James Lovelock will be eighty-seven this year. For the last forty-five years he has been an entirely independent scientist, unattached to any institution. He is qualified in medicine, chemistry and biophysics. He is garlanded with scientific awards in all these fields. He also makes his own instruments, for which he has filed more than fifty patents. He invented and made the electron-capture detector, a tiny instrument that remains the gold standard for detecting atmospheric pollution. He created the discipline known as Earth System Sciences and, in the Gaia hypothesis, created the most potent and urgent scientific vision of our time. (He is also a friend of mine.) 

I am writing in anger because I know of no man who is more consistently underrated – in the world at large certainly, but especially in his own country. There have been mutterings of ‘crank’ about this book, and a few pig-ignorant columnists have suggested it’s all just more eco-nut,