Thomas Berry
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.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.
The Dream of Earth (1988) and The Universe Story
(1992, written with cosmologist Brian Swimme) reflect on the
interdependence of all life and call for nothing less than a new
epoch of earth history, the 'Ecozoic,' in which humankind accepts
the unprecedented magnitude of its current impact on nature and
then undertakes a change of heart and mind that goes far beyond
recycling. 'The remedy for our dilemma is a deep cultural therapy,'
says Berry. 'We must come to see the natural world not as a
collection of objects, but a communion of subjects; and subjects
have rights.'
This vision, which looks back to the great French
scientist-priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, also looks forward to
the transformation of contemporary society; and one of Berry's
current concerns is working out the terms of the transformation of
the 'establishments'--university, government, church, and business.
'We must transform all four,' Berry insists, 'because all four
operate on the basis of disconnection between the natural and human
worlds.'
Where does this scholarly prophet go for precedent and hope in
this immense enterprise? To the Middle Ages, among other times and
places. 'People in the 11th, 12th, and 13th centuries felt that
they were engaged in what they called a Great Work--the
establishment of a finer civilization after the chaos of the Dark
Ages,' says Berry. 'There is a Great Work for us to do too, and as
we do it, it will not only give us a better world--it will give us
a reason to live.'