January/February 1995
Utne Reader
Thomas Berry is a massively learned cultural historian of the
West's unhappy relationship with the earth. In The Dream of
Earth, The Universe Story and other books, Berry, founder and
director of New York's Riverdale Center of Religious Research,
calls for a Green consciousness that reaches down to the very roots
of our religious, philosophical, and cosmological assumptions,
transforming them--and our educational, corporate, and religious
establishments too.
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For Thomas Berry--an 81-year-old historian, Asian scholar, and
ecological thinker who has lived in a Catholic monastery, studied
in China, and taught in seven universities--one of the most
important places on earth is an obscure little meadow in the
Appalachians.
'I discovered it when I was 10 years old,' he says. 'It was
filled with lilies and ran down to a little creek. As the years
passed I realized that the little meadow was normative for
everything. That a good economics would preserve it; a good science
would help us understand it; a good religion would interpret its
message.'
Thomas Berry's teaching and writing are a passionate meditation
on the links between that meadow, its message, and the deep
cultural and philosophical structures of both East and West. With a
thorough professional knowledge of European thought, Chinese
Taoism, and the religions of India ('where the divine is always
immanent in the natural world,' Berry points out), he is one of the
planet's most erudite and far-seeing advocates of a transformed
relationship with nature.