Homage to Gaia Read Online Free Page B

itself. Unfortunately, science is divided into a myriad of facets like the multi-lensed eye of a fly and through each separate lens peers a professor who thinks that his view alone is true. The danger now is that each of these fragmentedfaculties who once spurned Gaia will now claim the theory as their own. We must not stand aside and let these specialists highjack the unifying concept of Gaia.
    Gaia and environmentalism have never had an easy relationship. I seem to view environmental politics much as George Orwell did the socialism of his time. My heart is with the environmentalists but I see their good intentions thwarted by their failure to see that human rights alone are not enough. If, in caring for people, we fail to care for other forms of life on Earth then our civilization and we will suffer. I wonder if in the 21 st century, when the grim effects of global warming become apparent, we will regret the humanist bias that led us to continue to burn fossil fuel and plunder the natural world for food. Is our distrust of nuclear power and genetically modified food soundly based? I share Patrick Moore’s disenchantment with environmentalism . He was a founder of Greenpeace, but like me has an Orwellian view of the environment lobbies as they are today.
    Some who read this book might think it old fashioned, and if they do, I ask them to note that I was born in 1919, when English society was still conditioned by the code of the gentleman, a culture which valued good manners, playing by the rules, admiring the good loser and above all taking full responsibility for mistakes. In certain ways, it resembled the Samurai code of another island nation. I grew up believing in it and still do but recognize now when a young woman offers me her seat on the Underground that I am no longer with it. I acknowledge the debt I owe to the United States of America for launching me on my quest for Gaia and for sustaining me throughout my independence. Now with Sandy, my American wife, to accompany me, I no longer feel, when in the United States, a mere visiting alien. If at times in this book, I am critical of American institutions, it does not come from the spite or envy of an outsider but is the concern of one member of an American family. I am critical also of academia and share the author Robert Conquest’s view, expressed in his book Reflections on a Ravaged Century, that a surprising number of midlife academics seem selected for dogma. He was thinking of politics, but I think it applies to science also.
    Few are privately wealthy enough to develop a new theory of science and support a family from their own resources. When we started in Bowerchalke, my first wife Helen and I were less than rich; we had our parents to support as well as our children. Like most young families, we were heavily mortgaged and, like an intending artist, I knew that to make a start would not be easy. No matter how good was my science, no one would sponsor it until the science critics had approved. Like art critics, their first reactions are often cautious or negative.
    The answer was to do what the artist does: expect no sale for my masterpieces but live by selling ‘potboilers’. My potboilers were small research contracts and consultancies. These provided an ample income without needing more than a small proportion of my time. I had hoped that the sale of inventions would pay my bills but these turned out to be an unreliable source of income.
    Strangely, wealth threatens the would-be independent as much as poverty. It would have been easy for me at several stages in my independence to have built and marketed a successful product. In the 1960s, I built a prototype leak detector that was cheaper, simpler, and over a thousand times more sensitive than those that were then on the market. I could have joined with an engineer and a marketeer to form a company to make and sell it. I do not regret parting with that chance of wealth. Becoming an entrepreneur is a