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It's time we learned to live in peace with our planet
Stephan Harding
Wednesday September 27 2006
The Guardian
I believe it is now blindingly obvious that our lust for endless economic growth is
seriously destabilising the climate of the Earth and wiping out the astounding biodiversity
that enfolds us. As the ice caps collapse and the great forests burn, we are at last waking
up to the fact that we are at war with nature - a war that only she can win.
So why is our civilisation so destructive of the natural world on which we utterly depend?
Some say that it's merely a matter of technology, that any culture with access to
chainsaws and bulldozers would have done the same. But I disagree. I am convinced that
we see the world in an utterly mistaken way, that something malicious is eating away at
the core of our view of the world. For us, the Earth is nothing more than a vast, dead
machine to be exploited without hindrance by focusing only on what can be measured
and quantified.
All of us go about with this idea deliberately planted in our heads by our educators, by
the media, by politicians and by scientists. It was Descartes, Bacon and the other
pioneering scientific geniuses of the 16th and 17th centuries who sold us this line, and for
the past 400 years this understanding has contaminated every aspect of our lives.
Our efforts to solve the massive ecological and social crises we now face will come to
naught unless we remedy this unbalanced perspective. So if "world as machine" only
alienates, disconnects and makes us destructive, then what is the alternative? Here it is:
that our Earth is palpably and deliciously alive; that our turning world is a vast living
creature of planetary proportions within which we are immersed and which supports and
nourishes our psyches every bit as much as our physical bodies.
This is an ancient understanding with a profound pedigree. Plato called it the "anima
mundi" - the soul of the world. For the ancient Greeks, and indeed for most indigenous
people to this day, mountains, forests, the great oceans and the wide-open sky are full of
an ineffable communicative power that we are capable of perceiving spontaneously with
our intuition and our senses and to which we respond with a profound sense of awe and
innate respect.
These are the qualities so cruelly banished by science for so many centuries. They teach
us that the whole of nature has value because it exists, irrespective of its usefulness to us.
The good news is that this alternative, more holistic perspective is at last moistening and
dissolving the desiccated scientific heart of our culture, at first through the astonishing
discoveries of quantum physics, and more recently through James Lovelock's Gaia
theory. Both imply that nature is far more creative, far more animate than we ever dared
suppose.
How would things be if we achieved this? Limits to material growth would be rationally
determined through our best science and then accepted as we took up our rightful space
within the community of life. Only things of real value would grow - love of place,
simplicity, self-sufficient local communities and economies, ecological restoration,
renewable technologies, sustainable artifacts - and time for contemplating and celebrating
the qualities of this astonishing Earth.
· Stephan Harding is coordinator of the MSc course in holistic science at
Schumacher College, Devon. His book, Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia, is
published by Green Books (£10.95). To order a copy for £9.95 with free
UK p&p call 0870 836 0875 or go to guardian.co.uk/bookshop
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