Reflecting on the Life of a Giant

A Tribute to Dr. Stephan Harding

Dear ReWilders,?

In the grand scheme of nature, within the slow moving mountains and tributaries of nature-time, our lives on this planet are short - and sometimes seem like a blip on the radar of the immeasurable timescale of life on earth.

Then, sometimes, there are people who seem to move mountains themselves, whose effect on the people and landscapes around them ripple outward, and the ripples continue long after they have left the earth. One of those people was Stephan Harding, a dear mentor to ReWild, and someone whose understanding of deep ecology and the effect he had on the people around him will be felt for generations

“The Western rational mind doesn’t believe that nature speaks, it just thinks of nature as dead, it’s just part of our culture. But it requires a poetic sensitivity… You have to work with your imagination and put your rational mind very much in the back seat. It’s a practice… The only way we value things in our culture is through monetary value… but we need to start valuing things because they have intrinsic value, not use value or instrumental value for us.” - Stephan Harding, Learning to Value

In honour of Stephan’s life, we wanted to reflect on a life that was well lived, a life that had a net positive impact on the human and more-than-human communities that surrounded him; a vast life that not many will compare to.?

Stephan was a founding member of Schumacher College in the UK, where he researched deep ecology and gaia theory, and led the holistic sciences masters program for twenty years. Amongst books published, lives affected, students guided, and landscapes touched, Stephan was a dear mentor to ReWild’s co-founder Sam Chevallier, who met Stephan when he attended Schumacher College in 2013. Stephen inspired many of the core fundamentals that formed the foundation and purpose of ReWild as an organisation, and his memory will live on in the ethics and purpose of the work we do.?

“If I could snap my fingers, I would want everyone to be Gaia’d, that’s to say to have the realisation, not an intellectual idea at all - not academic - nothing to do with writing or reading, you can be totally illiterate… just to have the realisation that we are living inside a living planet, a gigantic planetary organism. That the cosmos is alive, that everything is alive, everything is sentient; and that the whole purpose of this existence is the cultivation and development of consciousness.” - Stephan Harding, Learning to Value

The fabric of life’s interwoven tapestries relies on all living things. Stephan highlighted how western epistemology has so often removed people from the rest of life on earth, isolating us from the natural chaos of nature and into the man-made rational world of science and logic. But, by separating these different cosmologies and ways of understanding, we have lost ourselves within it, and have lost our ability to see ourselves as part of it. Stephen speaks to a way of valuing nature and understanding our place within this beautiful chaos, that Indigenous cultures around the world understand intrinsically, and find it a lot easier to see people as part of these systems than western minds do. The ripple of Stephen’s memory lives on as a calling to rediscover these ways of knowing, learning, and understanding in order to imagine alternative futures where people and nature can thrive alongside one another.?

“I suppose I have moments of wholeness, you know, where you don’t just feel the earth is alive, but you are alive within the living earth. The earth is much more sentient than you imagine, the organisms are sentient, there is consciousness in everything… It's all about consciousness. Those are the wonderful moments, when you really know that - it’s no longer just an intellectual idea, but the knowing descends on you like a healing rain - and you just know, you know, without any doubt.” - Stephan Harding, Learning to Value

Watch A Tribute to Dr. Stephan Harding: Honouring a Visionary in Ecological Consciousness by ReWild’s Co-Founder Sam Chevallier and edited by Jean-Michelle Tane to get a sense of a man that was larger than life, and understood life far better than most of us ever will.?

Wild regards,?

The ReWild Family