News

Faced with a preponderance of evidence, it is time to revive an idea that was once roundly mocked: the Gaia hypothesis. Conceived by the British chemist James Lovelock in the early 1970s and later developed with the American biologist Lynn Margulis, the Gaia hypothesis proposes that all the living and nonliving elements of Earth are “parts and partners of a vast being who in her entirety has the power to maintain our planet as a fit and comfortable habitat for life.”

A new essay from Brian Thomas Swimme on how our solar came emerged. In this essay, Brian takes readers to the earliest moments of our solar system and invites us to imagine what it might feel like to experience the waves that gave birth to world as we know it today. Out of chaos, order evolves, takes form and fights for it's existence. In such moments, Brian suggests, we catch a glimpse of our destiny.

By Peter ReasonWinter 2019.It was several years ago that I first came across the shocking idea that humans were moving more physical stuff around the planet than the natural processes of volcanos and earthquakes, rivers and tides. In the last few years, the idea of the Anthropocene has engaged both scientists and civil society: human activities have been sufficiently extensive to have moved Earth out of the Holocene, the epoch of the last 10,0000 years, into a new epoch in which human actions have fundamentally impacted planetary dynamics. In (2106) I reviewed Gaia Vince's award winning book Adventures in the Anthropocene for EarthLines Magazine, and found myself troubled by the lack of fundamental thinking through the implications of statements such as 'We must choose the kind of nature we want'. I was also troubled by what I saw as the arrogance of the 'ecomodernist' gloss (http://www.ecomodernism.org/), the notion that humans can create a 'good' or even 'great' Anthropocene—a perspective that seemed to imply we could get ourselves out of the ecological mess we have created through 'more of the same', which offended against my understanding of system dynamic.

One of the most important large-scale artworks in the world sits in the desert of northern Arizona, where artist James Turrell has spent decades shaping the landscape into an immersive observatory. His creation, Roden Crater, is a masterwork of light and perception inside a dormant volcano, now only seen by a few hundred people every year. A new and innovative partnership between Turrell and Arizona State University will help complete the artist’s magnum opus on the edge of the Painted Desert, making it accessible to many more people and developing an academic component for Turrell to share his artistic vision and inspire transdisciplinary approaches to creativity.

On Dec. 21, 1968, Apollo 8 launched from the Kennedy Space Center in Merritt Island, Fla. The astronaut crew — Frank Borman, Bill Anders and James Lovell — were the first humans to escape Earth’s orbit, venturing about 240,000 miles farther than anyone before them. Their mission was to orbit the moon, testing the viability of a future moon landing. NASA was focused on getting to the moon and beating the Soviet Union in the space race; everything else, including photography, was secondary. Yet during their lunar orbit, the crew emerged from the dark side of the moon to see the Earth rising before them over the lunar horizon. They scrambled to capture the image, producing the first color photograph taken of the Earth from the moon. It became known as “Earthrise” and has become one of the most well-known photographs in history.