Jonathan Watts

The Guardian’s global environment editor Jonathan Watts shares his exploration of James Lovelock, environmentalist and inventor, industrialist, NASA engineer and spy. Watts (author of When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save the World – or Destroy It) has drawn on hours of interviews, personal papers and scientific archives to paint his portrait in The Many Lives of James Lovelock.

Lovelock is best known as the father of Gaia Theory (that life on Earth is a self-sustaining system in which organisms interact with their environment for a habitable ecosystem). Pulling together the many influences which shaped his life and thinking, Watts discusses this fascinating, often contradictory man.