Stephan Harding
Stephan Harding (born in Venezuela in 1953, died 2024 in UK) was a pioneering earth scientist who has focused on deep ecology and the theory of Gaia. After his degree in Zoology at Durham University in Engeland he became a field assistant for the Smithsonian’s field ecology research in Venezuela. His doctorate at the University of Oxford was on the behavioural ecology of the muntjac deer.
After teaching conservation biology at the National University of Costa Rica, he became a founder member of Schumacher College in Devon, England, where he met James Lovelock with whom he has maintained a long-lasting friendship and scientific collaboration that lead to their joint appointment as founding chair holders of the Arne Naess Chair in Global Justice and the Environment at the University of Oslo. Stephan is the author of Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia. In Gaia Alchemy: The Reuniting of Science, Psyche, and Soul, he explores how the concept of Gaia manifests itself in human consciousness, feelings, and soul. Much of his book focuses on the power of Jungian depth psychology in helping us understand Gaia through the collective unconscious. He probes medieval history to show how the imagery and observations of premodern alchemists can help understand Gaia. Harding was Resident Ecologist and MSc Coordinator at the Schumacher College and lived on the College campus with his wife Julia Ponsonby and their son Oscar. He is also the editor of a book Grow Small, Think Beautiful published by Floris Books.
“Gaia alchemy heals the Cartesian split by making matter and psyche intensively aware of each other as an unbroken wholeness in the unus mundus, as fact and image meld within us, an integrated style of consciousness is born – an epiphany happens that combines our deeply buried Indigenous soulful outlook with a modern mentality informed and shaped by the stunning discoveries of the contemporary sciences of the Earth.”