He said his books were written for people who, like him, wandered and wondered
was a passionate walker. His greatest achievement, he often felt, was to have walked in his 80s all 630 miles of England’s south-west coastal path. As a young man he ranged on foot all over the Surrey hills and the Welsh mountains. He loved to be by himself, out of the way, at the edge of things.
This wondrous system seemed to need a name, so he called it Gaia, prompted by the novelist William Golding as they walked together. It was a calculated risk. Gaia, from the Greek goddess of the Earth, had a ring of myth and magic about it, and suggested that the Earth itself was alive. He did not mean that. When his hypothesis appeared as a book in 1979 it contained an apology, more or less, for referring to the system as “she”.
His ideal, though, was to work alone, as poets and musicians did—as Galileo and Einstein did—often dreaming up inventions in the small hours and modelling them in his head over breakfast. He put on no white coat to go to work in some stifling corporate or government-funded lab. Instead, he donned old clothes and went to a workshop-lab where he had the best hand-tools, a lathe and a milling machine, to make his own equipment.
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