Stephan Harding autobiographical essay

I am an ecologist by birth. My early years in Venezuela where I was born were redolent with sunshine, hummingbirds and tropical flowers. Caracas in the 1950s was a verdant paradise in whose embrace my infant soul flourished in that rich alchemical brew of Spanish, Latin American musical rhythms and vibrant biodiversity. At such a young age I was of course unaware of the impacts of these influences on my developing psyche, but they went deep and influence me powerfully to this day in ways very relevant to this story, as you will soon discover.

We moved to England when I was six. It was roughly around that time that I had my first conscious ontopoetic experience. On a bright sunny day in high summer around 1961 my family and I went on a picnic to a woodland somewhere just outside London. Enticed by the green depths of the wood, I left my family behind for a while and wandered among the trees. I remember walking slowly feeling the presence of the entire wood as a great whole, as a person. a personality far vaster than myself – as a personhood that saw me, knew me, recognised me, approved of me and who initiated me into the many secret languages of green leaf, birdsong, towering trees, ambling beetles and rampant fungi. The wood was a vast emerald dome of living greenness, a sanctuary, a home for my soul and a challenge for my developing consciousness, for it was here, in the vast inner spaces of that profound meeting, that my future pathway as an ecologist was forged.

From that moment on I was a keen young naturalist who with other like-minded youngsters started a local zoological society working to protect frogs on London’s Hampstead Heath. On leaving school at the age of nineteen I spent eight months in the paradisiacal depths of the Zimbabwean bush helping to study warthogs and elephants before starting my degree in Zoology at Durham University in England during which the Royal Geographic Society funded a friend and I to undertake an expedition to the Manu National Park in the Peruvian Amazon. Immediately after Durham came three years in Venezuela where I was an assistant field ecologist for the Smithsonian working in the Llanos – the great wild savannah country that stretches all the way into Colombia, home to immense biodiversity which included jaguars, capybaras, howler monkeys and myriads of other species. Here it was that I learned to sing and play the traditional ‘joropo’ music of the plains on the cuatro – a small four stringed guitar akin to the ukulele. Then a return to England for my doctorate at Oxford on behavioural ecology of the muntjac deer, followed by nearly three years in Costa Rica teaching conservation biology at the National University.

In all these places wild locales offered me many and varied ontopoietic experiences that made me increasingly uneasy with the desiccated attitude and dryness of science. It was all so soulless, so overly focussed on abstraction, on quantification and on a ruthless mechanistic selfishness which drained all the deep meaning from the world. Eventually, through a series of synchronicities this dissatisfaction led me to Dartington Hall, where Satish Kumar and others were establishing a new college for exploring the global ecological crisis and its solutions by small numbers of participants living in community on five-week short courses led by leading thinkers and activists from around the world. I was appointed the college’s resident ecologist, and worked with the first of these teachers who was James Lovelock – the author of Gaia Theory - with whom a friendship and scientific collaboration developed. Then a little later Arne Naess, professor of philosophy at the University of Oslo and founder of the deep ecology approach to the ecological crisis, came to the college. Later still Freya Mathews came to teach and share her considerable insights.

With these teachers and many others at Schumacher College I’ve discovered ways of doing science that embrace soul rather than rejecting it. With Brian Goodwin we initiated an MSc in Holistic Science which has nurtured many hundreds of students to live and work in ways dedicated to the health of Gaia, our animate earth. Every summer for almost thirty years I contributed sessions to Peter Reason’s courses. I met Sandra Wooltorton in Western Australia during an extended stay to share and learn deep ecology in the depths of the bush country. I contributed sessions on Andreas Weber’s course on Erotic Ecology at the college and was delighted to discover the soulful approach to biology which he describes in these posts.

So many ideas, thoughts, feelings and insights that had surged in my unconscious with respect to the true nature of the world surfaced powerfully into my consciousness at Schumacher College. Perhaps the insight that most healed the wounds inflicted on my soul by my immersion in reductionist biology was panpsychism – the notion that every speck of matter feels to its deepest roots – that matter is sentient, that awareness – psyche – is at the very core of matter. This insight is intellectually appealing for it does away with the ‘hard problem’ in science which wrestles with how human consciousness could possibly appear out of inert, dead matter. This is no problem at all for a panpsychist since it is not difficult in principle to imagine our consciousness as an emergent property of all the little psyches in the atoms and molecules that come together to constitute our physical bodies.