Spring
Books Recovery of the earth: the Great Work of our age
Fr. Thomas Berry is well known to NCR readers as one of
the legendary founders of eco-theology, a recovery of reverence for the earth
in the Christian tradition. The following excerpt is from Chapter One of his
new book, The Great Work (Bell Tower, 242 pages, $23).
By THOMAS BERRY
History is governed by those overarching movements that give shape
and meaning to life by relating the human venture to the larger destinies of
the universe. Creating such a movement might be called the Great Work of a
people.
There have been Great Works in the past: the Great Work of the
classical Greek world with its understanding of the human mind and creation of
the Western humanist tradition; the Great Work of Israel in articulating a new
experience of the divine in human affairs; the Great Work of Rome in gathering
the peoples of the Mediterranean world and of Western Europe into an ordered
relation with one another.
So too in the medieval period there was the task of giving a first
shape to the Western world in its Christian form. The symbols of this Great
Work were the medieval cathedrals rising so graciously into the heavens from
the region of the old Frankish empire. There the divine and the human could be
present to each other in some grand manner.
In India the Great Work was to lead human thought into spiritual
experiences of time and eternity and their mutual presence to each other with a
unique subtlety of expression. China created one of the most elegant and most
human civilizations we have ever known as its Great Work. In America the Great
Work of the First Peoples was to occupy this continent and establish an
intimate rapport with the powers that brought this continent into existence in
all its magnificence. They did this through their ceremonies such as the Great
Thanksgiving ritual of the Iroquois, the sweat lodge and the vision quest of
the Plains Indians, through the Chantways of the Navaho, and the Katsina
rituals of the Hopi.
Through these and a multitude of other aspects of the indigenous
cultures of this continent, certain models were established of how humans
become integral with the larger context of our existence here on the planet
Earth.
Deeply human flaws
While all of these efforts at fulfilling a Great Work have made
significant contributions to the human venture, they were all limited in their
fulfillment and bear the marks of their deeply human flaws and imperfections.
Here in North America it is with a poignant feeling and foreboding concerning
the future that we begin to realize that the European occupation of this
continent, however admirable its intentions, has been flawed from the beginning
in its assault on the indigenous peoples and its plundering of the land. Its
most impressive achievements were establishing for the settlers a sense of
personal rights, participatory governance and religious freedom.
If there was also advancement of scientific insight and
technological skills leading to relief from many of the ills and poverty of the
European peoples, this advancement was accompanied by devastation of this
continent in its natural florescence by the suppression of the way of life of
its indigenous peoples and by communicating to them many previously unknown
diseases, such as smallpox, tuberculosis, diphtheria, and measles. Although
Europeans had developed a certain immunity to these diseases, they were
consistently fatal to Indians, who had never known such diseases and had
developed no immunities.
Meanwhile the incoming Europeans committed themselves to
development of the new industrial age that was beginning to dominate human
consciousness. New achievements in science, technology, industry, commerce and
finance had indeed brought the human community into a new age. Yet those who
brought this new historical period into being saw only the bright side of these
achievements. They had little comprehension of the devastation they were
causing on this continent and throughout the planet, a devastation that finally
led to an impasse in our relations with the natural world. Our
commercial-industrial obsessions have disturbed the biosystems of this
continent in a depth never known previously in the historical course of human
affairs.
The Great Work now, as we move into a new millennium, is to carry
out the transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period
when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner.
Such a transition has no historical parallel since the geobiological transition
that took place 67 million years ago when the period of the dinosaurs was
terminated and a new biological age begun.
Since we began to live in settled villages with agriculture and
domestication of animals some ten thousand years ago, humans have put increased
burdens upon the biosystems of the planet. These burdens were to some extent
manageable because of the prodigality of the nature, the limited number of
humans, and their limited ability to disrupt the natural systems. In recent
centuries, under the leadership of the Western world, largely with the
resources, psychic energy and inventiveness of the North American peoples, an
industrial civilization has come into being with the power to plunder Earth in
its deepest foundation, with awesome impact on its geological structure, its
chemical constitution, and its living forms throughout the wide expanses of the
land and the far reaches of the sea.
Some 25 billion tons of topsoil are now being lost each year with
untold consequences to the food supply of future generations. Some of the most
abundant species of marine life have become commercially extinct due to
overexploitation by factory fishing vessels and the use of drift nets 20 to 30
miles long 20 feet deep If we consider the extinctions taking place in the rain
forests of the southern regions of the planet with the other extinctions, we
find that we are losing large number of species ear year.
Cultural selection
Much more could be said concerning the impact of humans on the
planet, the disturbance caused by the use of river systems for waste disposal,
the pollution of the atmosphere by the burning of fossil fuels, and the
radioactive waste consequent on our use of nuclear energy. All of this
disturbance of the planet is leading to the terminal phase of the Cenozoic Era.
Natural selection can no longer function as it has functioned in the past.
Cultural selection is now a decisive force in determining the future of the
biosystems of the Earth.
The deepest cause of the present devastation is found in a mode of
consciousness that has established a radical discontinuity between the human
and other modes of being and the bestowal of all rights on the humans. The
other-than-human modes of being are seen as having no rights. In this context
the other than human becomes totally vulnerable to exploitation by the human,
an attitude that is shared by all four of the fundamental establishments that
control the human realm: governments, corporations, universities, and religions
the political, economic, intellectual, and religious establishments. All
four are committed consciously or unconsciously to a radical discontinuity
between the human and the nonhuman.
In reality there is a single integral community of the Earth that
includes all its component members whether human or other than human. In this
community every being has its own role to fulfill, its own dignity, its inner
spontaneity. Every being has its own voice. Every being declares itself to the
entire universe. Every being enters into communion with other beings. This
capacity for relatedness, of presence to other beings, for spontaneity in
action is a capacity possessed by every mode of being throughout the entire
universe.
So too every being has the right to be recognized and revered.
Trees have tree rights, insects have insect rights, rivers have river rights.
Mountains have mountain rights. So too with the entire range of beings
throughout the universe. All rights are limited and relative. So too with
humans. We have human rights. We have rights to the nourishment and shelter we
need. We have rights to habitat.
But we have no rights to deprive other species of their proper
habitat. We have no rights to interfere with their migration routes. We have no
rights to disturb the basic functioning of the biosystems of the planet. We
cannot own the Earth or any part of the Earth in any absolute manner. We own
property in accord with the well-being of the property and for the benefit of
the larger community as Virulent industrialization well as ourselves.
With the new technologies that emerged in the last half of the
19th century and the automobile industry that developed in the early 20th
century, industrialization achieved a new virulence. Roadways, superhighways,
parking lots, shopping centers, malls, and housing developments took over.
Suburban living became normative for the good life. This was also the time when
the number of free-flowing rivers began to decline. The great dams were built
on the Colorado, the Snake and especially the Columbia rivers.
Yet this was also the time when resistance began. The increasing
threat to the natural life-systems of the continent awakened the sense of need
for grandeur in the natural world if any truly human development was to
continue in our cultural traditions. This new awareness began in the 19th
century with such persons as Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, John Burroughs and
George Perkin Marsh; with John Wesley Powell and Frederick Law Olmstead; also
with artists, especially Thomas Cole, Frederick Edwin Church and Albert
Bierstadt of the Hudson River School.
In that same period the first voluntary associations were formed
to foster a deepened appreciation of the natural world. The Audubon Society,
founded in 1886, was concerned primarily with appreciation of the various bird
species. The Sierra Club was founded in 1892 and the Wilderness Society in
1924. Both sought to create a more intimate relationship between the human
community and wild world about us.
These various groups were the beginning. The larger dimensions of
what was happening could not have been known to those living in the 19th
century. They could not have foreseen the petroleum industry, the automobile
age, the damning of the rivers, the emptying of the marine life of the oceans,
the radioactive waste. Yet they knew that something was wrong at a profound
level.
Some, such as John Muir, were deeply disturbed. When the decision
was made to build a dam to enclose Hetch-Hetchy Valley as a reservoir for the
city of San Francisco, he considered it the unnecessary destruction of one of
the most sacred shrines in the natural world, a shrine that fulfilled some of
the deepest emotional, imaginative, and intellectual needs of the human soul.
Dam Hetch-Hetchy! As well dam for water-tanks the peoples
cathedrals and churches, for no holier temple has even been consecrated by the
heart of man.
Perhaps the most valuable heritage we can provide for future
generations is some sense of the Great Work that is before them of moving the
human project from its devastating exploitation to benign presence. We need to
give them some indication of how the next generation can fulfill this work in
an effective manner.
The Great Work before us, the task of moving modern industrial
civilization from its present devastating influence on the Earth to a more
benign mode of presence, is not a role that we have chosen. It is a role given
to us, beyond any consultation with ourselves. We did not choose. We were
chosen by some power beyond ourselves for this historical task.
We must believe that those powers that assign our role must in
that same act bestow upon us the ability to fulfill this role. We must believe
that we are cared for and guided by these same powers that bring us into being.
Our own special role, which we will hand on to our children, is
that of managing the arduous transition from the terminal Cenozoic to the
emerging Ecozoic Era, the period when humans will be present to the planet as
participating members of the comprehensive Earth community.
This is our Great Work and the work of our children, just as
Europeans in the 12th and 13th centuries were given the role of bringing a new
cultural age out of the difficulties and strife of that long period from the
sixth throughout the 11th centuries. At this time, the grandeur of the
classical period had dissolved, the cities of Europe had declined, and life in
all its physical and cultural aspects was carried on in the great castles and
monasteries to constitute what came to be known as the manorial period in
European history.
In the ninth and 10th centuries the Normans were invading the
nascent culture of Europe from the north, the Magyars were moving in from the
east, and the Muslims were advancing in Spain. Western civilization was
situated in a very limited region under siege. In response to this threatening
situation, Medieval Europe toward the end of the 11th century began the
crusading wars that united the nations of Europe and for two centuries engaged
them in an eastward drive toward Jerusalem and the conquest of the Holy
Land.
This period might be considered the beginning of the historical
drive that has led European people in their quest for religious, cultural,
political and economic conquest of the world. This movement was continued
through the period of discovery and control over the planet into our own times
when the Western presence culminates politically in the United Nations and
economically in such establishments as the World Bank, the International
Monetary Fund, the World Trade Organization, and the World Business Council for
Sustainable Development. We might even interpret this Western drive toward
limitless domain in all its forms as leading eventually to the drive toward
human dominion over the natural world.
Dazzling achievements
The immediate achievement, however, of the 13th century was the
creation of the first integration of what became Western civilization. In this
century new and dazzling achievements took place in the arts, in architecture,
in speculative thinking, in literature. By raising up the medieval cathedrals a
new and original architecture was created. In these soaring structures an
artistic daring and refinement was manifest that has been equaled only in rare
moments in the larger history of civilizations.
This was also the period of Francis, the poor man of Assisi, and
also the period of Thomas Aquinas. As the philosopher Alfred North Whitehead
has noted, this was the time when the Western mind took on that critical
keenness and reasoning process that made our modern scientific thought
processes possible. In literature the incomparable Dante Alighieri produced his
Commedia in the early 14th century, a time when Giotto was already beginning,
with Cimabue, the great period of Italian painting.
The importance of recalling these shaping forces in the narrative
account of Western civilization is that they arose as a response to the Dark
ages from the sixth-through 11th-centuries in Europe. We need to recall that in
these and in so many other instances the dark periods of history are the
creative periods; for these are the times when new ideas, arts, and
institutions can be brought into being at the most basic level.
Just as the brilliant period of medieval civilization arose out of
these earlier conditions, we might recall the period in China when, in the
third century, the tribal invasions from the northwest had broken down the rule
of the Han dynasty and for several centuries brought about disunity throughout
the empire. Yet this period of dissolution was also the period of Buddhist
monks and Confucian scholars and artists who gave expression to new visions and
new thoughts at the deepest levels of human consciousness.
Following the Tang period the Sung period of the 10th
through 14th centuries would bring forth such masterful interpretations of
traditional Chinese thought as those presented by Chou Tun-I and Chu Hsi.
Artists such as Ma Yüan and Hsia Kuei of the 12th century and poets such
as Su Tung-po would complete this creative period in the cultural history
of China.
We must consider ourselves in these early years of the 21st
century as also experiencing a threatening historical situation, although our
situation is ultimately beyond comparison with any former period in Europe or
in Asia. For those peoples were dealing with human adjustment to disturbances
of human life patterns. They were not dealing with the disruption and even the
termination of a geobiological period that had governed the functioning of the
planet for some 67 million years. They were not dealing with anything
comparable to the toxics in the air, the water, and the soil, or with the
immense volume of chemicals dispersed throughout the planet. Nor were they
dealing the extinction of species or the altering of the climate on the scale
of our present concern.
Yet we can be inspired by their example, their courage, and even
by their teachings. For we are heirs to an immense intellectual heritage, to
the wisdom traditions whereby they were able to fulfill the Great Work of their
times. These traditions are not the transient thoughts or immediate insights of
journalists concerned with the daily course of human affairs; these are
expressions in human form of the principles guiding human life within the very
structure and functioning of the universe itself.
We cannot doubt that we too have been given the intellectual
vision, the spiritual insight and even the physical resources we need for
carrying out the transition that is demanded of these times, transition from
the period when humans were a disruptive force on the planet Earth to the
period when humans become present to the planet in a manner that is mutually
enhancing.
National Catholic Reporter, February 4,
2000
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