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Chapters from the paperback
- Introduction
- Ecocriticism
- Optimisation
- Grounded Economic Awareness
- Advertising Awareness
- Transition Skills
- Commons Thinking
- Effortless Action
- Permaculture Design
- Community Gardening
- Ecological Intelligence
- Systems Thinking
- Gaia Awareness
- Futures Thinking
- Values Reflection and the Earth Charter
- Social Conscience
- New Media Literacy
- Cultural Literacy
- Carbon Capability
- Greening Business
- Materials Awareness
- Appropriate Technology and Appropriate Design
- Technology Appraisal
- Complexity, Systems Thinking and Practice
- Coping with Complexity
- Emotional Wellbeing
- Finding Meaning Without Consuming
- Being in the World
- Beauty as a Way of Knowing
- Citizen Engagement
- Re-Educating the Person
- Institutional Transformation
- A Learning Society
- Additional chapters
- Interviews
Home » The Handbook of Sustainability Literacy » Chapters from the paperback » Gaia Awareness
Gaia Awareness
Gaia Awareness: awareness of the animate qualities of the Earth. Stephan Harding, Coordinator of the MSc in Holistic Science at Schumacher College
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As the ecological and social crises bite deeper and deeper into the fabric of our lives, there is an urgent need for an education that addresses the question of how we can develop lifestyles that are truly sustainable in the ecological sense of the word. A key idea that people will need to understand is the notion that our planet seems to have regulated its own surface conditions within the narrow limits that life can tolerate over a vast span of time thanks to tightly coupled feedbacks between life and rocks, atmosphere and water. This is the key insight of Jim Lovelock’s paradigm-shifting Gaia theory. Students need a basic understanding of how to think in terms of feedback loops and of the surprising emergent properties that often appear when many such loops are linked together.
