God and Gaia
eBook - ePub

God and Gaia

Science, Religion and Ethics on a Living Planet

  1. 272 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

God and Gaia

Science, Religion and Ethics on a Living Planet

About this book

God and Gaia explores the overlap between traditional religious cosmologies and the scientific Gaia theory of James Lovelock. It argues that a Gaian approach to the ecological crisis involves rebalancing human and more-than-human influences on Earth by reviving the ecological agency of local and indigenous human communities, and of nonhuman beings.

Present-day human ecological influences on Earth have been growing at pace since the Scientific and Industrial Revolutions, when modern humans adopted a machine cosmology in which humans are the sole intelligent agency. The resultant imbalance between human and Earthly agencies is degrading the species diversity of ecosystems, causing local climate changes, and threatens to destabilise the Earth as a System. Across eight chapters this ambitious text engages with traditional cosmologies from the Indian Vedas and classical Greece to Medieval Christianity, with case material from Southeast Asia, Southern Africa and Great Britain. It discusses concepts such as deep time and ancestral time, the ethics of genetic engineering of foods and viruses, and holistic ecological management.

Northcott argues that an ontological turn that honours the differential agency of indigenous humans and other kind, and that draws on sacred traditions, will make it is possible to repair the destabilising impacts of contemporary human activities on the Earth System and its constituent ecosystems. This book will be of considerable interest to students and scholars of the environmental humanities, history, and cultural and religious studies.

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Yes, you can access God and Gaia by Michael S Northcott in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Biological Sciences & Religion & Science. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Half-Title
  3. Series
  4. Title
  5. Copyright
  6. Contents
  7. List of Figures
  8. Acknowledgements
  9. Introduction
  10. 1 From Deep Time to Ancestral Time
  11. 2 In Borneo
  12. 3 Diversity and Development
  13. 4 Reverse Engineering Life
  14. 5 Biosecurity, COVID-19, and Human–Earth Healing
  15. 6 The Earth as Gaia
  16. 7 Gaia and God
  17. 8 Gaian Ethics
  18. Index