The Scientific Revolution is often remembered as a liberation, the birth of reason, and the triumph of science over superstition. It certainly was. The scientific revolution gave us the ability to look at the world objectively and bring facts onto the stage of wisdom to widen our collective understanding of truth. Yet it was also a great animistic suppression rooted in the interpretation that humans were superior to their shared surroundings and made in the image of God. We can assume that humans may have forgotten science’s roots along the road of waged war, expansion, legal tender, colonialism, and the rise of monotheistic religions. And that we still forget today. Science initially rose from humans posing questions around them: ‘When someone sleeps, where do they go? And when they die, what is missing?’ The field of science arose from questions of consciousness and reality. It was initially deeply anchored in imagination, observation and participation. And as it seems, a clear, collective acceptance that there is more than the psyche of humans in the sphere of awareness. 

But something was lost along the way.

As certain political and religious authorities grasped and took the stage of domination as early as 310 CE, the world itself was slowly stripped of its own voice. What had once been perceived as alive was recast as inert. Forests became timber and it became rational to clear them without grief once they were recast as simple structures and not beings. Rivers became resources, easily poisoned without question in the name of conquest because they did not have a soul. Matter was rendered mute and placed on this earth for us to utilize. Something to be manipulated rather than listened to. This shift did not emerge from neutral observation alone but instead alongside centuries of conquest, colonization, religious consolidation, and economic expansion. A worldview took hold in which only certain humans, by virtue of status, geographic location, racial identity and power bestowed upon certain kingdoms were granted authority to define reality and deny further interpretations.

The consequences of that worldview surround us now. Climate collapse, mass extinction, and widespread alienation are not accidents of progress; they are the logical outcome of a worldview that severed spirit from matter and placed humans at the center of a fraudulent stage.

Science itself did not begin this way. Its earliest roots lie in curiosity, imagination, and participation. Long before laboratories and instruments, humans asked questions born of wonder: Where do stars go in the day? How does fire move and is it dancing? Why does the moon return? What is a feeling, and why is it sometimes mutual and other times not? Science arose from relationships with one's environment. With land, sky, cycles, animals, kin, and mystery. But we collectively fell out of this sacred relationship.

To fall out of right relationship is not merely to misunderstand the world; it is to forget that our actions reverberate through systems that sustain us. It is to act upon Earth as if our planet is the platform to debut our lives as the main act, rather than to act as if we are living within her. Ask yourself, do you treat the living body of the planet as a backdrop, not kin? Perhaps its not necessarily your fault, perhaps you are doing what you see around you, or what you are told.

Modern science and humans did not destroy the sacred outright. It dismembered it slowly and surely due to the agenda of those held in political power pushing for colonialism. Now that push, instead coming from the pursuit of expansion of kingdom, now is in pursuit of money. Knowledge was stripped and divided into disciplines and categories. But Earth refuses such partitioning and life will never fall cleanly into the lines humans try to put them in. Biology spills into chemistry. Chemistry into physics. Physics into cosmology. The deeper we look, the more the world coheres into conversation. Earth is not and never was silent; we simply forgot how to listen.

Every movement in the web of life reverberates. A molecule of water lifted from a leaf becomes part of a cloud. Nutrients carried by rivers feed coral reefs. Or the forests influence rainfall, calling the rain in-land through transpiration. Edward Lorenz defined this as the Butterfly Effect in chaos theory. The recognition that small actions ripple through vast systems. Ecology is not a collection of parts; it is a choreography of life and you are a part of it, so I urge you to choose the way you would like to be a part of it.

When somebody says ‘As above, so below’ they should also mean, by definition: what happens in the skies, happens in the sea and what happens in the sea as happens in our bloodstream. 

The climate crisis is not only technological, it is relational. It is the consequence of forgetting that we belong to a living community and participating in our communities. I believe the next evolution of science will not come from better instruments alone, but from a shift in posture; from control to participation.

To recognize rights for the living Earth is not to grant dignity to something undeserving; it is to acknowledge the community we have always belonged to and to acknowledge the ways we have stepped out of balance. Rivers existed before property lines. Forests breathed long before economies named them assets.

Science is not the enemy. It is the tool that can now confirm what animism has always known: the world is alive, relational, and in constant transformation. The great work is not turning lead into gold. It is reweaving knowledge with humility, science with soul, and humans back into the living fabric that sustains us.