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James Lovelock is probably best known today for being the co-creator of the Gaia Theory - the idea that life on Earth is a self-sustaining system in which organisms interact with their environments to maintain a habitable ecosystem.

But this controversial and complicated man lived many lives over the course of the 102 years he spent on this planet.

He was born just after the end of the First World War to parents who had little interest in having a family and preferred to leave their new born child with his grandparents. His early years were often spent alone in nature and this helped to establish his lifelong affinity for the natural world. But he was also an autodidact – fascinated with science and in particular chemistry. Despite struggling at school he went on to become one of the great polymaths of the 20th century.

During the Second World War he worked at the National Medical Research Institute, where his life-long interest in chemical tracing began. In the 1960s he worked at NASA. He worked for MI5 and MI6 during the Cold War. He was a science advisor to the oil giant Shell, who he warned as early as 1966 that fossil fuels were causing serious harm to the environment. He invented the technology that found the hole in the Ozone layer. And all of this shaped Gaia Theory – a theory that could not have been developed without the collaboration of two important women in his life.

Based on over 80 hours of interviews with Lovelock and unprecedented access to his personal papers and scientific archive, Jonathan Watts has written a definitive and revelatory biography of a fascinating, sometimes contradictory man.

Jonathan Watts is a British journalist with an interest in the environment. He is also the author of When a Billion Chinese Jump: How China Will Save the World - or Destroy It.

Written by Jonathan Watts
Abridged and Produced by Jill Waters
Read by Richard Goulding
The Waters Company for ³ÉÈË¿ìÊÖ Radio 4