KE YNOTE S

ECO-THEOLOGY • THOMAS BERRY

EARTH COMMUNITY

A vast new orientation to the universe and to the Earth will be needed to reorient the human community toward a viable future.

THE UNIVERSE IS primarily a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. Those of us who live in the industrial world have become locked into ourselves, into the human process. We cannot relate to the outer world in any effective manner. We cannot get out, and the outer world cannot penetrate the human. We have lost our reverence, our sense of mystery, our sense of the sacred. We do not hear the voices of the surrounding world, the voices of the entire range of natural phenomena. The forests seem to be there primarily for exploitation. Any depth of human presence to the forests is relegated to ‘marginal’ persons, such as poets and painters, who are considered victimised by sentiment. The reality of the tree is simply its utility, its economic value. To accept that trees have rights to be what they are and that all living beings have rights to their habitat is the challenge. Humans too have rights within the larger context of the Earth Community. If our rights are sacred, we must accept that the rights of other beings also are sacred. We are only beginning to realise what happens to humans once we lose our emotional-intellectual contact with the life forces of the natural world and begin to plunder the Earth in an effort to increase our human wellbeing. We fi nd that the fabric and the functioning of the planet are more mysterious than we thought, that we cannot win in this exploitative process. We have endless examples of the consequences of eliminating the forests, of using chemical rather than organic agriculture, of using petroleum to avoid having to develop more sustainable forms of energy and materials. The basic assumption as regards the future cannot be that it is necessary to maintain a high level of industrial production. The industrial period is at an end, at least in its present form.

The problem is how to terminate industrial plundering in such a way that we can go into a completely new sense of how humans should be present to the Earth. The industrial period has brought us to the terminal phase, not simply of Western civilisation, or even of the post-Neolithic period of human development: it has brought us to the end of the Cenozoic era itself. The period of the Earth as we know it, the period into which humans emerged, is generally designated as the Cenozoic. During this sixty-fi ve million-year period, the period of fl owering plants, of birds and of mammals, the entire range of life systems as we experience them were at the height of their fl orescence when humans came into being. What is truly regretful is that so much of this is irreversible in anything like human-historical time. We are already far beyond any recovery of the integrity of the planet – its basic life-sustaining functioning – such as existed prior to human appearance. This reversal of the wave on wave of life development that had been occurring during the sixty-fi ve million years of the Cenozoic can be designated the terminal phase of the Cenozoic. What is available to us is the emerging Ecozoic era, a period of the integral Earth community when humans become present to the powers of the Earth in a mutually enhancing manner. For humans to do this will require that we appreciate and honour the principle that the Earth is primary and humans are derivative. In our economics, in our healing, in our legal and political practices and in our religious sensitivities, we need to recognise the primacy of the Earth community. This interacting community has remarkable capacities for self-renewal, but within limits. Already we have strained these limits.

THE EARTH WILL never again function in the manner in which it has

functioned until the present. We had nothing to say in the Cenozoic era about the functioning of the planet. The awesome splendour of the planet came about completely independently of human participation. In the emerging Ecozoic era, however, very little will happen without human involvement. We cannot make a blade of grass, but there is liable not to be a blade of grass unless we accept it, protect it and foster it. There will continue to be a need for technology, and for science, especially for the chemical sciences, but these will need to develop sensitivities that they have never known before. These sensitivities to the inner functioning of the planet will, hopefully, enable our sciences and technologies to function in a creative relation with the planet and its technologies, not in the present destructive manner. The precautionary principle points the way by urging us not to put things into the environment for which we do not know the full consequences for both the health of humans and the wellbeing of the environment. The chemistry profession laid the foundations for entering into the transformation of the physical world with a special effi cacy. The ancient alchemical tradition had some sense of identifi cation with and transmutation of elemental processes. This identifi cation was lost with the rise of empirical science, which involved a psychic distancing from nature. The critical faculty was allowed to pursue its path only within very narrow confi nes of objective research. Chemical engineering entered into the process where nature was at an extremely vulnerable point, at the elementary level where nature wrought some of its most remarkable achievements. After the planet had been physically altered through the building of dams, highways, parking lots, shop

10 Resurgence No. 244 September/October 2007