The Many Lives of James Lovelock

Name: The Many Lives of James Lovelock
Price: 26.99 AUD
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ISBN: 9781837260874

Science, Secrets and Gaia Theory

Jonathan Watts

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Paperback

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English

Canongate Books
02 June 2026

Biography: science, technology & engineering; Ecological science, the Biosphere; Environmentalist thought & ideology

A BBC RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK

'Splendid' GUARDIAN 'Utterly fascinating' ROBERT MACFARLANE 'A scientific life as dissonant as it was remarkable' FINANCIAL TIMES

James Lovelock is best known as the father of Gaia Theory, the idea that life on Earth is a self-sustaining system in which animals, plants, forests and sea life interact with the atmosphere, land and sea to maintain a habitable ecosystem. At least until humans came along. But as well as being a scientist, in his long life Lovelock was many other things: an environmentalist and inventor, an industrialist, NASA engineer and spy.

Lovelock's life was a chronicle of twentieth century science, and somehow he seemed to have a hand in much of it. During the Second World War he worked at the National Medical Research Institute, where his life-long interest in chemical tracing began. In the 1960s he worked at NASA on a planned Mars mission. He worked for MI5 and MI6 during the Cold War. He was a science advisor to the oil giant Shell, who he warned as early as 1966 that fossil fuels were causing serious harm to the environment. He invented the technology that found the hole in the Ozone layer; the same technology that may have had military applications too. And all of this came together to shape his nascent environmentalism and to give shape to Gaia Theory - a theory that could not have been developed without the collaboration and inspiration of two important women in his life.

Based on over eighty hours of interviews with Lovelock and unprecedented access to his personal papers and scientific archive, Jonathan Watts has written a definitive and revelatory biography of this fascinating, sometimes contradictory man.

By: Jonathan Watts
Imprint: Canongate Books
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Edition: Main
Dimensions: Height: 198mm, Width: 129mm, Spine: 19mm
Weight: 222g
ISBN: 9781837260874
ISBN 10: 1837260877
Pages: 320
Publication Date: 02 June 2026
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Jonathan Watts is a journalist based in the Amazon rainforest in Brazil. He is global environment editor at the Guardian and founder of the Rainforest Journalism Fund and the Amazon-centred news website sumauma.com. He has won numerous environmental and science journalism awards and is the author of When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save the World - or Destroy It. Twitter @jonathanwatts

Reviews for The Many Lives of James Lovelock: Science, Secrets and Gaia Theory

This splendid, balanced biography testifies to the pros and cons of scientific mavericks * * Guardian * * A scientific life as dissonant as it was remarkable. Watts [ . . . ] nimbly parses the brilliance and flaws of a man whose interdisciplinary interests spanned vast areas of twentieth-century research * * Financial Times * * Utterly fascinating - a beautifully braided account of the life of a maverick, prophetic genius. Jonathan Watts has turned Lovelock's greatest idea into literary form, giving us a Gaian biography in which Lovelock's discoveries are understood as always occurring in relation - to people, to places and to the Earth itself -- ROBERT MACFARLANE In this comprehensive biography, Jonathan Watts presents a well-researched chronicle of a complicated life, marked by professional success, controversy and some personal failings. Watts tells Lovelock's story with admiration and compassion, but also with an honesty that embeds both success and failure in the complexities of being gifted, and human * * Times Literary Supplement * * In his tender and searching new biography of Lovelock, based on eighty hours of interviews with his subject, Jonathan Watts, global environment editor at the Guardian, embraces this multiplicity. [ . . . ] If you want a rounded sense of the man, this book provides one beautifully * * Economist * *