In Helliconia, the Digestive Tract method is employed. In 1979, while this book was a mere building site, its foundations open to the alien sky, James Lovelock published a small book entitled, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth. The name Gaia was suggesfed by Lovelock’s friend (I might even claim him as a friend of mine) William Golding, the novelist. The classical Gaia was the goddess of the Earth in Greek mythology; Lovelock was outlining an impersonal updated version of that gubernatory personage. Lovelock pointed out that the continued survival of a living Earth is miraculous. Life survives despite an amazingly narrow range of chemical and physical parameters—parameters subject to fluctuation.

How is it that the Earth’s temperature has not long ago increased, as has happened on “our sister planet” Venus; that the salinity of the oceans has not become more toxic than the Dead Sea, that atmospheric oxygen has not become tied down in oxides, or that hydrogen has not escaped from the upper atmosphere? Lovelock’s answer known as the Gaia Hypothesis, is that everything on the earth, the biomass, constitutes a single self-regulatory entity—living, of course, but of course without conscious intention. Gaia has no particular centre, no prime minister or parliament no Fuhrer, not even a Greek goddess; it functions through its unfocused complexity, built up over millions of years. The implication is that the work of bacterial and other forces have built, and maintain, the living world we know, best to suit themselves—a process in which humanity has played small part.

I gave myself up to James Lovelock’s arguments in his first book and succeeding ones in the way that, in an earlier phase of existence, I had surrendered myself to Thomas Hardy’s novels.

Interestingly, Lovelock is an independent biologist of a rather old-fashioned kind, unsupported by universities or other institutions. And his hypothesis relies on the mode of close observation and enquiry which is such a marked feature of Charles Darwin’s work. Darwin perceived where we merely see. Lovelock points out that what he calls “city wisdom” has become almost entirely centred on problems of human relationships; whereas, in a natural tribal group, wisdom means giving due weight to relationships with the rest of the animate and inanimate world.