Animate Earth: Science, Intuition,
And Gaia by Stephan Harding
Very Strongly Recommended
How Gaian science can help us to develop a sense of connectedness with
the more-than-human world. Dr. Stephan Harding, a long time
collaborator of James Lovelock, replaces the cold, objectifying language of
science with a way of speaking of our planet as a sentient, living being, not
a dead, inert mechanism. Animate Earth argues that we need to
establish a right relationship with the planet as a living entity in which we
are embedded—and to which, in the final analysis, we are all accountable.
The book inspires the reader to connect with a profound sense of the value
of the Earth, and to discover what it means to live as harmoniously as
possible within a sentient creature of planetary proportions.
Personal Review: Animate Earth: Science, Intuition, And Gaia
by Stephan Harding

This book offers a brilliant new approach - at once rigorous, experiential,
and intuitive - to the most up-to-date research within planetary ecology.
Harding is a close associate of James Lovelock, the polymathic scientist
who formulated the Gaia hypothesis - the theory that the chemical
composition of the earth's atmosphere, its temperature, the salinity of its
oceans, and a host of other variables are continually monitored and
modulated by all the earth's organic constituents acting collectively, as a
vast planetary metabolism. Originally considered an utterly radical
hypothesis when first proposed in the 1970s, Lovelock's insight early on
attracted the active support and research interest of one of the most far-
seeing American biologists, the audacious microbial biologist Lynn
Margulis, and has since, as their evidence mounted, garnered more and
more respect from the scientific community. Today most of the theory's
tenets have been integrated within the standard account of planetary
ecology.
Harding - the staff scientist at Schumacher College - brings a new, deeply
participatory approach to the articulation of whole earth science, employing
a nuanced sense of philosophy and the history of ideas in order to
demonstrate the transformative, paradigm-shattering power of Gaian
theory. Throughout his lucid presentation of recent and ongoing empirical
research, Harding strives to show the relevance of these remarkable
discoveries to our most personal experience of the world immediately
around us.
Current evidence is pushing various researchers in the natural sciences
away from the through-going objectivism of previous science toward a
more animistic acknowledgment that the biosphere in which we're
immersed is more a living subject than a determinate object, and hence
that their research is less a pursuit of inert and unchanging "facts," than it
is an ongoing participation, and dialog, with a vast, spherical sentience
whose corporeal complexity we can never completely fathom, and whose
actions we can never entirely predict. At every step in his presentation,
Harding offers richly imaginative and meditative exercises for the reader to
try, as a way to experience these insights viscerally and corporeally - as a
way to EMBODY this new understanding of our physiological
interdependence (or interbeing) with the animate earth, and so to let this
understanding resonate within our daily life.
At such a precarious historical moment as this one we're in, such creative,
interdisciplinary visions as Harding's are catalyzing a new and more
mature kind of science. They provoke a new kind of intelligence - a
rationality informed by our ongoing sensory experience of the world around
us, and by the empathic heart beating within our chest - a keen and
rigorous intelligence that places itself in service not to humankind alone,
but to the wild, more-than-human community of life.
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