Here's Dr. Doom; A founding father of environmentalism has embraced fatalism--and the public loves it.(James Lovelock )

Byline: William Underhill

James Lovelock has a modest explanation for his success. At the age of 86, the grand old seer of the environmentalist movement is high on the best-seller lists again with an account of the coming eco-apocalypse. So what's his secret? Says the pre-eminent scientist and author: "A cheerfully told story of doom will always prove pretty popular."

His latest, "The Revenge of Gaia," is intended to be a wake-up call to world leaders. Our careless approach to the world's resources, warns Lovelock, has set us on a course for calamity, as rising temperatures threaten to disrupt life on Earth. Where the British scientist parts ways with other environmentalists is in his fatalism. Catastrophe, he says, is inevitable. The direst consequences of global warming can be postponed, but not prevented. "Our future is like that of passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls knowing that the engine is about to fail," he writes. Forget the hopeful talk of renewable energy, the Kyoto Protocol and sustainable development. It's time to make ready the life rafts.

The message of doom has struck a chord. Since hitting bookstores earlier this year, "Gaia" is selling at a rate serious scientists rarely achieve. Journalists from as far afield as Germany and South Korea are calling or beating a path to the door of Lovelock's Devonshire mill. One recent book signing in a nearby town, held in the cinema, attracted 600 people, three times the building's capacity. "I've never known anything like it," he says. "Most of these people were just ordinary housewives and their husbands."

Until now, some of the biggest environmental pessimists have come from the right end of the political spectrum--the inevitability of rising temperatures is often used to dismiss the Kyoto treaty. Lovelock, on the other hand, is the man who first alerted the world to the dangers of ozone-eating chlorofluorocarbons in the 1970s. Forty years ago he developed the idea of the planet as Gaia, named for the Greek goddess of the Earth, with qualities comparable to a living organism's: for 3 billion years the world had managed to sustain life through an intricate system ...