In the middle section of Revenge, Lovelock moves on to how this process can at least be slowed. And it’s where I think he shows his age, and his time. He’s got an odd, seemingly visceral objection to wind power, seemingly mostly for its visual effect on the landscape, and an attachment to nuclear power that reflects the era of his youth, when it was seen as a panacea. He claims that wind and solar are not sufficiently developed or reliable, but talks after major technical advances in nuclear that would be decades off – the same time as the other, clean, energies would require.
But he does come up with a powerful final metaphor of what we have to do: should we continue on our current path we’re Napoleon marching on Moscow in 1812 – on arrival, the only way he could have preserved his army was a fast, immediate, professional retreat, which was not, of course, in the marshal’s nature. By contrast, Lovelock holds up the example of Dunkirk, “a successful and sustainable” retreat.
It is perhaps both the strength and the weakness of Lovelock that he can be, for a scientist, unusually poetic. It seems right to finish with his paean to Gaia:
The first aeons of her life were bacterial, and only in the equivalent of late middle age did the first meta-fauna and meta-zoa appear. Not until her eighties did the first intelligent animal appear on the planet. Whatever her faults, we surely have enlightened Gaia’s seniority by letting her see herself from space as a whole planet while she was still beautiful. Unfortunately, we are a species with schizoid tendencies, and like an old lady who has to share her house with a growing and destructive group of teenagers, Gaia grows angry, with a growing a destructive group of teenagers, Gaia grows angry and if they do not mend their ways she will evict them.
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