Get Elisabet Sahtouris' book, Earthdance (with a foreword by James Lovelock, who proposed the Gaia Hypothesis/Theory), in various ways:

• read it on the web, free of charge, here
• get the ebook at iUniverse
• call your local alternative or feminist bookstore and order it from them
• purchase copies from large publishers, like Amazon.com

Learn more about Ms. Sahtouris and her worldwide work for our planet here and here. Why should you? Read on.

I visited the California Institute of Integral Studies in 1991 for an interview for admission to a doctoral program in psychology. There, I saw a poster announcing a talk with Elisabet Sahtouris about her recently-published book, Gaia, the Human Journey from Chaos to Cosmos. A Goddess woman, I marveled at the coincidence/serendipity of our concurrent visits to CIIS and was intrigued by her presentation and her work, with the story of Gaia at its heart.

Though I wasn't offered admission to CIIS's PhD program, that trip to San Francisco was a fruitful one, for through the work of Ms. Sahtouris, I began to understand what life is all about -- literally, geobiologically, and spiritually. Recently republished with an extra chapter and a new title -- Earthdance, Living Systems in Evolution -- Sahtouris' book explains the process of life creating and evolving itself in a way that non-scientists can understand.

Sahtouris is a Ph.D. scientist who taught at the University of Massachusetts and M.I.T., and was a science writer for the HORIZON/ NOVA TV series, before taking a long sabbatical to live simply and passionately between forest and sea in Greece. There, she developed her topic, refining and simplifying the concepts into a story for children. This book, written for adults, is very accessible and a fascinating account of earth life.

She writes (in a way that we non-science folks can understand) about the history of life, from the "big bang" forward, explicating the roles of competition (for resources), conflict and cooperation in the evolution of life on this planet.

Sahtouris explores life from the perspective of geobiology, demonstrating that we have in our very bodies the entire history of earthlife creating itself, through its wise moments, its follies and its serendipities. She easily refutes Darwin's notion that life/our species evolved/evolves due to survival of the fittest (competition). She maintains that survival of life forms and the evolution of life is a direct result of creative, cooperative solutions to natural tendencies that cause conflict due to competition for resources. She talks about our species as being at the teenage stage of species development and warns that we'd better get on with embodying cooperation, or else....

Her book is not just food for thought, but an entire feast for those interested in understanding life from the perspective of matter itself. If you're developing a cosmology that has anything to do with life the way Gaia has evolved it, read this book!

My copy of the original book is curled and broken-spined, its front cover dangling, its pages soft and deteriorating around the edges. It is one of the holiest books in my library.