A tribute to my friend James Lovelock

The scientist James Lovelock died this week at the age of 103. He was best known for his Gaia theory, which found that Earth is a self-regulating system formed by the interaction between living organisms and their surroundings. Here, Bryan Appleyard, who co-wrote ‘Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence’ with Lovelock, pays tribute to his friend:

James Lovelock died this Tuesday on his 103rd birthday. I had known him since 1988 when I met him at his then home in Devon. He later moved to Dorset where he lived with his wife, Sandy, in a coastguard’s cottage overlooking Chesil Beach. He loved the landscapes of the west of England. In fact, he was a member of that diminishing tribe known as patriots.

He was born in 1919 in the immediate aftermath of the first world war. His mother, Nell, was determined he would never experience the hell of the trenches so she had him brought up as a Quaker which gave him a legitimate cause to be a conscientious objector when the 20th-century’s second hell broke out in 1939.