This September New Moon, when the stars were at their most luminous, our beloved elder, friend and teacher – Stephan Harding – passed into the ancestral realm. A soulful scientist with a poetic sensitivity, Stephan could conjure Deep Time on a casual stroll in the Devonshire countryside, evoking aeons of the Earth’s evolutionary story with a playfulness that would open hearts and minds.
In the course of a conversation – with bright-eyed, feverish enthusiasm – he could inspire a visceral sense of being embedded within the vast matrix of the Earth: Gaia, our living, breathing, blue-green planet; a planet so very beloved to Stephan. Indeed, it was his deep love of Gaia that was the bubbling spring of his remarkable life and work and way of being in the world. As the river of his life flows into the ocean, we celebrate Stephan’s expansive, enlivening vision and his life-affirming legacy.
Animate Earth
To spend time with Stephan was to be invited into a world suffused with sentience, infused with meaning. The ‘oikos’ of ecology means home, Stephan would remind us, and to be in his company was to ‘come home’: to become keenly aware of one’s place within the wider web of life and to feel one’s body embedded within the larger body of Mother Earth.
“We must really feel that Gaia is alive – a great mysterious, animate being. We must understand that Gaia has purpose and that all the evolution that has happened up to this point is about something. That it is not just chance or blind natural selection, but that there is something deeply teleological, meaningful and purposeful about what is happening on the Earth… you could say that the whole Earth is a great consciousness. It’s not outside us; we’re inside it.”
His conviction that consciousness spanned the Cosmos inspired the reverence and reverie that characterised his relationship with the more-than-human community. And his vision is one that has profound implications for the ways we collectively navigate this present moment of the unravelling of our Earth Systems. If we understand ourselves to be a cell within the organism of Gaia – rather than as omnipotent masters of a dead planet – how might we govern ourselves as human communities?
“Now more than ever, we need to develop what we could call a ‘Gaian Consciousness’. That is to say a consciousness that primarily creates an awareness that we are embedded in a much larger body the size of a planet, upon which we are totally dependant but can effect to a very large extent.”
Gaia Sit Spot
Stephan wished for us all “to be Gaia’ed”: that is to have the realisation that the Cosmos is alive and everything is sentient. This was not an intellectual idea for Stephan but something that we might feel and know through all our senses. He recommended a sit spot practice as a way of cultivating this rooted, embodied sense of belonging.
“I’ve had the same Gaia spot for 27 years. That’s to say, a space near your house, and it could be in your garden, but inside nature, where you go regularly and just sit and just watch and just be in it. Just being aware of a place as it changes through the seasons over a period of time, many years hopefully, so you develop a deep relationship with that place. The place then becomes a wider personality with which you are relating and in which you are an integral part. It stimulates your imagination.”
His place for all those years was at Schumacher College in Devon, England: a pioneering and transformative adult learning centre offering courses exploring ecology, economics for transition and regenerative agriculture, among other topics. Stephan was one of the co-founders of the College and in his many years of teaching he exemplified the experiential, ‘head, heart and hands’ pedagogy that is so central to this learning community.
Holistic Science
Together with his friend and mentor, Brian Goodwin, Stephan led and lectured on the College’s MSc Holistic Science, teaching alongside many of the world’s leading ecological thinkers and activists, including Arne Naess, Fritjof Capra, Vandana Shiva, David Abram, James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis. He later became the College’s Deep Ecology Research Fellow.
Stephan drew upon Jung’s understanding of four ways of knowing – intuition, feeling, thinking and sensing – as a basis of Holistic Science; that is to say, as a way of seeing holistically, with all our senses. He challenged the dominance of reductionist thinking in science, and in industrialised societies, and – running countercurrent to the wider scientific community – promoted the engagement of feeling, intuition, embodied sensemaking and systems thinking as ways of seeing and engaging in an ethical and relational way with life.
“One of the reasons we’re destroying the planet is that we have no feeling. We don’t feel the beauty of a landscape, we just think, ‘oh, there’s coal there or gold’…. That’s why we need more feeling or ‘valuing’….Feeling and intuition…are much more subtle ways of knowing but they are ways of knowing just as valid as thinking and sensing are.”
In an age when a deluge of data about climate and biodiversity crises cohabits awkwardly with widespread inertia in the face of Earth Systems unravelling, this fourfold way of seeing and sensemaking is ever more essential.
Deep Time
Stephan also advocated for the primacy of the imagination as well as the practice of awe and wonder; faculties he awakened in his students through lectures and conversations and, most memorably, through his Deep Time Walk.
Over a 4.6km journey, he would guide groups through the 4.6-billion-year history of the Earth. Each metre representing one million years, each millimetre a 1000 years. From the formation of the Sun and the creation of the Moon to the early evolution of single-celled life and the Cambrian Explosion, the journey culminates in its final, potent moment: Stephan would lay a measuring tape on the ground and draw his companions in to focus on the final 30cm of the walk. This is when Homo sapiens arrive; in the blink of a geological eye.
The industrial revolution that has shaped modern perspectives – entrenching anthropocentrism and a mechanistic worldview – is set into motion in the final ¼ of a millimetre of our long amble. A temporal vertigo sets in at this point and an embodied realisation of how very young our species is. A realisation that in turn inspires humility and catalyses transformation from a human-centred to Earth-centred way of seeing the world and understanding our place within the wider Earth community.
A Life-affirming Legacy
This Equinox – as the dynamic, fragile balance of our precious Earth becomes more precarious – Stephan’s teachings have never been more essential to industrialised societies. As we stand in this present moment, the unfathomable deep time history of our ancient Earth stretching back behind us and an uncertain future ahead, Stephan has gifted us vital ways of seeing and being in the world that can guide us towards a life-affirming future for all species.
Stephan returns to Gaia’s ever-unfolding cycles – back into the mystery, back into Deep Time. His legacy is a global mycelium of “Gaians”: those who have fallen unabashedly in love with the Earth and commit to act in service to her flourishing. His life and work will no doubt inspire this community for years to come, just as a great tree continues to nourish its wider forest ecosystem long after death. Our work now is to grow this mycelium so that it can support the mushrooming of diverse ecocentric initiatives and ways of being across our wondrous planet.
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Dr Stephan Harding was one of the founding members of Schumacher College where he worked closely with James Lovelock and Brain Goodwin, with whom he had long-lasting friendships and scientific collaboration. He led and lectured on the College’s MSc Holistic Science for nearly two decades. He was also a treasured friend and associate of The Gaia Foundation and taught on our Earth Jurisprudence Trainings, imparting his wisdom and enthusiasm to a constellation of Earth Jurisprudence Practitioners across East, West and Southern Africa. Stephan is author of ‘Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia’, as well as ‘Gaia Alchemy’ and ‘Poems of Lorca: Courting the Dawn’, translated with Martin Shaw.
Explore Further
- Experience the Deep Time Walk through this Outrage + Optimism podcast episode immersive sound journey or the award-winning Deep Time Walk App.
- Watch this 10-min film Learning to Value by Sam Chevallier
- Read Stephan’s acclaimed book, Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia
The quotes in the article come from an interview that The Gaia Foundation did with Stephan in December 2018 and Sam Chevallier’s film Learning to Value; read the interview here and watch the film here.
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