Accountable to Gaia

Book review on

Animate Earth

by Harding, Stephan (2006)

Reviewed by David Lorimer, 2006 published in Network Review No 91

Green Books, 2006, 256 pp., £10.95 p/b – ISBN 1 903998 75 1

Stephan Harding has a doctorate in ecology from Oxford and is currently the co-ordinator of the MSc in holistic science at Schumacher College. I met him two years ago at a conference on Nature in Norway. There he gave a brilliant and (literally) animated lecture on the Gaia hypothesis which forms the kernel of this book. Those familiar with the Gaia hypothesis will find that Stephan Harding opens up a new dimension with his expanded epistemological approach. He signals early on that ‘our way of doing science in the West has inadvertently contributed to the many problems we face' (he calls this ‘quantificationitis'), adding that ‘science is a dangerous gift unless it can brought into contact with the wisdom that resides in the sensual, intuitive and ethical aspects of our nature.' Harding argues that mechanistic science has separated fact from value and quantity from quality, leading to the damaging consequences of the overvaluation of the rational mind. Hence his assertion that our crisis is one of perception, in the sense that we no longer see the cosmos as alive (the anima mundi) or recognise that we are inseparable from the whole of nature.

Holistic science restores the perspective that we are embedded in nature. One of the most original insights in the book is Harding's use of Jung's four ways of knowing applied to science, namely thinking, sensing, feeling and intuition. It is obvious that mechanistic science has privileged thinking at the expense of the other three ways of knowing. He then draws a comparison with Goethe's way of science, which begins with intuitive perception and moves on to exact sensing. The next chapter expands the thesis by illustrating the four modes with the stories of Aldo Leopold (intuition), David Abram (sensing), Arne Naess (feeling) and James Lovelock (thinking). Harding shows how each of these people were ‘Gaia-ed' by experiences with nature. Throughout the book he offers experiential exercises in which we can develop our sense of nature being alive - another feature which makes it unique.

The chapters which follow explain the science of Gaia in considerable technical detail, all the while interspersed with the intuitive exercises already referred to. The reader is invited to become a carbon atom and experience the extraordinary journey of its cycle. Harding explains how Gaia has regulated both the atmosphere and the temperature of the Earth. It is particularly striking to learn that clouds cool the earth's temperature by as much as 10°C. He then moves on to a consideration of climate cycles over very long periods of time where the concentration of carbon dioxide varies between 180 ppm and 280ppm. As most readers will know, we are now at 380 ppm and rising, the highest level for millions of years. It is a myth, Harding argues, that climate is stable - hence we can expect abrupt changes in conditions, as forecast by James Lovelock. He draws on the latest research findings, especially those relating to ice cover are likely activation of positive feedback loops which might result in runaway climate change. He also gives several examples of ‘phenological decoupling': traditionally, great tits have been able to find enough caterpillars to feed on, but warmer temperatures mean that they hatch earlier than the oak leaves on which they feed. They therefore die before the tits arrive, so the tits are short of food.

A chapter on Gaia and biodiversity points out that species are disappearing at a rate up to 1000 times the natural rate of extinction, which leads Harding to the conclusion that ‘we need, as a matter of the utmost urgency, to recover the ancient idea of Gaia as a fully integrated, a living being consisting of all our life forms, air, rocks, oceans, lakes and rivers, if we are ever to halt the latest, and possibly greatest, mass extinction.' The last chapter is entitled In Service to Gaia, in which Harding reminds us that we are all accountable to Gaia. He rightly reiterates that we have to reach beyond our rational mind - beyond utility to a sense of sanctity. This will enable us to connect with a deeper and wider mode of consciousness in which we experience our unity with Gaia and understand the importance of radically changing our way of being in the world. Harding suggests that we are in the earth rather than just on it, and that we need to move beyond the ideology of economic growth to a steady-state model of economics and a commitment to the principles of deep ecology. I believe that his diagnosis is correct, and that nothing less than a change of world-view will enable us to alter our course: real change comes from within we have engaged our whole being and therefore transformed our sense of relationship with the world.

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