Excerpt 2
“Dghem,” however pronounced, Lewis Thomas (physician-writer, 1913-1993) reminds us, is the ancient Indo-European term for “Mother Earth.” Surprisingly different English words derive from dghem. This fact illuminates Stephan Harding’s admonition that we humans can lead happier, healthier, more knowledgeable and lively lives if we return to the “experience of Gaia as a living presence” (p.41). In Animate Earth our author, an Oxford University PhD zoologist who has taught for 15 years at Schumacher College in the southwest corner of England, near Totnes, Devon, begins with prehistory. He writes that
traditional peoples all over the world have believed in an Earth mother who bestows life and receives the dead into her rich soil. The ancient Greeks called her Gaia, the earthly presence of anima mundi, the vast and mysterious primordial intelligence that steadily gives birth to all that exists. The great nourishing subjectivity—at once both spiritual and material—that sustains all that is.
Such ancient knowledge reveals itself in the dghem word that somehow led to the word “Earth” in English and related words like Erde in Germanic languages. Harding revels in a comparable term, “anima mundi,” or in translation from Latin, “the soul of the Earth.”
The living, animate Earth idea continues to influence us today through a circuitous Platonic route: in his Timaeus Plato claims “The world is indeed a living being supplied with soul and intelligence… a single visible entity, containing all other entities” (p.24). And from dghem, the Earth-word, comes, for example, “humus,” “humic acid,” “humor,” “humanity,” “humanist,” “humanities,” “humility,” and most telling, “human.” Harding, in luminous prose and with scientific passion shows us that, from the beginning of written documents, and deep in our intuitive consciousness, we members of the genus touted as “wise men,” Homo sapiens, with our literally fantastic capacity for denial and self-deception, know, really know, that we belong to the Earth. No matter our religious preconceptions or our particular straightjacket of socialization, of so-called education, we recognize emotionally and intellectually that not only do we come from the prodigious Earth, but that, alas, when our heart stops beating each of us will return to her. Most of us, indeed, those of us who do not perish over the ocean in a misguided airplane, fall victim in war to the ravages of bombs, or succeed in the mandate of personal cremation as an ecologically-friendly alternative, we will, as the ancients proclaimed, be received as her dead into Mother Earth’s “rich soil.”
Harding, who is profoundly educated in the biological sciences, especially zoology, has left the halls of academe far behind. He has transcended his own superb Oxonian background. His intellectual excursion has rejected that English-speaking, Anglo-American, Darwin-distorting, population-genetics-capitalistic, idiosyncratic “evolutionary biology,” I see mainly as a subfield of loyalists. The blinkered abomination of those who call themselves “evolutionary biologists” permeates the great universities of California, eastern Canada, England, New England, the mid-Atlantic states, and many other former British colonies. They control the “organismic and evolutionary biology” (OEB) budgets. Harding doesn’t practice such “academic apartheid” (Lovelock’s term). No, his loyalty is to the whole living Earth, and yet he never waivers in his dedication to science as a way of knowing. This contribution, Animate Earth, because of the accessibility of its language and in spite of the depth of its erudition, is as laudable as it is unique.
“Science is the search for truth,” said David Bohm, quantum mechanical theoretical physicist, “whether we like it or not.” Bohm (1917-92), who worked for years in England and Israel, was born in Pennsylvania and studied in this country with Albert Einstein and J. Robert Oppenheimer. In his 30’s, as a victim of McCarthyism, he abandoned his US residency for the rest of his life; he went first to Brazil and, in the end, died in London. For Harding, Bohm’s “truth” is as illusive as the biologist’s “life itself,” yet “science” really is the search for, not necessarily the discovery of, truth.
Harding has no difficulty with “primary science,” the immense literature of “scientific truths” that mightily attempt to explain nature in, as close as possible, her own language. Our author greatly respects the mode of learning about the world called primary science where the discoveries are recorded by the scientists themselves. He honors practicing scientists as he informs himself of their hard-earned arcane knowledge. However, he transcends the practitioners. Because the entire Earth and its history is Harding’s object of study he never claims that any authentic scientific observation or measurement is “out-of-his-field.” Whether a meteorologist who tracks climate change, a hammer-toting geologist who reconstructs (from the chemical state of minerals trapped in sedimentary rocks) the transition from an oxygen-poor to an oxygen-replete atmosphere, or a behavioral biologist who describes choreographically the mother-toddler bond, Stephan reads their work with a scientist’s critical eye.
Scientifically eclectic, Harding’s view is inclusive, tolerant, and enlightened as are those of many “deep ecologists” and “environmental activists.” However, no other zoologist is like him in my experience. Superbly, if peculiarly, educated in the best British tradition but tutored by James Lovelock himself in rigorous, iconoclastic scientific analysis, Harding’s insights are tempered by personal experience in the wilds of South America and in Africa. I suspect that no one else in the English-speaking world has the personal field knowledge, rigorous Lovelockian quantitative scientific training, intellectual curiosity, and years of response to earnest questions by curious, talented, international, and often very mature students, especially those attracted to Schumacher College. No “straight-A" academic-type could even conceive of this book, let alone write it!
I am reminded of the deep thinking of James Baldwin, the African-American writer who, himself disillusioned by the entrenched delusions and intolerant power structure, could not continue to reside in his own beloved country. Baldwin, in a recorded interview in Amherst, Massachusetts, where I am now, said:
It is hard to think of America as a culture. It impresses me as being a conglomeration of many cultures, none of them really respected. All of them at the mercy of what this country imagines itself to be. What this country imagines itself to be may be exactly what it is: what it imagines itself to be, one would have to conclude from what it says, is a collection of pragmatic, pious businessmen. That seems to be the American self-image. Nothing could be more sterile. And for any artist finding himself or herself in the middle of a terrifying sterility there is very little that is admired in this country that anyone can use. It seems to me, you know, the chimera of success. You have to be nurtured that way, so I can’t answer what it says about the culture except that—because one doesn’t want to say that its sterile—the culture. Its sort of impossible to imagine a sterile culture. It is a contradiction in terms. It seems to me there’s something buried here, buried alive trying to, trying…, struggling for expression. I may be wrong about this but it seems to me that key to American life—if one can say a key to anything so vast as that generality—the key to American life seems to me to be involved with their stubborn, manic refusal to accept their history. The history that is taught, the history that is promulgated in all the schools, in all our institutions is not true. Its simply not true that the country was founded by freedom-loving heroes. The myth of George Washington is not true. None of it is true. The Declaration of Independence was signed by slave owners.
It is the “stubborn, manic refusal to accept” not United States of America written history but worldwide natural history that has promulgated the need, on a global scale, for the antidote of Harding’s “Animate Earth.” Science textbooks, especially those on life sciences, general biology, or evolutionary biology do not teach science. They teach common myths of nation, profession, and “Western civilization,” myths that conform to current budgetary needs of politically powerful academic departments, international corporations in need of technicians, greed-driven book publishers, and others. The teachers, even more than the students, are victims. Recent science textbooks in no way bring us closer to the hard-earned scientific truths like those expounded here by Stephan Harding. I suggest that the textbooks provide us with a wonderful Baldwinian illustration of our “stubborn, manic refusal to face” not only our national but our natural history.
The history of life as evolutionary narrative, told in Harding’s book with sensibility, is entirely absent in life sciences textbooks that feel compelled to “cover the material.” Such books that drone on about animal physiology, cell and molecular biochemistry, anatomy and the like are often opaque and confusing not only to students but even to the teaching faculty. General biology books tend not only to be ignorant of the most basic geological facts but are deficient in understanding the microbiological world that supports all life on Earth. By contrast, the microbiology texts are in frank contradiction to those of “general biology”: botany (the study of plants), mycology (the study of fungi such as molds, mushrooms and yeasts), and protoctists. Often the evolution books ignore sciences critical to their task, such as atmospheric chemistry, chemical thermodynamics, and microbial ecology. Rather, in the practice of population ecology and population genetics they glorify a bizarre numerology, a cryptic mathematics that proffers unmeasurables such as “reciprocal altruism” and “inclusive fitness.” These unquantifiables are inappropriate to our cell-biological and other chemically-based subject matter, in my view.
Harding’s unique, hypocrisy-free narrative probably can never be sold in bulk. It will probably not be embraced by the academic establishment in any Anglophone country but, like other small, clearly written books with literary merit, Animate Earth is a text to be studied by curious bibliophiles, students and teachers especially of biogeological topics. It should serve as required reading for at least the following kinds of classes (in rough order of importance to their required subject matter: evolution, Earth sciences, biology, sedimentology, stratigraphy, palaeontology, economics, comparative religion, ethics, sociology, physiology, meteorology, and especially philosophy.
The Baldwinian “manic refusal to face our history”—and our natural history—is dwarfed by our “manic refusal” to even admit the existence of philosophy. Most citizens of the United States don’t see any value in any philosophy. They don’t think they have, or need, any philosophy. And since Harding’s book is one of philosophy consistent with scientific observation, its subject matter eludes easy market classification.
Harding’s great merit, it seems to me, is his provision of a factual foundation to Whiteheadian philosophy. Animate Earth should be translated into all the major languages of the world. Why? Because of its fidelity to the best available truths of science, rather than to any academic, corporate or political constituency. Unlike the usual science books, in Animate Earth Harding incorporates into his work the cunning of that particular branch of animal behavior that we name human psychology, with its insights into emotional inference, feigning, betrayal, intuition, delusion, persuasion, tribal loyalty and the like. Harding faces immense odds against him in this realm of “manic refusal,” this reductionist, mercantile world. I salute his valiant, and mostly successful attempt to “keep things whole.”
At the end of this delightful narrative about the trials and tribulations on the Earth’s surface, you, the reader, will understand Gaia. You will know for yourself that what has been called “the Earth’s environment” is no externality. The environment is part of the body. Therefore, for us, the talkative, lying, quarrelsome but endlessly manipulative, social ape, the disrespectful act of despoilment, the self-mutilation, the pandemic we call progress (e.g., deforestation, desertification) are, for Gaia, only petty activities, a masochism writ large of the mammalian kind that Gaia has seen before. Gaia continues to smile: Homo sapiens, she shrugs, soon will either change its wayward ways or, like other plague species, will terminate with a whimper in the current scourge, in this same accelerated Holocene extinction it initiated and has sustained over the past 10,000 years.
Lynn Margulis
Distinguished University Professor in the Geosciences Department
University of Massachusetts, Amherst
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