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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
September 8, 2006
Contact: Jon-Mikel Gates, 802-295-6300 x 111,
jgates@chelseagreen.com
Animate Earth Bridges Science and Human Intuition for Popular Audience
The first title from Sciencewriters Books, a Brave New Imprint from Chelsea Green
“This book offers a brilliant new approach - at once rigorous, experiential, and intuitive—to the most up-to-date research within planetary ecology.”
—David Abram, author of The Spell of the Sensuous
“For depth of understanding of Earth functioning and our human role in the process, Stephan Harding’s Animate Earth is the finest of recent studies. It should be read, meditated on, and adopted as a guide to our human course of action if we would avoid the disaster of an ecological collapse of life on Earth.”
—Thomas Berry, author of The Great Work
“Animate Earth represents systems science at its best . . . gives a whole new dimension to what ‘environment-friendly’ really means.”
—Jonathon Porritt, author of Capitalism as if the World Matters
“This is a wonderful and beautiful book, a teacher’s treasure.”
—James Lovelock, author of The Revenge of Gaia
Chelsea Green Publishing is very pleased to announce this challenging addition to the literature of earth science and also the first offering in an imprint called Sciencewriters Books, a new venture that publisher Margo Baldwin initiated earlier this year with legendary scientist/writers Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan.
Modern science and western culture both teach that the planet we inhabit is a dead and passive lump of matter, but as Stephan Harding points out, this wasn’t always the prevailing sentiment and in Animate Earth he sets out to explain how these older notions of an animate earth can be explained in rational, scientific terms.
In this astounding book Harding lays out the facts and theories behind one of the most controversial notions to come out of the hard sciences arguably since Sir Isaac Newton’s Principia or the first major publications to come out of the Copenhagen School regarding quantum mechanics. The latter is an important parallel: Whereas quantum mechanics is a science of the problem—it gave rise to the atomic bomb among other things—Gaia Theory in this age of global warming and dangerous climate change is a science of the solution. Its utility: Healing a dying planet becomes an option in a culture otherwise poised to fall into total ecological collapse.
Gaia Theory, also known as earth system science offers a scientific model of the geo-sphere (that’s where we live) that postulates a self-regulating system. This system is what creates the environment. An understanding of the theory is crucial to the environmentalist movement as it explains the apparatus, the organism, that is our planet. Through that explanation it shows how that organism is being damaged and how it can be allowed to regain its equilibrium. James Lovelock developed the theory while at NASA in the 1960s.
Replacing the cold, objectifying language of science with a way of speaking of our planet as a sentient, living being, Harding presents the science of Gaia in everyday English. His scientific passion and rigor shine through his luminous prose as he calls us to experience Gaia as a living presence and bringing to mind such popular science authors as James Gleick.
Animate Earth will inspire in readers a profound sense of the interconnectedness of life, and to discover what it means to live harmoniously as part of a sentient creature of planetary proportions. This new understanding may solve the most serious problems that face us as a species today.
Dr Stephan Harding holds a doctorate in ecology from the University of Oxford. He is the coordinator of the MSc in Holistic Science at Schumacher College at Dartington, where he is also Resident Ecologist. He lives in Dartington, Devon, England.
Available September 2006 | Paperback | 1-933392-29-0 | $25.00 | 6 X 9 | 256 Pages
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