
Animate Earth: Science, Intuition and Gaia
Ecologist Stephan Harding spent his doctoral years tracking muntjac deer through the English countryside, collecting data by the book, until the fieldwork left him convinced that conventional science was missing something essential about how life actually connects. This film follows that conviction back to Schumacher College in Devon, where Harding now teaches, and out into interviews with Fritjof Capra, Vandana Shiva, Iain McGilchrist, Brian Goodwin, Jules Cashford, and Satish Kumar on Gaia Theory, the idea of Earth as a self-regulating living system. Harding argues that solving ecological collapse requires pairing rational analysis with intuition and direct sensory contact with the natural world, rather than treating nature as an object to be measured from a distance. The film intercuts his personal account of that shift with the thinkers who share his position, building a case for an expanded science rather than a rejection of it. It stays close to one person's argument and the company he keeps rather than surveying the field.