In Memoriam Stephan Harding

Encouraging children to open their senses in a world of ecological wounds

Below is an interview with Stephan Harding that I conducted in June 2008 at Schumacher College in the UK. He passed away on 2 September, 2024. This is how the College remembers one of its founding members: "Stephan made a profound and incalculable contribution to the life and learning of this wonderful community. His teaching, writing and research into Gaia theory, Deep Ecology, and a holistic approach to science, as well as his many other gifts, such as the Deep Time Walk, leave behind a legacy that will continue to send vibrant ripples around the world for many years to come."

Jan: If one starts to know more about nature, about ecosystems, about the integrity of it all - how then does this body of knowledge impact one’s appreciation of its aesthetic qualities or the spiritual qualities? To give an example of what I mean: One might think of a certain tree in a forest, that it has a peculiar shape, that there is a “human” figure in the trunk of the tree or in the bark. Then, at some point, a biologist might come along and say: “Well, what you see as a face is actually a cancer, killing the tree.”

Stephan: O, I see.

Once you have this knowledge, it is very hard to get back to this original.

Right, yes, I think that that kind of scientific knowledge can go both ways. It can either distance you from nature, or bring you closer to nature. It depends on how you use it. Because scientific knowledge is based on abstraction; it is based on the notion that we can only learn or know about knowledge, if we detach ourselves from knowledge and focus on quantitative relationships in the world, and strip away all the sensory experience which is irrelevant, which tells you nothing about the world. Or all the qualities that you feel in nature, they too must be stripped away. As a scientist you must focus only on the quantitative relationships.

You also have an agenda, when you do science, because you are trying to prove a hypothesis. You can’t just collect data randomly, because then it will be meaningless. So you have to have hypotheses. In other words, you have to have a preconceived idea that you are testing. So you are asking a question of nature, and the answer can only come through numbers. It’s the only way, through number. Galileo said, you know, “The book of the universe is written in the language of mathematics.” So if you do science in that way, it can distance you from nature. You’re trying to get an answer out of nature; furthermore, you are trying to get this answer in order to control and dominate nature – often, not always, but often. And you yourself, you see yourself as superior to nature, and as the only rational intellect in the whole natural world that has got this capacity for rational scientific understanding.

But, on the other hand, you can also do the scientific work, of this kind, but do it with tremendous humility. And realise that you are asking mathematical questions of nature, but you realise that nature is far more mysterious and far more alive and sentient than we can dream of. In fact you can think of nature as a great psyche in which our psyches are embedded, or are in fact indissoluble from the psyche of nature. Then you can go to nature and say: “Look I am very interested in knowing how many blackbirds there are here and what they are eating, because if I find this out, it gives me a greater sense of belonging, of participation, with this ecosystem. And so, will you give me permission to ask these questions and to do some surveying work, to collect some numbers, to do some quadrates, measure some trees, maybe even catch a few blackbirds and weigh them. Will you give me permission?” So that, through the blackbird, I can enter into the whole much more fully. Then I can share that knowledge with other people and help them to plunge into nature as a great psyche, as a mysterious, sentient being. And then nature will say: “No, perhaps this is too much, catching blackbirds and nets is not acceptable.” Or she might say: “OK, in this occasion, yes.” So then you enter into the scientific work much in the same way as the detached scientist would have done, but now you do it with a much greater sensitivity.

And also, whenever you are doing the work in this more holistic way, you will often stop and just listen to what the whole forest is telling you. And everything you see in the forest will be regarded a kind of language, the movement of the trees. And of course, if you are studying birds, the bird song itself, you will start listening to the song as a quality, as a form of communication which embodies the essence of the forest “birdly,” in a “birdish” way. So you will be hearing things in a completely different way.

You will also drop any theories, or any hypotheses, in those moments of complete wonder. So you just drop all of that. You realise that is only a sort of game or a provisional question which you will drop. And then you will have contact with the whole and that contact with the whole will then inspire your scientific work and actually make you a far better scientist than you would have been in the old conventional, mechanistic, detached way.

But can knowledge be a burden too? Thoreau was saying: “If you really want to make acquaintance with the ferns, you have to forget your botany, and all the prior knowledge you have about them.”

Well, I think both are true, you see. It depends on how you use the knowledge. Because if you know the ferns first appeared x-hundred million years ago, and you know something about their amazing reproductive history, and where they fit in the evolutionary lineage of the plants, then you can enter, through the fern, into the dynamical coming into being of the planet as a whole and of the plant kingdom as a whole. You can suddenly plunge into the whole evolutionary history of the earth, through a fern, through a stone, through a rock, through a bird, through another human being, through anything, you can plunge into the whole. So that knowledge can be used, very skilfully, to contact the whole. So I think Thoreau is maybe being too categorical, you see. I think he is right, and that can happen, and it has happened in our culture, particularly during his times, in the Victorian era, when there was a very big movement towards this reductionist understanding of nature. Of course he was responding to that, by moving away from that.

On the other hand, you can also enter into the whole without knowing anything. I mean traditional peoples have done this before. Not that they did not know anything; they knew in different ways. You can still have a sense of the whole without any modern scientific knowledge. But it can help you greatly.

I have a friend in Sweden and sometimes when we would go walking into the woods, I would be looking at the play of the light coming down on the mosses. He is a moss expert, so what he would see first was an impoverished ecosystem, he could not see the dance of light.

O, I see. That’s interesting. Because I have that here with the redwoods, this redwood grove. The redwoods are exotics in Britain, and I am always against them and I don’t like them. But on the other hand this grove back here, near the college, is actually very beautiful. And I take my son there; we make little camps and make fires there. Now I have learned to see them as just colour, and light and presence, the opposite. I still know that they’re exotics, and that is still in the background. But I can drop that and bring the phenomenological understanding to the full.

 How are you able to do that, to store it away, in a way?

I think it is because I have been doing holistic science here, at Schumacher College, for 10 years. And we do a lot of work with Goethe’s approach to science, which is phenomenological. Just merely, as you were doing, just to look at what the senses offer you. And sometimes it is good to bring the knowledge in, and sometimes it is better not to bring the knowledge in. It depends.

 There is this quote of Aldo Leopold, that ‘ecological consciousness brings…’

‘. . . a world of wounds’? Yes I know. I suffer from that a lot, here in England, the world, to see how wounded it is. But on the other hand, it is possible, particularly on a beautiful sunny summer day like this, just to look at the British countryside purely phenomenologically and find it quite beautiful: the shapes of the hills, the light green fields, the dark green hedgerows. But I think the more severe the damage, the more difficult it is to hold that knowledge at bay. You might hold them both together but then the knowledge might become more important than the phenomenology. Well OK, this is beautiful, this English countryside. Yes, I can appreciate it for what it is. I can, I can let go of the knowledge [deep sigh] and just enjoy the fields and the colours and let myself enjoy that. But at the same time, there in the background is the knowledge of what used to be here before and what has been lost.

At the same time, it is present?

Well, I suppose when you fully enter into the phenomenology, it disappears and you just enter into the joy of the light and the colour on the fields. And then you step back from that and the knowledge is there again.

David Abram has pointed to the fact that some people are more sensitive than others, that they pick up more, they are absorbing, more transparent, more like a sponge. If you are to encourage people to be more open, to be more receptive – especially with children – it means also taking down your protective shields, to let in more from the outside world. Is there a danger, you believe, in the times we are living in today, with this massive sort-of dark shadow – of global warming, species extinction – of allowing ourselves to be too open, especially in the context of children, in the face of what’s coming in then?

You mean: could you be too open as a parent or as a teacher?

Maybe, as advocate of the devil: might it not be wisest to encourage children not to be too open, because it takes a special capacity to handle…

Yes, I see. Well I don’t think you should tell children too much about the crisis, actually. I think they need to know about it. I mean, it depends where they are living. In England, where it all seems fine, you know, you can’t feel the extinctions, particularly not on a day like this, the countryside is absolutely beautiful. There is no need to tell them anything, I think they shouldn’t be told about climate change and species extinction until they are about maybe 10 or so. But of course it is in the air and so they pick it up. But if they don’t know it is better not to tell them, better to let them develop their own phenomenological relationship with nature in a very pure way.

My grasp of it is that we have only just begun to sort of go into this direction, so we don’t really fully understand the implications if we would do it in a more radical way, especially with children: to allow for this receptivity, to really encourage them to be open and that maybe they would be able to pick up a general sense, a mood, among adults having in the back of their minds this feeling that we are going downhill.

Yes, well, I think they do. For example my son, of course he is at Schumacher College. He is 6. He knows all about carbon footprint and climate change, and I think most of the children in his school will know. So I think a lot of children will know, because their parents are talking about it. At least sort of . . . Even in families that don’t really talk about issues very much, I think climate change will be there, it is on everyone’s radar. It is in the general Zeitgeist. So children will pick it up. But when I am with my son in the redwoods back there, we don’t talk about the fact that they’re exotics. I mean, he has asked me whether they are natives or not. I said, “No, but never mind, they are very nice trees.” So I think one should not alarm children too much.

And you would still encourage them to be as open as possible?

Yes I would! You’ve got to be open. How can one not encourage someone to be open, even in the face of a very difficult situation? Because that openness is a bit like Aikido. That openness is actually the best defence. The best way to cope is to be open, I think. If you are truly open you can allow the grief to flow through you and out. And then the grief maybe can inspire you to be active. That is Joanna Macy’s idea: from despair to empowerment.

But if you let the grief get locked up in you, then it can do tremendous damage to you and to other people. So it is better to practice to be as fully open as possible, so you are like a whirlpool of water. The water comes through into the whirlpool, it causes a disturbance, but it flows out again.

Also with children?

I think so, I think it is important to teach them openness, to nature, definitely. Be as open as possible, as receptive as possible. They need to stand in front of a magnificent tree, or, if they are lucky, of a mountain or the wide ocean and really feel its qualities to the max, they need to feel that, out to the absolute maximum, because that is the basic foundation of life. Our roots in nature are absolutely fundamental; our roots in the psyche of nature. And if children haven’t got that, then they have nothing. They only have the human world; they don’t have a fundamental embeddedness in the psyche of the world.

What you mentioned about Joanna Macy, absorbing the grief and to let go again, to be open to grief, also the dark side, I think that’s for me why art is so important, to allow for expression of these deeper feelings which might pop up in a nightmare: that they are made explicit, and in that way you can communicate about it, or deal with them in another way.

Yes, that’s right; very important. And maybe one can help children as they grow, to show them ways of dealing with these negative feelings, that they will feel. Maybe through doing Joanna Macy-style practices with them, or with art. Teaching them skilful ways of dealing with the grief that they are going to feel.

To me, in arts-based environmental education, the work we are doing during this course at Schumacher College with eco-artist Lynn Hull, engaging with what you find in the woods, is as important as this other side, of dealing with grief, of coping with the ecological crisis in an unconventional way.

I think one of our chief responsibilities is to develop a deep love of nature. That is one of the most important things we can all do, each individual needs to do. I like what Jung said, “The answer is not with the collective, it is with the individual.” The individual is the solution. So every person needs to develop a deep love of nature, and one way to do it is to engage actively with nature in the ways you are doing, by touching, building wooden sculptures, for birds, or making rock pools, or gardening. Just anything that connects you with nature once more, very important for everybody. But the whole culture is moving in the opposite direction. More and more people are moving into the cities. And this is an absolute psychological disaster, both for each human being and for the earth, of course.