Animate Earth: Science, Intuition, And Gaia [Paperback]

Stephan Harding (Author), Lynn Margulis (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 15, 2006

Modern science and western culture both teach that the planet we inhabit is a dead and passive lump of matter, but as Stephan Harding points out, this wasn't always the prevailing sentiment and in Animate Earth he sets out to explain how these older notions of an animate earth can be explained in rational, scientific terms. In this astounding book Harding lays out the facts and theories behind one of the most controversial notions to come out of the hard sciences arguably since Sir Isaac Newton's Principia or the first major publications to come out of the Copenhagen School regarding quantum mechanics. The latter is an important parallel: Whereas quantum mechanics is a science of the problem--it gave rise to the atomic bomb among other things--Gaia Theory in this age of global warming and dangerous climate change is a science of the solution. Its utility: Healing a dying planet becomes an option in a culture otherwise poised to fall into total ecological collapse. Replacing the cold, objectifying language of science with a way of speaking of our planet as a sentient, living being, Harding presents the science of Gaia in everyday English. His scientific passion and rigor shine through his luminous prose as he calls us to experience Gaia as a living presence and bringing to mind such popular science authors as James Gleick. Animate Earth will inspire in readers a profound sense of the interconnectedness of life, and to discover what it means to live harmoniously as part of a sentient creature of planetary proportions. This new understanding may solve the most serious problems that face us as a species today.

Editorial Reviews

Review

Electronic Book Review-
"Animate Earth is important because Harding walks its swaying rhetorical tightrope with grace and poise to spare, at many moments with moving poetic force, and brings the narrative to his destination, the mutual enhancement of vital scientific ideas and crucial ethical recognitions. The success of his discursive gamble (above and beyond Lovelock's Gaia gambit, which he has absorbed and transformed) is all the more important because, with global ecological disaster closer than anyone had thought up till the end of the last millennium, it seems beside the point to quibble about pedagogical methodology and ontological niceties. Yes, in order to diagram the sort of holism involved in "holistic science," Harding elicits the "mandala" of Jungian wholeness, with its compass points of thinking, sensing, feeling, and intuition. This is not science; it is another serviceable heuristic device, and Harding's discussion does not commit one to the further armatures of Jungian archetypalism. Rather, it prompts one to admit that there may be something to be said for the vision of a culture in better psychological balance."

Midwest Book Review-
"Author Stephen Harding's doctorate in ecology from Oxford and his interest in holistic science creates a satisfying blend of modern science and new age ideas, so add in a dose of history of how older ideas of an 'animate earth' can be explained through a blend of modern science and spirituality and you have a powerful set if ideas indeed. GAIA theory, scientific insights and a focus on a living earth make for wonderful, revealing reading in his new book. Animate Earth is a very strongly recommended for the non-specialist general reader with an interest in science and metaphysics."

"This is a wonderful and beautiful book, a teacher's treasure." --James Lovelock, author of The Revenge of Gaia

"The conception of the Earth as a living, self-organising system, known today as Gaia theory, is an ancient idea and yet one of the most radical and far-reaching scientific theories of the 20th century. In this remarkable book, Stephan Harding, who has worked closely with James Lovelock, tells the story in a way that is scientifically sophisticated, yet easy to understand and captivating. Harding writes about Gaia with great passion, and he eloquently discusses the theory's philosophical, social and political implications. I recommend Animate Earth to everyone concerned about the fate of our planet."--Fritjof Capra, author of The Hidden Connections, The Web of Life, and The Tao of Physics

"For depth of understanding of Earth functioning and our human role in the process, Stephan Harding's Animate Earth is the finest of recent studies. It should be read, meditated on, and adopted as a guide to our human course of action if we would avoid the disaster of an ecological collapse of life on Earth." --Thomas Berry, author of The Great Work

"This book offers a brilliant new approach at once rigorous, experiential, and intuitive to the most up-to-date research within planetary ecology."--David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous



"Animate Earth represents systems science at its best...gives a whole new dimension to what 'environment-friendly' really means." -- Jonathon Porritt

From the Publisher

"For depth of understanding of Earth functioning and our human role in the process, Stephan Harding's Animate Earth is the finest of recent studies. It should be read, meditated on, and adopted as a guide to our human course of action if we would avoid the disaster of an ecological collapse of life on Earth." --Thomas Berry, author of The Great Work

"Animate Earth represents systems science at its best. . . gives a whole new dimension to what `environment-friendly' really means." --Jonathon Porritt

"This is a wonderful and beautiful book, a teacher's treasure." --James Lovelock, author of The Revenge of Gaia

"This book offers a brilliant new approach - at once rigorous, experiential, and intuitive--to the most up-to-date research within planetary ecology." --David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous

"The conception of the Earth as a living, self-organising system, known today as Gaia theory, is an ancient idea and yet one of the most radical and far-reaching scientific theories of the 20th century. In this remarkable book, Stephan Harding, who has worked closely with James Lovelock, tells the story in a way that is scientifically sophisticated, yet easy to understand and captivating. Harding writes about Gaia with great passion, and he eloquently discusses the theory's philosophical, social and political implications. I recommend Animate Earth to everyone concerned about the fate of our planet." --Fritjof Capra, author of The Hidden Connections, The Web of Life, and The Tao of Physics

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 256 pages
• Publisher: Chelsea Green (September 15, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1933392290
• ISBN-13: 978-1933392295
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.8 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #204,090 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Discover books, learn about writers, read author blogs, and more.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

28 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a remarkable book, November 20, 2006

By 

David Abram - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Animate Earth: Science, Intuition, And Gaia (Paperback)

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.

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Most Important Book of 21st Century, April 30, 2006

By 

Richard S. Jones "Possumcreek" (Australia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Animate Earth (Paperback)

In my view this is the most important book I have ever read - and I have read many. It is a seminal work, as was Silent Spring by Rachel Carson. Every scientist, every science student and every person who calls him or herself an environmentalist should make it their duty to read this work. It is extraordinarily well researched and profound. Your whole attitude to science, to nature and to life itself will inevitably be changed after reading it, unless you have a totally closed mind. Time is running out for the human race as we blindly destroy our own life support systems. Animate Earth points the way to securing the future of life on earth.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars a remarkable book, April 25, 2006

By 

David Abram - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Animate Earth (Paperback)

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.