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This much I know

This article is more than 18 years old
James Lovelock, scientist, 86, Devon

The world will be unbelievably different at the end of the century. I'm not surprised there's a sudden interest in environmental affairs. Good climatologists, careful scientists, are predicting that it will be at least 8C hotter in Europe. Meanwhile, oceanographers say that the oceans are about to collapse. It's a grim state of affairs.

It's traditional to think that you are 'past it' by the age of 69. But that's when I met my second wife, Sandy. I never believed that you could fall in love in that age bracket until it happened.

Ecosystems are here to regulate the earth and keep the climate equitable, not to provide food for us. The problem with our Christian traditions is that we think God gave us everything and we can do what we like.

I had a Eureka moment when I came up with Gaia. I was in a jet propulsion laboratory in California, almost 40 years ago, when I discovered that the earth was not a dead planet, but a self-regulating system composed of all of the life that is on it.

You don't turn down a suggestion from a wordsmith like William Golding. He was my neighbour and came up with the name Gaia when we were walking to the post office one day. Before that I called my theory the 'earth system', which is what the scientists still call it.

Look on the earth as a living planet and you start thinking in terms of pathology. You start wondering how the ecosystems will respond to poisonous gases in the air. And this type of thinking has been badly delayed.

Emulate the monks in the fall of the Roman civilisation, that's what I tell my grandchildren.The monks kept the message of civilisation going as the civilisation collapsed, just as ecologists will have to be the guardians of our hard-won knowledge. Things like the fact that bacteria cause disease, not witches.

Sustainable development is a crazy notion. It was a wonderful idea in 1800, when there were only a billion of us on the planet, and if we'd adopted it then we wouldn't be in the mess we're in now. Now it's far too late.

You measure a general by how successfully he can retreat not by how he wins battles. What we need now is a sustainable retreat, and that requires good general-ship for one thing.

People enjoy wartime, or at least I did. The Second World War was one of the most pleasant times of my life.We regarded bombs very much in the same way as one regards a thunder storm nowadays, maybe a bit more deadly.We didn't spend our time cowering in fear. Well, perhaps a few did, but they were crazy people.

In science, if you can't explain what you're doing to a non-scientist of reasonable intelligence, then you probably don't really know yourself.

We need to learn to synthesise food. What I had in mind was using nuclear energy, and nitrogen and CO2 from the atmosphere, to produce a foodstock to feed tissue culture in great big vats.You could get beef tissue culture, potatoes and whatever you like. And you can either use non-GM or GM, it doesn't worry me.

I think God is an improbable hypothesis. It's better to have something like Gaia which you can have trust in, rather than something unknown like God that you have faith in.

We've no option but to use nuclear power. I don't repent for having this view because we have no alternative. My relationship with the Greens has deteriorated somewhat.

I can just imagine some Green typing a diatribe on his word processor when the wind stops blowing. He'd be screaming. These damned little windmills all over the place are totally unreliable and expensive.

White people are absurdly worried about getting cancer. DDT, one of the best chemicals to prevent malaria, was outlawed because we white people were so terrified of cancer, and now 2 million die of malaria every year and 200,000 are made utterly miserable by it.

Nothing illustrates spin better than one of these dratted turbines. I think wind turbines were introduced to save German industry.They're churning out these damned things at an alarming pace. I wouldn't be against them if they actually worked.

The economists say, 'We can't run a world without growth because it will be chaos. 'Well, it's going to be chaos anyway.

· Gaia: Medicine for an Ailing Planet is published by Gaia Books at £15.99

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