The text below comes from "Gaia, the practical science of planetary medicine" by my father, James Lovelock
I took this photograph of him, by the church at Launceston."Modern medicine recognises the mind and body as part of a single system where the state of each can affect the health of the other. It may be true also in planetary medicine that our collective attitude towards the Earth affects and is affected by the health of the planet. Christian teaching has it that "the body is the temple of the soul" and that alone is a good enough reason for leading a healthy life. I find myself looking on the Earth itself as a place for worship, with all life as its congregation. For me this is reason enough for doing everything that is in my power to sustain a healthy planet.
Perhaps because I think this way, I take special comfort from an unusual sacred place which I often visit with my wife, Sandy. It is the small church of St Michael de Rupe, perched upon the central peak of a long extinct Miocene volcano, about half a mile south of the village of Brentor in Devon, some ten miles from my home at Coombe Mill
At the peak of Brent Tor, on a fine day when the wind comes in from the broad Atlantic bringing clear fresh air, the green dappled fields and woods of Devon stretch out to a far horizon 30 miles away. They form a landscape that looks good, perhaps because the farming is still pre- agribusiness.
This pleasant prospect encompasses three quarters of the view and stands in contrast to the small mountain mass to the east called Dartmoor. Here is treeless brown tundra, that from a distance seems to have slumped like the tailing of a mine. It was a forest once, but Iron Age people destroyed it. There is always at the peak of Brent Tor a sense of sacredness, as if it were a place where God and Gaia meet. The feeling is intense, like that felt in great cathedrals, caverns and on other mountain tops. Of course it could be rationilised scientifically as a physical sense, as yet poorly understood, by which the brain processes the sound impinging on our ears and converts the multitude of signals into a "vision in sound" of our surroundings. Bats and other animals that see by sound must possess this sense. maybe we do also, but become aware of it places such as Brent Tor. It is this sense that creates what my physicist friend, Peter Fellgett, calls ambience. Whatever the reason, Brent Tor and places like it have a sense of peace. They seem to serve as reference points of health against which to contrast the illness of the present urban or rural scene."
My father, again, outside Launceston Chruch. This time he put his camera away and I took another photo of him and Sandy, and my brother John.