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Animate Earth: Science, Intuition, And Gaia

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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.

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.

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.

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.

Stephan Harding's Animate Earth is thoroughly refreshing, motivating, rigorous, profound, fun, and well written. Harding has articulated so clearly another way of looking at and being in the world by holding to the rigors of science but expanding its boundaries to an animistic world-view. I can think of no clearer introduction to Gaia theory. Harding has a fluid mix of the hard-core science of it (he's worked with James Lovelock) and Gaia theory's implications for a fuller experience of the living earth. I will be using this book as a text in my college junior/senior-level complex systems course. And, importantly, the book is wonderfully accessible to most readers.
Perhaps Harding's work will touch most deeply those young scientists (or those of any age, really) who find themselves struggling to rectify the differences between their sensorial experiences of nature and their analytic, scientific studies of it--how the former are entirely invigorating while the latter often less so. Harding is honest with his own experiences and points a way to holistic science where this schism can finally disappear.

I read this with only a rough idea of the Gaia concept, and came away much more knowledgeable and better for having done so. I wish it was required reading in schools. There's a little for everyone, spiritual or scientific minded. Well worth the purchase price.

After reading David Abram's book "The Spell of the Sensuous" this book takes the subject even further.. Written by an Oxford Phd in Ecological Sciences.. the book explains the notion of Gaia in very understandable and compelling terms.. A must read for anyone who feels the direction that the scientific community has been taking for 400 years is misguided and lacking in a most crucial ethical standard.. the fact that everything in our field of sensory comprehension is actually as much alive as we are..

"A vild, complex, dynamic being" - that's what Stephan Harding calls Earth in his book Animate Earth. Science, Intuition and Gaia (2006). There he collects the wisdom that as a "Resident Ecologist" he gives out at Schumacher College in Devon, England. In the summer 1999 he made also the Green party in Skåne, Sweden, happy with this wisdom, lecturing on how the earth's ecological system functions as feedback processes within the framework of the sun energy's infinitely complicated cycles on earth. So with carbon's, calcium's and sulphur's, oxygen's and phosphorus' "travels" over land and sea, through atmosphere and underground. Important are the clouds, which with their white upper surface reflect away the sunlight that would have made Earth too hot. Over the sea, the clouds are formed through condensation nucleii from algae. In such ways, life regulates the temperature in its own habitat and is everywhere participating in what happens. Ecology's miracle is that waste products from one being becomes" food" for another; so with oxygen from plants that runs ourselves (and the animals), at the same time as we give away carbon dioxide, which is food for the plants. So the planet is one big symbios of matter and life: Gaia.
In our time Earth is desperate, Harding means; it wobbles between glacial periods and shorter hot periods like a top that is losing its speed. With his square reason man is not skilled to handle this. Instead, we need to feel that we live our lives in symbiotic relationship with a planetary being, so very much bigger than we - something similar to mitochondria in the cell. Gaia certainly is more like a living organism than a dead stone lump, but alive in the ordinary sense she is not, maybe. But Earth is something much bigger and more remarkable than we usually think.