James Lovelock again : "A Rough Ride to the Future"

Sorry, I didn't finish writing about this:-  The thesis of this book is called "accelerated evolution": Since Newcomen invented the steam engine in the early 18th c. there has been an age in which human activity has had a rapid and profound effect on the planet.

"The changes in the environment that we see as adverse - from rising carbon dioxide abundance, climate change and population growth are all consequences of this new evolutionary inflation; as may be economic instability and the tendency of the human species to become city or nest animals."

He also posits the idea that one consequence of accelerated evolution could be that at some point we ourselves incorporate inorganic elements in our bodies.

"... already pacemakers are starting to be thought about that use the body system to provide the energy to keep them going. [My pacemaker] is coupled to the physiology of my body more or less completely, and much more sinister, it has a radio communication with the outside world so that the technician can check it every year to see whether it's working. This really bothers me, because I can see it's only a short time before my body's on the internet and receiving spam. Once you go in for this endo-symbiosis with the mechanical world, you're in for trouble, and we've started."

Lovelock's parents were working class and ran an art shop in Brixton. He hated school like poison, and taught himself science from books in the local library. He says he wanted to be a scientist from the age of 4 when his father gave him a primitive electronics set, and reckons the sense of science as a vocation has largely disappeared.

"The whole system of teaching has lost it, because it's taught as if you were going into a career. It isn't a career and never should be."

Lovelock's new book is likely to be claimed by both sides in the climate change debate. He has pulled back from the alarmist predictions of The Revenge of Gaia, published in 2006.

"You just can't tell what's going to happen". ...."It's just as silly to be a denier as it is to be a believer. You can't be certain." So we need to take the politics out of climate science? "Oh sure, but we're tribal animals. We can't help being political."

"I'm an old-fashioned green, a person who's happy with that Selborne character, Gilbert White. I'm very old, and the British countryside up until world war two was glorious. ...we were just another animal in the place, but it got wrecked with the coming of cars."

Lovelock sees environmentalism as a form of "urban politics". "It's become a religion, he says, "and religions don't worry too much about facts." [Haha]. He is an enthusiast for nuclear power, which makes him unpopular with many greens.

Fracking: "it produces only a fraction of the amount of CO2 that coal does, and will make Britain secure in energy for quite a few years. We don't have much choice."

"Europe could get all its energy from the Sahara, but politics screws it. A solar farm 100 miles by 100 miles could supply energy for the whole of Europe, but terrorists would blow it up."

Lovelock manages to be both catastrophist and boundless optimist at the same time. He believes that humanity will suffer crises that threaten the species, but will somehow pull through.

"We are an extraordinarily special species, the first to harvest information." [what does he mean exactly? When I read news, am I harvesting information? Suppose I forget it straight away, have I still harvested it? Or is it harvested only if it is saved in an archive?] But anyway, I am a cunning bastard, thanks James.

"As a species, we're cunning bastards"

Who said that?

James Lovelock, aged 94. It would be a great slogan to have on a T-shirt. What illustration would you put with it? I would quite favour a submarine, which is a cunning invention, but all kinds of things attest to our cunning, including the heart pacemaker and inoculation. The earliest cunning invention was the bow and arrow, I think, because with it we had such an advantage when hunting other species.

His new book, a Rough Ride to the Future, is part memoir of his long life in science and part prediction of whether humankind can survive. From the Guardian quite recently:

The concept for which Lovelock is best known is Gaia - the idea that the Earth is a single, self-regulating entity in which the organic and inorganic interact to sustain life. He developed the idea in the 1960s when he was working for Nasa and has returned to it frequently; he says defending it from detractors is one reason he carries on writing. "I want to keep fighting the battle because the academics just won't buy it, whereas most other people have."
Lovelock, who for the past 50 years has been what he calls an "independent scientist" unfettered by institutional links, reckons he knows why academics reject Gaia. "It's political," he says. "You can't run a university unless it's divided up into subjects. If you try and teach the whole lot, it becomes a complete mess and the vice chancellor goes mad, so they have to divide it up. But if you divide it up, you can't understand it." Lovelock, who trained as a chemist but is just as interested in and likely to expound upon physics and biology, detests academic compartmentalisation. "The universities have reached a point similar to the monasteries in the middle ages where the monks counted the number of angels that could stand on the head of a needle."

another post on this article

Last week I rowed down the river from Windsor with some friends and the river was rather rough as the wind blew against the stream. End of term. Just managed to get to the end without letting up. Speaking and listening exam session. Then a day off, and taking Mum for a walk. then teaching the Advanced au pairs. The advanced au pairs want me to be very prescriptive about grammar. I feel that they are getting quite angels-on-the-head-of the-pin about it. I feel they ought to know that there are also functional approaches to grammar, but they would probably explode if faced with such a concept. the CAE is a well-respected exam but it doesn't relate to the real world. When would you need to talk about a pair of photographs (that have no significance) for a minute without stopping? When and why would you cut up a piece of text into ten pieces and try to fit it together again? This last is part of the reading test but it doesn't only test reading in English: it also tests reasoning and logic. So why are we testing these in an English language test?

Then yesterday I got up in good time to make a lemon cake to sell at the Valley.  I had to cox in a race there which took 40 minutes, really exciting. Quite a good result. I then went to the garden centre and bought a lot of things, although I really went for 2 bags of compost and a large pot, with a structure for supporting tall plants. I have decided to grow delphiniums in this pot because there is no room for them in the garden. But I am happy because I found a spot in a border for my pot-bound rosemary and I think it will survive there, and at last I dug out a big sedge which I couldn't manage before, and I have got room for a few more things, as long as they don't mind shade. I bought some garotta, a scoop for the compost and some good gloves, which I used for about a minute and then I went back to using bare hands. I bought a few alpines, which are so lovely. All the pink tulips that I planted last year have come up in one side of the garden (I replanted them in the autumn) so they are looking good and also not a waste of money! The magnolia has had its best spring yet and looked so lovely and magical. Spent hours in the garden.

Today it rained and I felt incredibly tired. I made an apple pie and drove to Farnham twice. And that's enough for now.