Ayana Elizabeth Johnson has a tenuous relationship with the word “hope.” The marine biologist, policy expert, teacher, and author is too much of a pragmatist to rely on something so passive. Hope as a noun is defined as having an expectation of a positive outcome. To Johnson, that’s not in line with reality. In a chapter near the end of her new book, What If We Get It Right?: Visions of Climate Futures, she writes, “Fuck hope. Where’s the strategy? What are we going to do so that we don’t need hope?”

“Fuck hope. Where’s the strategy? What are we going to do so that we don’t need hope?”

Later in the chapter she concedes that active hope—“catalytic hope” as she calls it—is the type of thing she could get down with. A hope that allows people to exist on auto-pilot could be disastrous. But a hope that inspires people to act could be revolutionary.

What If We Get It Right?, which hit shelves Tuesday, offers some of this inspiration. The book features Johnson’s interviews with a wide swath of people about how we as a society are going to get ourselves out of the climate mess. She talked to the likes of Indigenous rights activist Jade Begay, screenwriter Adam McKay, film executive Franklin Leonard, climate justice advocate Ayisha Siddiqa, and writer and activist Bill McKibben, among others, on topics ranging from how to facilitate a truly just transition to how to design neighborhoods for a warmer, more dangerous world. 

Standing apart from the technocratic and economic-oriented solutions literature, What If We Get It Right? focuses on nature-based and justice-oriented strategies. For instance, Johnson interviewed farmer and author Leah Penniman about the role of reparations in regenerative agriculture. While regenerative agriculture has become increasingly buzzy—the USDA is even making massive investments to support it—Penniman highlights that giving farmland back to its rightful owners, including dispossessed Indigenous and Black communities, is just as important as eliminating industrial methods of farming because regenerative practices are derived from those communities.

In fact, the book seems to say, much of the wisdom about how to conquer climate change is already at our fingertips—we just need to do a better job of actually putting those solutions into practice, whether by strengthening our disaster recovery systems, finding new ways of building cities, or covering climate change better in the news. Everyone has gifts to help in the fight. A mass movement to tackle climate change through art, design, science, policy, and justice is our best bet.

Ahead of the book’s release, I spoke with Johnson about her writing process, the plethora of climate solutions out there, and what to do to avoid spiraling about climate change. Our conversation has been edited and condensed.

Why did you want to write this book?

I actually don’t know that I wanted to write this book, but it was like the book that I wanted to read and I couldn’t find it. I was feeling like there was a gap in the literature of books helping us see the way forward, or more broadly than books, I guess just culture. 

“We have so much media about climate apocalypse—but not a lot about how we have the climate solutions we need, and what would happen if we just did them?”

We have so much media about climate apocalypse, so many films, so much news about disasters—but not a lot about how we have the climate solutions we need, and what would happen if we just did them? I was wishing for that to be the climate conversation, to shift more to a solutions focus, and not in a techno-utopian kind of way, but in a grounded in nature and justice sort of way.

How do you want a reader to approach this book? Do you want it to be a Project Drawdown thing, where they’re like, “Oh, let me just read one of these chapters, and then, like, go live my life and come back.” Or do you want people to read it completely from start to finish?

I don’t want it to feel like a textbook. I mean, that’s why it took me so long to write the book, because I couldn’t crack the code of how to structure this so that it would feel readable. And my editor had been coming to this event series that I curate and host at Pioneer Works, an arts institution in Brooklyn, and he was like, “This is the book. It’s you telling us who we should be listening to and helping us understand what they’re saying.”

Writing the book, did it make you feel better?

I don’t know that I felt bad when I started. I think the broad strokes of climate science and where we’re heading—unless we rapidly, dramatically change our ways—have been known for decades. That’s still the case. 

Everyone has some way they can contribute to climate solutions. I feel better now that this book exists, because it’s like the best I could do.

I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about the writing process. Where did you write this book and what was helpful for you to get it across the finish line?

I started writing this book at my family farm, my mom’s, in my bedroom there and at the kitchen table that’s described in the introduction of the book. And I moved to Maine almost two years ago now, and the book was written almost entirely here. I moved here because I needed more green in my life, right? And the opening line of the last chapter is: If we get it right, the world is a lot more green. I just wanted to skip ahead to living in that world.

After the last debate, are you feeling hopeful about the future of climate action?

Hope is not really my jam. I’m not an optimist. As a scientist, I find that to be a sort of unscientific position, but I also, you know, just the assumption it’ll be okay in the end—I don’t harbor that, but I do know that there’s also a scientific fact that there are many different possible futures. And my job, as I’ve embraced it, is to help make sure we have the best possible one. 

“There are many different possible futures. And my job, as I’ve embraced it, is to help make sure we have the best possible one.” 

And that didn’t change after the debate. I mean, I’m still like, “Wow, we have a lot of work to do.” We clearly need a much stronger climate electorate so that politicians feel like they have to talk about their climate plan, so that the debate organizers and moderators feel like they need to ask those questions, not just one at the end, but acknowledge that climate is the context within which all of our other policies and challenges as a country are unfolding.

What’s a good first step for someone who wants to work toward climate solutions but doesn’t even know where to start because they’re so overwhelmed? 

I would just say, I get it: It’s the biggest thing humanity has ever faced. Feeling anxious, overwhelmed, depressed about it is a reasonable and very human response. So there’s nothing wrong with that, per se. 

But of course, I do hope that people will find a way to leverage that energy into finding a way to contribute to solutions, because we really do have the solutions we need. I think that’s sort of the open secret: We know what to do. We know how to shift to renewables. We know how to green buildings. We know how to improve public transit. We know how to improve agriculture. We know how to protect and restore ecosystems. None of this is a secret. You don’t need to wait for a magical new technology. It’s just a matter of building the cultural momentum, unlocking the political will, pressuring a shift in financing. 

Obviously, I know it’s not simple, but I do think it’s important for people to understand that we’re not lacking for solutions. We’re lacking for people working on them.

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Love rarely gets the credit it deserves for the advancement of science. Nor, for that matter, does hatred, greed, envy or any other emotion. Instead, this realm of knowledge tends to be idealized as something cold, hard, rational, neutral, and objective, dictated by data rather than feelings. The life and work of James Lovelock is proof that this is neither possible nor desirable. In his work, he helped us understand that humans can never completely divorce ourselves from any living subject because we are interconnected and interdependent, all part of the same Earth system, which he called Gaia.

Our planet, he argued, behaves like a giant organism—regulating its temperature, discharging waste and cycling chemicals to maintain a healthy balance. Although highly controversial among scientists in the 1970s and 80s, this holistic view of the world had mass appeal, which stretched from New Age spiritual gurus to that stern advocate of free-market orthodoxy, Margaret Thatcher. Its insights into the link between nature and climate have since inspired many of the world’s most influential climate scientists, philosophers, and environmental campaigners. The French philosopher Bruno Latour said the Gaia theory has reshaped humanity’s understanding of our place in the universe as fundamentally as the ideas of Galileo Galilei. At its simplest, Gaia is about restoring an emotional connection with a living planet.

Even in his darkest moments, Lovelock tended not to dwell on the causes of his unhappiness.

While the most prominent academics of the modern age made their names by delving ever deeper into narrow specialisms, Lovelock dismissed this as knowing “more and more about less and less” and worked instead on his own all-encompassing, and thus deeply unfashionable, theory of planetary life.

I first met Lovelock in the summer of 2020, during a break between pandemic lockdowns, when he was 101 years old. In person, he was utterly engrossing and kind. I had long wanted to interview the thinker who somehow managed to be both the inspiration for the green movement, and one of its fiercest critics. The account that follows, of the origins and development of Gaia theory, will probably surprise many of Lovelock’s followers, as it surprised me.

Knowing he did not have long to live, Lovelock told me: “I can tell you things now that I could not say before.” The true nature of the relationships that made the man and the hypothesis were hidden or downplayed for decades. Some were military (he worked for MI5 and MI6 for more than 50 years) or industrial secrets (he warned another employer, Shell, of the climate dangers of fossil fuels as early as 1966). Others were too painful to share with the public, his own family and, sometimes, himself. Even in his darkest moments, Lovelock tended not to dwell on the causes of his unhappiness. He preferred to move on. Everything was a problem to be solved.

What I discovered, and what has been lost in the years since Lovelock first formulated Gaia theory in the 1960s, is that the initial work was not his alone. Another thinker, and earlier collaborator, played a far more important conceptual role than has been acknowledged until now. It was a woman, Dian Hitchcock, whose name has largely been overlooked in accounts of the world-famous Gaia theory.

Lovelock told me his greatest discovery was the biotic link between the Earth’s life and its atmosphere. He envisaged it as a “cool flame” that has been burning off the planet’s excess heat for billions of years. From this emerged the Gaia theory and an obsession with the atmosphere’s relationship with life on Earth. But he could not have seen it alone. Lovelock was guided by a love affair with Hitchcock, an American philosopher and systems analyst, who he met at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. Like most brilliant women in the male-dominated world of science in the 1960s, Hitchcock struggled to have her ideas heard, let alone acknowledged. But Lovelock listened. And, as he later acknowledged, without Hitchcock, the world’s understanding of itself may well have been very different.

Lovelock had arrived at JPL in 1961 at the invitation of Abe Silverstein, the director of Space Flight Programs at NASA, who wanted an expert in chromatography to measure the chemical composition of the soil and air on other planets. For the science-fiction junkie Lovelock, it was “like a letter from a beloved. I was as excited and euphoric as if at the peak of passion.” He had been given a front-row seat to the reinvention of the modern world.

California felt like the future. Hollywood was in its pomp, Disneyland had opened six years earlier, Venice Beach was about to become a cradle of youth culture and Bell Labs, Fairchild and Hewlett-Packard were pioneering the computer-chip technology that was to lead to the creation of Silicon Valley. JPL led the fields of space exploration, robotics and rocket technology.

In the 1950s, Wernher von Braun, the German scientist who designed the V-2 rockets that devastated London in the second world war, made JPL the base for the US’s first successful satellite programme. It was his technology that the White House was relying on to provide the thrust for missions to the moon, Mars and Venus. By 1961, the San Gabriel hillside headquarters of JPL had become a meeting place for many of the planet’s finest minds, drawing in Nobel winners, such as Joshua Lederberg, and emerging “pop scientists” like Carl Sagan. There was no more thrilling time to be in the space business.

Lovelock had a relatively minor role as a technical adviser, but he was, he told me, the first Englishman to join the US space programme: the most high-profile, and most lavishly funded, of cold war fronts. Everyone on Earth had a stake in the US-USSR rivalry, but most people felt distant and powerless. Three years earlier, Lovelock had listened on his homemade shortwave radio in Finchley to the “beep, beep, beep” transmission of the USSR’s Sputnik, the first satellite that humanity had put into orbit. Now he was playing with the super powers.

Dian Hitchcock had been hired by NASA to keep tabs on the work being done at JPL to find life on Mars. The two organisations had been at loggerheads since 1958, when JPL had been placed under the jurisdiction of the newly created civilian space agency, Nasa, with day-to-day management carried out by the California Institute of Technology. JPL’s veteran scientists bristled at being told what to do by their counterparts in the younger but more powerful federal organisation. Nasa was determined to regain control. Hitchcock was both their spy and their battering ram. Lovelock became her besotted ally.

They had first met in the JPL canteen, where Hitchcock introduced herself to Lovelock with a joke: “Do you realise your surname is a polite version of mine?” The question delighted Lovelock. As they got to know one another, he also came to respect Hitchcock’s toughness in her dealings with her boss, her colleagues and the scientists. He later saw her yell furiously at a colleague in the street. “They were frightened of her. Nasa was very wise to send her down,” he recalled. They found much in common. Both had struggled to find intellectual peers throughout their lives.

Pillow talk involved imagining how a Martian scientist might find clues from the Earth’s atmosphere that our planet was full of life.

Hitchcock had grown used to being overlooked or ignored. She struggled to find anyone who would take her seriously. That and her inability to find people she could talk to on the same intellectual level left her feeling lonely. Lovelock seemed different. He came across as something of an outsider, and was more attentive than other men. “I was initially invisible. I couldn’t find people who would listen to me. But Jim did want to talk to me and I ate it up,” she said. “When I find someone I can talk to in depth it’s a wonderful experience. It happens rarely.”

They became not just collaborators but conspirators. Hitchcock was sceptical about JPL’s approach to finding life on Mars, while Lovelock had complaints about the inadequacy of the equipment. This set them against powerful interests. At JPL, the most optimistic scientists were those with the biggest stake in the research. Vance Oyama, an effusively cheerful biochemist who had joined the JPL programme from the University of Houston the same year as Lovelock, put the prospects of life on Mars at 50 percent. He had a multimillion-dollar reason to be enthusiastic, as he was responsible for designing one of the life-detection experiments on the Mars lander: a small box containing water and a “chicken soup” of nutrients that were to be poured on to Martian soil.

Hitchcock suggested her employer, the NASA contractor Hamilton Standard, hire Lovelock as a consultant, which meant she wrote the checks for all his flights, hotel bills and other expenses during trips to JPL. As his former laboratory assistant Peter Simmonds put it, Lovelock was now “among the suits.”

On March 31, 1965, Hitchcock submitted a scathing initial report to Hamilton Standard and its client Nasa, describing the plans of JPL’s bioscience division as excessively costly and unlikely to yield useful data. She accused the biologists of “geocentrism” in their assumption that experiments to find life on Earth would be equally applicable to other planets. She felt that information about the presence of life could be found in signs of order—in homeostasis—not in one specific surface location, but at a wider level. As an example of how this might be achieved, she spoke highly of a method of atmospheric gas sampling that she had “initiated” with Lovelock. “I thought it obvious that the best experiment to begin with was composition of the atmosphere,” she recalled. This plan was brilliantly simple and thus a clear threat to the complicated, multimillion-dollar experiments that had been on the table up to that point.

At a JPL strategy meeting, Lovelock weighed into the debate with a series of withering comments about using equipment developed in the Mojave Desert to find life on Mars. He instead proposed an analysis of gases to assess whether the planet was in equilibrium (lifelessly flatlining) or disequilibrium (vivaciously erratic) based on the assumption that life discharged waste (excess heat and gases) into space in order to maintain a habitable environment. It would be the basis for his theory of a self-regulating planet, which he would later call Gaia.

Lovelock’s first paper on detecting life on Mars was published in Nature in August 1965, under his name only. Hitchcock later complained that she deserved more credit, but she said nothing at the time.

The pair were not only working together by this stage, they were also having a love affair. “Our trysts were all in hotels in the US,” Lovelock remembered. “We carried on the affair for six months or more.” Sex and science were interwoven. Pillow talk involved imagining how a Martian scientist might find clues from the Earth’s atmosphere that our planet was full of life. This was essential for the Gaia hypothesis. Hitchcock said she had posed the key question: what made life possible here and, apparently, nowhere else? This set them thinking about the Earth as a self-regulating system in which the atmosphere was a product of life.

From this revolutionary perspective, the gases surrounding the Earth suddenly began to take on an air of vitality. They were not just life-enabling, they were suffused with life, like the exhalation of a planetary being—or what they called in their private correspondence, the “great animal.” Far more complex and irregular than the atmosphere of a dead planet like Mars, these gases burned with life.

They sounded out others. Sagan, who shared an office with Lovelock, provided a new dimension to their idea by asking how the Earth had remained relatively cool even though the sun had steadily grown hotter over the previous 8 billion years. Lewis Kaplan at JPL and Peter Fellgett at Reading University were important early allies and listeners. (Later, the pioneering US biologist Lynn Margulis would make an essential contribution, providing an explanation of how Lovelock’s theory might work in practice at a microbial level.) The long-dead physicist Erwin Schrödinger also provided an important key, according to Lovelock: “I knew nothing about finding life or what life was. The first thing I read was Schrödinger’s What is Life? He said life chucked out high-entropy systems into the environment. That was the basis of Gaia; I realized planet Earth excretes heat.”

In the mid-60s, this was all still too new and unformed to be described as a hypothesis. But it was a whole new way of thinking about life on Earth. They were going further than Charles Darwin in arguing that life does not just adapt to the environment, it also shapes it. This meant evolution was far more of a two-way relationship than mainstream science had previously acknowledged. Life was no longer just a passive object of change; it was an agent. The couple were thrilled. They were pioneers making an intellectual journey nobody had made before.

It was to be the high point in their relationship.

The following two years were a bumpy return to Earth. Lovelock was uncomfortable with the management duties he had been given at JPL. The budget was an unwelcome responsibility for a man who had struggled with numbers since childhood, and he was worried he lacked the street smarts to sniff out the charlatans who were pitching bogus multimillion-dollar projects. Meanwhile, the biologists Oyama and Lederberg were going above his head and taking every opportunity to put him down. “Oyama would come up and say: ‘What are you doing there? You are wasting your time, Nasa’s time,’” Lovelock recalled. “He was one of the few unbearable persons I have known in my life.”

In 1966, they had their way, and Lovelock and Hitchcock’s plans for an alternative Mars life-exploration operation using atmospheric analysis were dropped by the US space agency. “I am sorry to hear that politics has interfered with your chances of a subcontract from Nasa,” Fellgett commiserated.

Cracks started to appear in Lovelock’s relationship with Hitchcock. He had tried to keep the affair secret, but lying weighed heavily on him. They could never go to the theater, concerts, or parks in case they were spotted together, but close friends could see what was happening. “They naturally gravitated towards one another. It was obvious,” Simmonds said. When they corresponded, Lovelock insisted Hitchcock never discuss anything but work and science in her letters, which he knew would be opened by his wife, Helen, who also worked as his secretary. But intimacy and passion still came across in discussions of their theories.

Their view of the atmosphere “almost as something itself alive” was to become a pillar of Gaia theory.

Lovelock’s family noticed a change in his behaviour. The previous year, his mother had suspected he was unhappy in his marriage and struggling with a big decision. Helen openly ridiculed his newly acquired philosophical pretensions and way of talking—both no doubt influenced by Hitchcock. “Who does he think he is? A second Einstein?” she asked scornfully. Helen would refer to Hitchcock as “Madam” or “Fanny by Gaslight,” forbade her husband from introducing Hitchcock to other acquaintances, and insisted he spend less time in the US. But he could not stay away, and Helen could not help but fret: “Why do you keep asking me what I’m worried about? You know I don’t like (you) all those miles away. I’m only human, dear, and nervous. I can only sincerely hope by now you have been to JPL and found that you do not have to stay anything like a month. I had a night of nightmares…The bed is awfully big and cold without you.”

So, Lovelock visited JPL less frequently and for shorter periods. Hitchcock filled the physical void by throwing her energy into their shared intellectual work. Taking the lead, she began drafting a summary of their life-detection ideas for an ambitious series of journal papers about exobiology (the study of the possibility of life on other planets) that she hoped would persuade either the US Congress or the British parliament to fund a 100-inch infrared telescope to search planetary atmospheres for evidence of life.

But nothing seemed to be going their way. In successive weeks, their jointly authored paper on life detection was rejected by two major journals: the Proceedings of the Royal Society in the UK and then Science in the US. The partners agreed to swallow their pride and submit their work to the little-known journal Icarus. Hitchcock admitted to feeling downhearted in a handwritten note from 11 November 1966: “Enclosed is a copy of our masterpiece, now doubly blessed since it has been rejected by Science. No explanation so I suppose it got turned down by all the reviewers…Feel rather badly about the rejection. Have you ever had trouble like this, publishing anything?…As for going for Icarus, I can’t find anybody who’s even heard of the journal.”

Hitchcock refused to give up. In late 1966 and early 1967, she sent a flurry of long, intellectually vivacious letters to Lovelock about the papers they were working on together. Her correspondence during this period was obsessive, hesitant, acerbic, considerate, critical, encouraging and among the most brilliant in the Lovelock archives. These missives can be read as foundation stones for the Gaia hypothesis or as thinly disguised love letters.

The connection between life and the atmosphere, which was only intuited here, would be firmly established by climatologists.

In one she lamented that they were unable to meet in person to discuss their work, but she enthused about how far their intellectual journey had taken them. “I’m getting rather impressed with us as I read Biology and the Exploration of Mars—with the fantastic importance of the topic. Wow, if this works and we do find life on Mars we will be in the limelight,” she wrote. Further on, she portrayed the two of them as explorers, whose advanced ideas put them up against the world, or at least against the senior members of the JPL biology team.

The most impressive of these letters is a screed in which Hitchcock wrote to Lovelock with an eloquent summary of “our reasoning” and how this shared approach went beyond mainstream science. “We want to see whether a biota exists—not whether single animals exist,” she said. “It is also the nature of single species to affect their living and nonliving environments—to leave traces of themselves and their activity everywhere. Therefore we conclude that the biota must leave its characteristic signature on the ‘non-living’ portions of the environment.” Hitchcock then went on to describe how the couple had tried to identify life, in a letter dated December 13, 1966:

“We started our search for the unmistakable physical signature of the terrestrial biota, believing that if we found it, it would—like all other effects of biological entities—be recognizable as such by virtue of the fact that it represents ‘information’ in the pure and simple sense of a state of affairs which is enormously improbable on nonbiological grounds…We picked the atmosphere as the most likely residence of the signature, on the grounds that the chemical interactions with atmospheres are probably characteristic of all biotas. We then tried to find something in our atmosphere which would, for example, tell a good Martian chemist that life exists here. We made false starts because we foolishly looked for one giveaway component. There are none. Came the dawn and we saw that the total atmospheric mixture is a peculiar one, which is in fact so information-full that it is improbable. And so forth. And now we tend to view the atmosphere almost as something itself alive, because it is the product of the biota and an essential channel by which elements of the great living animal communicate—it is indeed the milieu internal which is maintained by the biota as a whole for the wellbeing of its components. This is getting too long. Hope it helps. Will write again soon.”

With hindsight, these words are astonishingly prescient and poignant. Their view of the atmosphere “almost as something itself alive” was to become a pillar of Gaia theory. The connection between life and the atmosphere, which was only intuited here, would be firmly established by climatologists. It was not just the persuasiveness of the science that resonates in this letter, but the intellectual passion with which ideas are developed and given lyrical expression. The poetic conclusion—“came the dawn”—reads as a hopeful burst of illumination and a sad intimation that their night together may be drawing to a close.

Their joint paper, “Life detection by atmospheric analysis,” was submitted to Icarus in December 1966. Lovelock acknowledged it was superior to his earlier piece for Nature: “Anybody who was competent would see the difference, how the ideas had been cleared up and presented in a much more logical way.” He insisted Hitchcock be lead author. Although glad to have him on board because she had never before written a scientific paper and would have struggled to get the piece published if she had put it solely under her name, she told me she had no doubt she deserved most of the credit: “I remember when I wrote that paper, I hardly let him put a word in.”

The year 1967 was to prove horrendous for them both, professionally and personally. In fact, it was a dire moment for the entire US space program. In January, three astronauts died in a flash fire during a test on an Apollo 204 spacecraft, prompting soul-searching and internal investigations. US politicians were no longer willing to write blank cheques for a race to Mars. Public priorities were shifting as the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement gained ground, and Congress slashed the Nasa budget.

“He just dropped me. I was puzzled and deeply hurt. It had to end, but he could have said something.”

The affair between Hitchcock and Lovelock was approaching an ugly end. Domestic pressures were becoming intense. Helen was increasingly prone to illness and resentment. On March 15, 1967, she wrote to Lovelock at JPL to say: “It seems as if you have been gone for ages,” and scornfully asked about Hitchcock: “Has Madam arrived yet?” Around this time, Lovelock’s colleague at JPL, Peter Simmonds, remembered things coming to a head. “He strayed from the fold. Helen told him to ‘get on a plane or you won’t have a marriage’ or some such ultimatum.”

Lovelock was forced into an agonising decision about Hitchcock. “We were in love with each other. It was very difficult. I think that was one of the worst times in my life. [Helen’s health] was getting much worse. She needed me. It was clear where duty led me and I had four kids. Had Helen been fit and well, despite the size of the family, it would have been easier to go off.” Instead, he decided to ditch Hitchcock. “I determined to break it off. It made me very miserable…I just couldn’t continue.”

The breakup, when it finally came, was brutal. Today, more than 50 years on, Hitchcock is still pained by the way things ended. “I think it was 1967. We were both checking into the Huntington and got rooms that were separated by a conference room. Just after I opened the door, a door on the opposite side was opened by Jim. We looked at each other and I said something like: ‘Look, Jim, this is really handy.’ Whereupon he closed the door and never spoke to me again. I was shattered. Probably ‘heartbroken’ is the appropriate term here. He didn’t give me any explanation. He didn’t say anything about Helen. He just dropped me. I was puzzled and deeply hurt. It had to end, but he could have said something…He could not possibly have been more miserable than I was.”

Hitchcock was reluctant to let go. That summer, she sent Lovelock a clipping of her interview with a newspaper in Connecticut, below the headline “A Telescopic Look at Life on Other Planets,” an article outlining the bid she and Lovelock were preparing in order to secure financial support for a telescope. In November, she wrote a memo for her company detailing the importance of her continued collaboration with Lovelock and stressing their work “must be published.”

But the flame had been extinguished. The last record of direct correspondence between the couple is an official invoice, dated March 18, 1968, and formally signed “consultant James E Lovelock.” Hitchcock was fired by Hamilton Standard soon after. “They were not pleased that I had anything at all to do with Mars,” she recalled. The same was probably also true for her relationship with Lovelock.

The doomed romance could not have been more symbolic. Hitchcock and Lovelock had transformed humanity’s view of its place in the universe. By revealing the interplay between life and the atmosphere, they had shown how fragile are the conditions for existence on this planet, and how unlikely are the prospects for life elsewhere in the solar system. They had brought romantic dreams of endless expansion back down to Earth with a bump.

This is an edited excerpt from The Many Lives of James Lovelock: Science, Secrets and Gaia Theory, published by Canongate on September 12 and available at guardianbookshop.com

This story was originally published by the Guardian and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Love rarely gets the credit it deserves for the advancement of science. Nor, for that matter, does hatred, greed, envy or any other emotion. Instead, this realm of knowledge tends to be idealized as something cold, hard, rational, neutral, and objective, dictated by data rather than feelings. The life and work of James Lovelock is proof that this is neither possible nor desirable. In his work, he helped us understand that humans can never completely divorce ourselves from any living subject because we are interconnected and interdependent, all part of the same Earth system, which he called Gaia.

Our planet, he argued, behaves like a giant organism—regulating its temperature, discharging waste and cycling chemicals to maintain a healthy balance. Although highly controversial among scientists in the 1970s and 80s, this holistic view of the world had mass appeal, which stretched from New Age spiritual gurus to that stern advocate of free-market orthodoxy, Margaret Thatcher. Its insights into the link between nature and climate have since inspired many of the world’s most influential climate scientists, philosophers, and environmental campaigners. The French philosopher Bruno Latour said the Gaia theory has reshaped humanity’s understanding of our place in the universe as fundamentally as the ideas of Galileo Galilei. At its simplest, Gaia is about restoring an emotional connection with a living planet.

Even in his darkest moments, Lovelock tended not to dwell on the causes of his unhappiness.

While the most prominent academics of the modern age made their names by delving ever deeper into narrow specialisms, Lovelock dismissed this as knowing “more and more about less and less” and worked instead on his own all-encompassing, and thus deeply unfashionable, theory of planetary life.

I first met Lovelock in the summer of 2020, during a break between pandemic lockdowns, when he was 101 years old. In person, he was utterly engrossing and kind. I had long wanted to interview the thinker who somehow managed to be both the inspiration for the green movement, and one of its fiercest critics. The account that follows, of the origins and development of Gaia theory, will probably surprise many of Lovelock’s followers, as it surprised me.

Knowing he did not have long to live, Lovelock told me: “I can tell you things now that I could not say before.” The true nature of the relationships that made the man and the hypothesis were hidden or downplayed for decades. Some were military (he worked for MI5 and MI6 for more than 50 years) or industrial secrets (he warned another employer, Shell, of the climate dangers of fossil fuels as early as 1966). Others were too painful to share with the public, his own family and, sometimes, himself. Even in his darkest moments, Lovelock tended not to dwell on the causes of his unhappiness. He preferred to move on. Everything was a problem to be solved.

What I discovered, and what has been lost in the years since Lovelock first formulated Gaia theory in the 1960s, is that the initial work was not his alone. Another thinker, and earlier collaborator, played a far more important conceptual role than has been acknowledged until now. It was a woman, Dian Hitchcock, whose name has largely been overlooked in accounts of the world-famous Gaia theory.

Lovelock told me his greatest discovery was the biotic link between the Earth’s life and its atmosphere. He envisaged it as a “cool flame” that has been burning off the planet’s excess heat for billions of years. From this emerged the Gaia theory and an obsession with the atmosphere’s relationship with life on Earth. But he could not have seen it alone. Lovelock was guided by a love affair with Hitchcock, an American philosopher and systems analyst, who he met at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California. Like most brilliant women in the male-dominated world of science in the 1960s, Hitchcock struggled to have her ideas heard, let alone acknowledged. But Lovelock listened. And, as he later acknowledged, without Hitchcock, the world’s understanding of itself may well have been very different.

Lovelock had arrived at JPL in 1961 at the invitation of Abe Silverstein, the director of Space Flight Programs at NASA, who wanted an expert in chromatography to measure the chemical composition of the soil and air on other planets. For the science-fiction junkie Lovelock, it was “like a letter from a beloved. I was as excited and euphoric as if at the peak of passion.” He had been given a front-row seat to the reinvention of the modern world.

California felt like the future. Hollywood was in its pomp, Disneyland had opened six years earlier, Venice Beach was about to become a cradle of youth culture and Bell Labs, Fairchild and Hewlett-Packard were pioneering the computer-chip technology that was to lead to the creation of Silicon Valley. JPL led the fields of space exploration, robotics and rocket technology.

In the 1950s, Wernher von Braun, the German scientist who designed the V-2 rockets that devastated London in the second world war, made JPL the base for the US’s first successful satellite programme. It was his technology that the White House was relying on to provide the thrust for missions to the moon, Mars and Venus. By 1961, the San Gabriel hillside headquarters of JPL had become a meeting place for many of the planet’s finest minds, drawing in Nobel winners, such as Joshua Lederberg, and emerging “pop scientists” like Carl Sagan. There was no more thrilling time to be in the space business.

Lovelock had a relatively minor role as a technical adviser, but he was, he told me, the first Englishman to join the US space programme: the most high-profile, and most lavishly funded, of cold war fronts. Everyone on Earth had a stake in the US-USSR rivalry, but most people felt distant and powerless. Three years earlier, Lovelock had listened on his homemade shortwave radio in Finchley to the “beep, beep, beep” transmission of the USSR’s Sputnik, the first satellite that humanity had put into orbit. Now he was playing with the super powers.

Dian Hitchcock had been hired by NASA to keep tabs on the work being done at JPL to find life on Mars. The two organisations had been at loggerheads since 1958, when JPL had been placed under the jurisdiction of the newly created civilian space agency, Nasa, with day-to-day management carried out by the California Institute of Technology. JPL’s veteran scientists bristled at being told what to do by their counterparts in the younger but more powerful federal organisation. Nasa was determined to regain control. Hitchcock was both their spy and their battering ram. Lovelock became her besotted ally.

They had first met in the JPL canteen, where Hitchcock introduced herself to Lovelock with a joke: “Do you realise your surname is a polite version of mine?” The question delighted Lovelock. As they got to know one another, he also came to respect Hitchcock’s toughness in her dealings with her boss, her colleagues and the scientists. He later saw her yell furiously at a colleague in the street. “They were frightened of her. Nasa was very wise to send her down,” he recalled. They found much in common. Both had struggled to find intellectual peers throughout their lives.

Pillow talk involved imagining how a Martian scientist might find clues from the Earth’s atmosphere that our planet was full of life.

Hitchcock had grown used to being overlooked or ignored. She struggled to find anyone who would take her seriously. That and her inability to find people she could talk to on the same intellectual level left her feeling lonely. Lovelock seemed different. He came across as something of an outsider, and was more attentive than other men. “I was initially invisible. I couldn’t find people who would listen to me. But Jim did want to talk to me and I ate it up,” she said. “When I find someone I can talk to in depth it’s a wonderful experience. It happens rarely.”

They became not just collaborators but conspirators. Hitchcock was sceptical about JPL’s approach to finding life on Mars, while Lovelock had complaints about the inadequacy of the equipment. This set them against powerful interests. At JPL, the most optimistic scientists were those with the biggest stake in the research. Vance Oyama, an effusively cheerful biochemist who had joined the JPL programme from the University of Houston the same year as Lovelock, put the prospects of life on Mars at 50 percent. He had a multimillion-dollar reason to be enthusiastic, as he was responsible for designing one of the life-detection experiments on the Mars lander: a small box containing water and a “chicken soup” of nutrients that were to be poured on to Martian soil.

Hitchcock suggested her employer, the NASA contractor Hamilton Standard, hire Lovelock as a consultant, which meant she wrote the checks for all his flights, hotel bills and other expenses during trips to JPL. As his former laboratory assistant Peter Simmonds put it, Lovelock was now “among the suits.”

On March 31, 1965, Hitchcock submitted a scathing initial report to Hamilton Standard and its client Nasa, describing the plans of JPL’s bioscience division as excessively costly and unlikely to yield useful data. She accused the biologists of “geocentrism” in their assumption that experiments to find life on Earth would be equally applicable to other planets. She felt that information about the presence of life could be found in signs of order—in homeostasis—not in one specific surface location, but at a wider level. As an example of how this might be achieved, she spoke highly of a method of atmospheric gas sampling that she had “initiated” with Lovelock. “I thought it obvious that the best experiment to begin with was composition of the atmosphere,” she recalled. This plan was brilliantly simple and thus a clear threat to the complicated, multimillion-dollar experiments that had been on the table up to that point.

At a JPL strategy meeting, Lovelock weighed into the debate with a series of withering comments about using equipment developed in the Mojave Desert to find life on Mars. He instead proposed an analysis of gases to assess whether the planet was in equilibrium (lifelessly flatlining) or disequilibrium (vivaciously erratic) based on the assumption that life discharged waste (excess heat and gases) into space in order to maintain a habitable environment. It would be the basis for his theory of a self-regulating planet, which he would later call Gaia.

Lovelock’s first paper on detecting life on Mars was published in Nature in August 1965, under his name only. Hitchcock later complained that she deserved more credit, but she said nothing at the time.

The pair were not only working together by this stage, they were also having a love affair. “Our trysts were all in hotels in the US,” Lovelock remembered. “We carried on the affair for six months or more.” Sex and science were interwoven. Pillow talk involved imagining how a Martian scientist might find clues from the Earth’s atmosphere that our planet was full of life. This was essential for the Gaia hypothesis. Hitchcock said she had posed the key question: what made life possible here and, apparently, nowhere else? This set them thinking about the Earth as a self-regulating system in which the atmosphere was a product of life.

From this revolutionary perspective, the gases surrounding the Earth suddenly began to take on an air of vitality. They were not just life-enabling, they were suffused with life, like the exhalation of a planetary being—or what they called in their private correspondence, the “great animal.” Far more complex and irregular than the atmosphere of a dead planet like Mars, these gases burned with life.

They sounded out others. Sagan, who shared an office with Lovelock, provided a new dimension to their idea by asking how the Earth had remained relatively cool even though the sun had steadily grown hotter over the previous 8 billion years. Lewis Kaplan at JPL and Peter Fellgett at Reading University were important early allies and listeners. (Later, the pioneering US biologist Lynn Margulis would make an essential contribution, providing an explanation of how Lovelock’s theory might work in practice at a microbial level.) The long-dead physicist Erwin Schrödinger also provided an important key, according to Lovelock: “I knew nothing about finding life or what life was. The first thing I read was Schrödinger’s What is Life? He said life chucked out high-entropy systems into the environment. That was the basis of Gaia; I realized planet Earth excretes heat.”

In the mid-60s, this was all still too new and unformed to be described as a hypothesis. But it was a whole new way of thinking about life on Earth. They were going further than Charles Darwin in arguing that life does not just adapt to the environment, it also shapes it. This meant evolution was far more of a two-way relationship than mainstream science had previously acknowledged. Life was no longer just a passive object of change; it was an agent. The couple were thrilled. They were pioneers making an intellectual journey nobody had made before.

It was to be the high point in their relationship.

The following two years were a bumpy return to Earth. Lovelock was uncomfortable with the management duties he had been given at JPL. The budget was an unwelcome responsibility for a man who had struggled with numbers since childhood, and he was worried he lacked the street smarts to sniff out the charlatans who were pitching bogus multimillion-dollar projects. Meanwhile, the biologists Oyama and Lederberg were going above his head and taking every opportunity to put him down. “Oyama would come up and say: ‘What are you doing there? You are wasting your time, Nasa’s time,’” Lovelock recalled. “He was one of the few unbearable persons I have known in my life.”

In 1966, they had their way, and Lovelock and Hitchcock’s plans for an alternative Mars life-exploration operation using atmospheric analysis were dropped by the US space agency. “I am sorry to hear that politics has interfered with your chances of a subcontract from Nasa,” Fellgett commiserated.

Cracks started to appear in Lovelock’s relationship with Hitchcock. He had tried to keep the affair secret, but lying weighed heavily on him. They could never go to the theater, concerts, or parks in case they were spotted together, but close friends could see what was happening. “They naturally gravitated towards one another. It was obvious,” Simmonds said. When they corresponded, Lovelock insisted Hitchcock never discuss anything but work and science in her letters, which he knew would be opened by his wife, Helen, who also worked as his secretary. But intimacy and passion still came across in discussions of their theories.

Their view of the atmosphere “almost as something itself alive” was to become a pillar of Gaia theory.

Lovelock’s family noticed a change in his behaviour. The previous year, his mother had suspected he was unhappy in his marriage and struggling with a big decision. Helen openly ridiculed his newly acquired philosophical pretensions and way of talking—both no doubt influenced by Hitchcock. “Who does he think he is? A second Einstein?” she asked scornfully. Helen would refer to Hitchcock as “Madam” or “Fanny by Gaslight,” forbade her husband from introducing Hitchcock to other acquaintances, and insisted he spend less time in the US. But he could not stay away, and Helen could not help but fret: “Why do you keep asking me what I’m worried about? You know I don’t like (you) all those miles away. I’m only human, dear, and nervous. I can only sincerely hope by now you have been to JPL and found that you do not have to stay anything like a month. I had a night of nightmares…The bed is awfully big and cold without you.”

So, Lovelock visited JPL less frequently and for shorter periods. Hitchcock filled the physical void by throwing her energy into their shared intellectual work. Taking the lead, she began drafting a summary of their life-detection ideas for an ambitious series of journal papers about exobiology (the study of the possibility of life on other planets) that she hoped would persuade either the US Congress or the British parliament to fund a 100-inch infrared telescope to search planetary atmospheres for evidence of life.

But nothing seemed to be going their way. In successive weeks, their jointly authored paper on life detection was rejected by two major journals: the Proceedings of the Royal Society in the UK and then Science in the US. The partners agreed to swallow their pride and submit their work to the little-known journal Icarus. Hitchcock admitted to feeling downhearted in a handwritten note from 11 November 1966: “Enclosed is a copy of our masterpiece, now doubly blessed since it has been rejected by Science. No explanation so I suppose it got turned down by all the reviewers…Feel rather badly about the rejection. Have you ever had trouble like this, publishing anything?…As for going for Icarus, I can’t find anybody who’s even heard of the journal.”

Hitchcock refused to give up. In late 1966 and early 1967, she sent a flurry of long, intellectually vivacious letters to Lovelock about the papers they were working on together. Her correspondence during this period was obsessive, hesitant, acerbic, considerate, critical, encouraging and among the most brilliant in the Lovelock archives. These missives can be read as foundation stones for the Gaia hypothesis or as thinly disguised love letters.

The connection between life and the atmosphere, which was only intuited here, would be firmly established by climatologists.

In one she lamented that they were unable to meet in person to discuss their work, but she enthused about how far their intellectual journey had taken them. “I’m getting rather impressed with us as I read Biology and the Exploration of Mars—with the fantastic importance of the topic. Wow, if this works and we do find life on Mars we will be in the limelight,” she wrote. Further on, she portrayed the two of them as explorers, whose advanced ideas put them up against the world, or at least against the senior members of the JPL biology team.

The most impressive of these letters is a screed in which Hitchcock wrote to Lovelock with an eloquent summary of “our reasoning” and how this shared approach went beyond mainstream science. “We want to see whether a biota exists—not whether single animals exist,” she said. “It is also the nature of single species to affect their living and nonliving environments—to leave traces of themselves and their activity everywhere. Therefore we conclude that the biota must leave its characteristic signature on the ‘non-living’ portions of the environment.” Hitchcock then went on to describe how the couple had tried to identify life, in a letter dated December 13, 1966:

“We started our search for the unmistakable physical signature of the terrestrial biota, believing that if we found it, it would—like all other effects of biological entities—be recognizable as such by virtue of the fact that it represents ‘information’ in the pure and simple sense of a state of affairs which is enormously improbable on nonbiological grounds…We picked the atmosphere as the most likely residence of the signature, on the grounds that the chemical interactions with atmospheres are probably characteristic of all biotas. We then tried to find something in our atmosphere which would, for example, tell a good Martian chemist that life exists here. We made false starts because we foolishly looked for one giveaway component. There are none. Came the dawn and we saw that the total atmospheric mixture is a peculiar one, which is in fact so information-full that it is improbable. And so forth. And now we tend to view the atmosphere almost as something itself alive, because it is the product of the biota and an essential channel by which elements of the great living animal communicate—it is indeed the milieu internal which is maintained by the biota as a whole for the wellbeing of its components. This is getting too long. Hope it helps. Will write again soon.”

With hindsight, these words are astonishingly prescient and poignant. Their view of the atmosphere “almost as something itself alive” was to become a pillar of Gaia theory. The connection between life and the atmosphere, which was only intuited here, would be firmly established by climatologists. It was not just the persuasiveness of the science that resonates in this letter, but the intellectual passion with which ideas are developed and given lyrical expression. The poetic conclusion—“came the dawn”—reads as a hopeful burst of illumination and a sad intimation that their night together may be drawing to a close.

Their joint paper, “Life detection by atmospheric analysis,” was submitted to Icarus in December 1966. Lovelock acknowledged it was superior to his earlier piece for Nature: “Anybody who was competent would see the difference, how the ideas had been cleared up and presented in a much more logical way.” He insisted Hitchcock be lead author. Although glad to have him on board because she had never before written a scientific paper and would have struggled to get the piece published if she had put it solely under her name, she told me she had no doubt she deserved most of the credit: “I remember when I wrote that paper, I hardly let him put a word in.”

The year 1967 was to prove horrendous for them both, professionally and personally. In fact, it was a dire moment for the entire US space program. In January, three astronauts died in a flash fire during a test on an Apollo 204 spacecraft, prompting soul-searching and internal investigations. US politicians were no longer willing to write blank cheques for a race to Mars. Public priorities were shifting as the Vietnam war and the civil rights movement gained ground, and Congress slashed the Nasa budget.

“He just dropped me. I was puzzled and deeply hurt. It had to end, but he could have said something.”

The affair between Hitchcock and Lovelock was approaching an ugly end. Domestic pressures were becoming intense. Helen was increasingly prone to illness and resentment. On March 15, 1967, she wrote to Lovelock at JPL to say: “It seems as if you have been gone for ages,” and scornfully asked about Hitchcock: “Has Madam arrived yet?” Around this time, Lovelock’s colleague at JPL, Peter Simmonds, remembered things coming to a head. “He strayed from the fold. Helen told him to ‘get on a plane or you won’t have a marriage’ or some such ultimatum.”

Lovelock was forced into an agonising decision about Hitchcock. “We were in love with each other. It was very difficult. I think that was one of the worst times in my life. [Helen’s health] was getting much worse. She needed me. It was clear where duty led me and I had four kids. Had Helen been fit and well, despite the size of the family, it would have been easier to go off.” Instead, he decided to ditch Hitchcock. “I determined to break it off. It made me very miserable…I just couldn’t continue.”

The breakup, when it finally came, was brutal. Today, more than 50 years on, Hitchcock is still pained by the way things ended. “I think it was 1967. We were both checking into the Huntington and got rooms that were separated by a conference room. Just after I opened the door, a door on the opposite side was opened by Jim. We looked at each other and I said something like: ‘Look, Jim, this is really handy.’ Whereupon he closed the door and never spoke to me again. I was shattered. Probably ‘heartbroken’ is the appropriate term here. He didn’t give me any explanation. He didn’t say anything about Helen. He just dropped me. I was puzzled and deeply hurt. It had to end, but he could have said something…He could not possibly have been more miserable than I was.”

Hitchcock was reluctant to let go. That summer, she sent Lovelock a clipping of her interview with a newspaper in Connecticut, below the headline “A Telescopic Look at Life on Other Planets,” an article outlining the bid she and Lovelock were preparing in order to secure financial support for a telescope. In November, she wrote a memo for her company detailing the importance of her continued collaboration with Lovelock and stressing their work “must be published.”

But the flame had been extinguished. The last record of direct correspondence between the couple is an official invoice, dated March 18, 1968, and formally signed “consultant James E Lovelock.” Hitchcock was fired by Hamilton Standard soon after. “They were not pleased that I had anything at all to do with Mars,” she recalled. The same was probably also true for her relationship with Lovelock.

The doomed romance could not have been more symbolic. Hitchcock and Lovelock had transformed humanity’s view of its place in the universe. By revealing the interplay between life and the atmosphere, they had shown how fragile are the conditions for existence on this planet, and how unlikely are the prospects for life elsewhere in the solar system. They had brought romantic dreams of endless expansion back down to Earth with a bump.

This is an edited excerpt from The Many Lives of James Lovelock: Science, Secrets and Gaia Theory, published by Canongate on September 12 and available at guardianbookshop.com

When his uncle Donald became president, Fred Trump III—whose son William, due to a rare genetic mutation, has seizures and an intellectual disability—saw an opportunity to advocate for disability rights.

In a Time excerpt of his forthcoming book All in the Family, Fred Trump revealed a disturbing conversation with the then-president following a White House meeting in which he discussed how expensive caring for people with complex disabilities can be. Donald Trump said of some disabled people, his nephew recounted, “The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”

Time said that it had reached out to Donald Trump for comment about his nephew’s allegations but received no response.

It wasn’t the only concerning conversation Trump’s nephew alleged that they had. When a Trump family medical fund for William’s medical and living expenses was running low, Fred said his uncle told him, “He doesn’t recognize you. Maybe you should just let him die and move down to Florida.”

“The shape they’re in, all the expenses, maybe those kinds of people should just die.”

It wouldn’t be the first time Donald Trump has made offensive comments about disabled people. He infamously made fun of a reporter’s disability at a 2015 rally. But it’s still even more shocking to hear from a close relative that he clearly does not value the life of his own disabled family member.

When police kill someone, a medical examiner lists their cause of death—which plays a significant role in whether a police officer will be held accountable.

Some of those determinations shield the police from potential accountability: notably, “excited delirium,” a so-called syndrome not recognized in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders or the International Classification of Diseases, with research finding that most deaths attributed to the term involve aggressive restraint.

Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús, a professor of American studies at Princeton University, traces the history of “excited delirium” in a new book, Excited Delirium: Race, Police Violence, and the Invention of a Disease—and calls it a “very useful tool that has allowed medical examiners to participate in these cover-ups.”

Beliso-De Jesús spoke to me about the racist and xenophobic views behind the term, the devastating impact of its pseudoscience on the families of the deceased, and what has to be done to move forward.

Forensic pathologist Charles Wetli first used the concept of “excited delirium” in dismissing the deaths of Black sex workers in the 1980s; they were later found to have been murdered by a serial killer. Does the term’s origin speak to its being dehumanizing? 

Medical diagnoses are supposed to be helpful to people. But as we can see in the example of excited delirium, and specifically with the misdiagnosis of the cases that you’re referring to—the misdiagnosis of Black women who were strangled to death, murdered and raped by a serial killer—which Charles Wetli described as “cocaine sex deaths,” this horrific term was really used for him to substantiate his argument.

He used these Black women’s deaths to sort of make the argument that Black people, who he saw as a species that was separate from white people, had a specific genetic flaw [causing them] to die spontaneously.

He argued Black women died through small amounts of cocaine use and sexual activity, which he assumed or presumed to be consensual. Then he argued that Black men died spontaneously around police officers. This reveals so much dehumanization.

How did Wetli use and misconstrue Afro-Latine religions in rationalizing excited delirium? 

The relationship between Wetli’s research on Afro-Cubans and cocaine and “excited delirium syndrome” is not direct or obvious, but I think it’s much more subtle and ingrained. So this is the 1980s, during the Mariel Boatlift, when 125,000 Cubans arrived as refugees in Miami—and those Cubans that arrive are darker, poorer and less well or less resourced than the previous generations of Cubans, who were whiter and wealthier.

Wetli was in his first couple of years as the new assistant medical examiner, and at the same time, there was a mass criminalization of this community. You see it in stereotypes like the famous Tony Montana from Scarface, who is this sweaty, aggravated, sexual predator mobster who is addicted to cocaine and murder.

Charles Wetli’s research on Afro-Cubans and cocaine, particularly on the tattoos of Afro-Cubans, is a participation in this longer criminalization of Afro-Cuban religions. He has this hobby where he claims himself as an expert on Afro-Caribbean religions, or cults, as he calls them.

He’s saying that, basically, mostly Black and Latino men have this tendency to become aggressive, sweaty, and overheated—essentially just self-combusting as a result of their aggressiveness. And as a result, he argues, they die, and police witness their deaths. It becomes a pattern with the Afro-Cubans he’s studying, where he blames the religion and the Cubans as these aggressive criminals, almost a plague infection into the United States.

How has the label of “excited delirium” in the killing of Black people by police been used to underplay how lethal other forms of police violence can be, such as the use of tasers?

Excited delirium has allowed for certain deaths to go under the radar for so long. With shootings, it’s very clear what the cause of death was. But for many years, with this term, these deaths have been completely ignored.

What excited delirium does is say that the person’s own behavior— cocaine use or hyper-masculinity, aggressiveness—leads to their death. As a result, there’s a very frightening, medicalized cover-up of police violence. If it hadn’t been for footage of George Floyd’s death, many people would have taken for granted the initial argument: that he was simply a man who died under medical distress. That was what [Minneapolis police] had posted when his death first occurred. Without the bystander video, there really would have been no way for the world to have known that this was someone who was essentially murdered in plain sight.

Was there anything that stood out to you in conversations with family members of people whose deaths were labeled as excited delirium?

For a lot of the family members I spoke with, there is a sense of relief—because for many years, people were blaming the victims. A family I interviewed was told that their father just suddenly up and died during a police car chase, that it was his drug use, and his heart had just self-combusted. There were other stories that maybe the police had pushed him off the road. Questions around that completely got erased by the narrative.

These people who are labeled as dying by “excited delirium” are often seen as written off by society, similar to the way that the Black women who were murdered and raped were written off as so-called “crack whores.” That weaponization [of the term] by police justified blaming the victims, and in many [cases], created a buffer for police and medical doctors to work together to write off whole communities.

The American Medical Association came out against “excited delirium” in 2021. What do you think would need to change for its racist pseudoscience to be discarded?

I’m really glad to see that there have been many people, many organizations, many states, actively working against excited delirium right now. I think it’s [a trend] that grew out of the post-2020 uprising of people coming together and recognizing systemic police violence.

That practice has not gone away simply because people don’t use the term any longer. People are still being tased and asphyxiated. Police officers are putting their weight on people’s bodies, putting them into chokeholds; people are complaining of not being able to breathe, and then ultimately dying. Medical examiners and coroners are still using the same kinds of medical justifications, like heart failure and drug use, rather than acknowledging the role of police violence in these deaths.

We have to continue to ensure that we don’t just focus solely on this term, but on the broader structure of policing in the country and how these two institutions—medical institutions, police institutions—are tied together.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

This story was originally published by Grist and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

Talking about climate change doesn’t come naturally to most people, even those who are worried about it. Roughly two-thirds of Americans report discussing it with family and friends “rarely” or “never,” a survey found last fall. They might be intimidated by the science, nervous about starting an argument, or afraid of being a Debbie Downer. The resulting silence is part of why there’s not more social pressure to reduce fossil fuel emissions: People dramatically underestimate public support for climate policies, because that’s the cue they’re getting from those around them. The only way to break this cycle, communication experts have said for many years, is to please, please, start talking about it.

But a recently published book makes the case that not just any kind of talking is good; anything that resembles the phrasing of fossil fuel propaganda, even unwittingly, undermines what should be the central goal of reducing emissions. In The Language of Climate Politics, Genevieve Guenther, a former Renaissance scholar turned climate activist, writes that fossil fuel talking points have weaseled their way into becoming the “common-sense position,” espoused not just by the right, but also by the left.

Guenther founded the New York City-based volunteer group End Climate Silence in 2018, in the hopes of provoking the media into talking more about climate change. The common-sense philosophy behind her work is that words shape ideas, and ideas have consequences, so we should rethink the words we use. “To secure a livable future, one thing we will need to do is dismantle and reframe the terms dominating the language of climate politics,” Guenther writes.

“The book is positioned not so much as a guide to communication, but as a guide to taking a side in a battle of words: “One of the most powerful weapons you have is your voice.”

Her book lays out six key terms that she believes command the conversation, to the detriment of climate action: “alarmist,” “costs,” “growth,” “India and China,” “innovation,” and “resilience.”

These words are often used to prop up fossil fuels: by accusing people who speak out about the risks as overly alarmed, by pitting climate action against economic prosperity, by deflecting attention away from the US and onto other countries, and by protecting the status quo by pointing to carbon removal technologies and societies’ ability to bounce back. The book seeks to debunk these points of view, smartly documenting, for example, how economic models failed to account for the true costs of climate change for so long.

For each term, Guenther offers substitute arguments that “will be hard for fossil fuel interests to appropriate.” Don’t talk about “resilience,” she says, because it implies people can tough out extreme weather; talk about “transformation” instead. The result is a binary approach that suggests there is a right way and a wrong way to talk about the climate. This quest for black-and-white moral clarity risks antagonizing potential allies—such as the climate-concerned folks who think that carbon removal has promise or advocates who worry that a message could backfire if it sounds too scary, not to mention younger Republicans, two-thirds of whom favor prioritizing renewable energy over expanding fossil fuels. But that’s a risk Guenther is willing to take.

The opening chapter of The Language of Climate Politics scrutinizes the word “alarmist,” often used to accuse scientists of exaggerating dangers, in the service of embracing “alarmed,” which Guenther thinks is “a perfectly appropriate” response to the planet exiting the comfortable conditions that complex societies evolved in over the last 10,000 years. She criticizes the various factions within the climate discourse, from “lukewarmers” and “techno-optimists” who imagine a warmer future won’t be so bad, to “doomers” who imagine it’s too late to fix anything. 

In the same spirit of putting people into boxes, Guenther’s critics might classify her as a “carbon reductionist” whose dogged focus on ending CO2 emissions elides the complex social and political factors behind weather disasters. In her view, anyone who questions those sounding the alarm, even a scientist who dislikes hyperbole, is overstepping. After the UN Secretary-General António Guterres proclaimed last year that the era of “global boiling” had arrived, NASA climate scientist Chris Colose criticized it as a “cringe” phrase that lets “bad faith people get an easy laugh.” Guenther condemns this critique as a distraction.

She acknowledges that her argument—“climate change will become catastrophic for everyone if the world does not phase out fossil fuels”—may not resonate broadly. “You may repel people who are generally disengaged from the climate crisis—not to mention centrist optimists—because it will be too much for them to take in at once. But that’s OK.” Her audience clearly isn’t the general public. To support this narrow focus, Guenther points to the “3.5 percent rule,” the idea that you only need to mobilize a small minority, 3.5 percent of a population, to force serious political change. 

To make the “vast, swift system change now needed to head off collapse, we will need to take a pretty large swathe of the 99 percent with us,” wrote an Extinction Rebellion strategist.

The problem is that this number comes from political science research on how nonviolent campaigns can overthrow authoritarian governments, not campaigns seeking social change in democracies. It doesn’t necessarily translate to the process of implementing laws to reduce emissions over decades. The Harvard researcher behind the rule, Erica Chenoweth, has warned that aiming to mobilize 3.5 percent of a population without building wide public support is no guarantee of success. “It can be easy to conclude, I think wrongly, that all you need is 3.5 percent of the population on your side,” Chenoweth said on a podcast in 2022.

One climate activist group that was inspired by the 3.5 percent rule has since shifted away from the strategy. Extinction Rebellion drew the world’s attention in 2018 when its members in the United Kingdom began blockading bridges, supergluing their hands to government buildings, and pouring fake blood on the streets.

For years, critics within the organization warned that it was misusing the rule, potentially missing out on more effective strategies that would bring in the broader approval needed to enact climate policies. “To actually effect the kind of vast, swift system change now needed to head off collapse, we will need to take a pretty large swathe of the 99 percent with us,” wrote Rupert Read, a former XR strategist, in 2019.

Three years later, recognizing this need, Extinction Rebellion UK announced that it was shifting tactics from smashing windows to building bridges, “prioritizing attendance over arrest and relationships over roadblocks.” Since then, organizers say, support has grown and more people are becoming members.

Near the end of The Language of Climate Politics, in what could be read as a self-critique, Guenther gestures toward the need for a broad movement to force the US to move away from fossil fuels—one that includes Black communities fighting toxic pollution, young people worried about their future, and possibly even (gasp) climate tech entrepreneurs. The book as a whole, with its emphasis on reinforcing divisions, feels firmly placed in a time when social media has inflamed polarization, and a moment when a Democratic president has been in power for years.

Having a climate-friendly face like President Joe Biden in the White House tends to cause the environmental movement to splinter, with some groups focused on “insider” tactics, like lobbying Congress and crafting policies, and others focusing on “outsider” tactics, pushing for more ambitious change by protesting. By contrast, if former president and vigorous climate denier Donald Trump gets reelected this fall, even the vaguely climate-concerned could be mobilized for a revived “Resistance” movement, once again united by a common enemy.

What Guenther’s book gets right is that conversations about climate change have to be steered away from tired talking points toward new, productive ground. But the book is positioned not so much as a guide to communication, but as a guide to taking a side in a battle of words, with Guenther writing, “One of the most powerful weapons you have is your voice.”

Research shows that the hard work of persuasion, however, usually starts with listening to people with an empathetic, nonjudgmental ear, as opposed to debating them. It involves asking questions, building trust, and accepting that you’re not always right. Guenther eventually embraces this practical advice for approaching conversations with real people in a three-page afterword, and it seems to counter the strident tone of the nearly 200 pages that preceded it. That’s because there isn’t one right way to talk about climate change, but many.