggested naming the idea after the Greek goddess – a “poison gift”, according to philosopher Bruno Latour, as the mythic associations alienated many scientists.

Much of this is well known, but Watts digs deeper to find the source of Lovelock’s contradictory, maverick nature. At its heart was pain and tragedy. He was brought up by his grandparents, after being virtually disowned by his aspiring lower-middle-class mother. Lovelock, meanwhile, idolised his father, Thomas, a former farmworker and somewhat feckless ex-convict who was illiterate until adulthood.

This biography is authorised, Lovelock granting Watts access to documents and many hours of interviews (which began after Lovelock turned 101). But that has not compromised Watts’ objectivity – and Lovelock probably wouldn’t want it to be otherwise. Watts does not hesitate to challenge Lovelock’s sometimes self-serving view of events, nor does he doesn’t spare his subject from unflattering judgments. According to environmentalist Jonathon Porritt, “He could come across as downright insensitive”; his first wife, Helen, had to endure her husband’s affairs even as she faded with MS. “His human skills lagged far behind his scientific acumen,” says Watts. Lovelock was a “gullible genius”, vulnerable to flattery and manipulation by those seeking to enlist his brilliance for their own agendas, from Lord Rothschild, head of research at Shell, who used the nascent Gaia theory to veil the environmental damage wreaked by the petrochemicals industry, to Nigel Lawson, who leveraged the ageing Lovelock’s reputation in support of climate denialism.

The Gaian notion of the planet as a web of interconnected systems, at first ignored or reviled, has now entered the scientific mainstream. But Lovelock’s own interpretation of these ideas – one moment suggesting the planet is resilient against our depredations, the next forecasting imminent climate apocalypse, and then back again – owed more to his own predispositions and to the audience who happened to be lionizing him than to the kind of detailed calculations and assessments conducted by meteorological agencies or the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

He initially ridiculed the suggestion that CFC compounds in refrigerants and aerosols, useful as a tracer of atmospheric currents detectable by the ECD, might harm the ozone layer. “Despite his reputation as an independent, contrarian maverick, he was embedded in the military-industrial complex,” writes Watts. “He relished being part of that club.”

As with many who crossed his path, Watts evidently found Lovelock, who died in 2022, genial, inspiring, fun and sympathetic. It is to his great credit that he has not let that become the whole story. In the end this splendid, balanced biography testifies to the pros and cons of scientific mavericks. Only a self-proclaimed “awkward bugger” like Lovelock would have had the guts and vision to challenge old orthodoxies and upturn our understanding of planetary science. But contrarianism can easily veer in unreliable directions, especially when its author craves recognition and praise as much as intellectual independence.

• The Many Lives of James Lovelock: Science, Secrets and Gaia Theory by Jonathan Watts is published by Canongate (£25). To support the Guardian and the Observer buy a copy at guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.