During the night of 11 September 2010, at age seventy-eight, Colombian philosopher Carlos Augusto Angel Maya passed away in Cali.This "maestro de maestros" of Latin American environmental thought was closer to life, to Ataraxia (the title of one of his final works), to the enjoyment of life in life, than to the notion of development, or sustainable development.Maya opened the possibility of environmental thought for Colombia and Latin America, stemming from the complexity of the webs of life, as explored in his Web of Life, published in 1994, four years before Fritjof Capra's The Web of Life.Both Maya and Capra would show that life in its very fabric is complexity.Having been woven for millions of years, today the dense web of life demands from global society a profound transformation of all symbols, of the entire framework, of all stories, teleologies, foundations, and images of the metaphysical culture that the prophetic poet Hölderlin defined in the early nineteenth century-at the height of the Enlightenment, but also of restless Romanticism, skeptic of the messianic promises of modern rationality-as "a sly race that thinks it knows what it is doing."Mainstream approaches to global climate change and the socio-ecological crisis focus on novel ways of understanding and using nature.Maya, philosopher-poet of life, invites us to look backward to ancient, traditional forms of conceiving and inhabiting the world.In order to heal the relationship between society and nature, we need to undo the path that has taken modern global thought away from nature into abstractions of numbers and ideas that have lost all connection with the physical world.Maya's school of thought guides students in this deconstruction of the abstract path of thought, enabling them to arrive at one of the original, most fertile sources, of Western thought: the pre-Socratics.The pre-Socratics "were not polluted by the infection and spread of the disease of logos," which put a veil between nature and the dominant current of thought in Western civilization.With modernity, this veil was imposed around the world through a process of colonial conquering and suppression of local forms of knowledge rooted in local ecological and cultural realities.With the Ionians, Maya explores the unity between the human and the other-than-human.These pre-Socratics offer Western science insights into the unity between energy and matter, and spirit and nature.