The Ecozoic Era
by Thomas Berry
Eleventh Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures
October 1991, Great Barrington, Massachusetts
Edited by Hildegarde Hannum
©Copyright 1991 E. F. Schumacher Society and Thomas Berry
May be purchased in pamphlet form from the E. F. Schumacher Society,
140 Jug End Road, Great Barrington, MA 01230, (413) 528-1737,
www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications.html.
You can listen to this lecture online at Archive.org
It is indeed a high honor to be with you today and to discuss
with you the significance of these terminal decades of the century,
which are also the terminal decades of the millennium. Far beyond
any of these in its significance is the terminal phase of the
Cenozoic Era of Earth history, in which we presently find ourselves.
In these fateful years we are terminating sixty-five million years
in the biological history of the planet. It is most important
that we appreciate the order of magnitude of what is happening
in our times.
Lewis Mumford has been mentioned here today in commemoration
of his career as our foremost cultural historian in the twentieth
century. He extended the horizons of our vision to include a vast
range of human cultural development. In doing this he was extremely
sensitive to the rootedness of human affairs in the geological
and biological systems of the planet. This perception we now need
to extend beyond anything that he could envisage in his day.
The changes presently taking place in human and earthly affairs
are beyond any parallel with historical change or cultural modification
as these have occurred in the past. This is not like the transition
from the classical period to the medieval period or from the medieval
to the modern period. These changes reach far beyond the civilizational
process, beyond even the human process, into the biosystems and
even the geological structures of the Earth itself.
There are only two other moments in the history of this planet
that offer us some sense of what is happening. These two moments
are the end of the Paleozoic Era 220 million years ago, when some
90 percent of all species living at that time were extinguished,
and the terminal phase of the Mesozoic Era sixty-five million
years ago, when there was also very extensive extinction.
Then, in the emerging Cenozoic Era the story of life on this
planet flowed over into what could be called the lyric period
of Earth history. The trees had come before this, the mammals
already existed in a rudimentary form, the flowers had appeared
perhaps thirty million years earlier. But in the Cenozoic Era,
there was wave upon wave of life development, with the flowers,
the birds, the trees, and the mammalian species particularly all
leading to that luxuriant display of life upon Earth such as we
have known it.
In more recent times, during the past million years this region
of New England went through its different phases of glaciation,
also its various phases of life development. New England's trees
especially developed a unique grandeur. Possibly no other place
on Earth has such color in its fall foliage as this region. It
was all worked out during these past sixty-five million years.
The songbirds we hear also came about in this long period.
Then we, the human inhabitants of the Earth, came into this region
with all the ambivalences we bring with us. Not only here but
throughout the planet we have become a profoundly disturbing presence.
In this region and to the north in southern Quebec, the native
maple trees are dying out in great numbers due to pollutants we
have put into the atmosphere, the soil, and the water.
Their demise is largely a result of the carbon compounds we have
loosed into the atmosphere through the use of fossil fuels, especially
of petroleum, for our fuel and energy. Carbon is, as you know,
the magical element. The whole life structure of the planet is
based upon the element carbon. So long as the life process is
guided by its natural patterns, the integral functioning of the
Earth takes place. The wonderful variety expressed in marine life
and land life, the splendor of the flowers and the birds and animals—all
these could expand in their gorgeous coloration, in their fantastic
forms, in their dancing movements, and in their songs and calls
that echo over the world.
To accomplish all this, however, nature must find a way of storing
immense quantities of carbon in the petroleum and coal deposits,
also in the great forests. This process was worked out over some
hundreds of millions of years. A balance was achieved, and the
life systems of the planet were secure in the interaction of the
air and the water and the soil with the inflowing energy from
the sun.
But then we discovered that petroleum could produce such wonderful
effects. It can be made into fertilizer to nourish crops; it can
be spun into fabrics; it can fuel our internal combustion engines
for transportation over the vast highway system we have built;
it can produce an unlimited variety of plastic implements; it
can run gigantic generators and produce power for lighting and
heating of our buildings.
It was all so simple. We had no awareness of the deadly consequences
that would result from the residue from our use of petroleum for
all these purposes. Nor did we know how profoundly we would affect
the organisms in the soil with our insistence that the patterns
of plant growth be governed by artificial human demands met by
petroleum-based fertilizers rather than by the spontaneous rhythms
within the living world. Nor did we understand that biological
systems are not that adaptable to the mechanistic processes we
imposed upon them.
I do not wish to dwell on the devastation we have brought upon
the Earth but only to make sure we understand the nature and the
extent of what is happening. While we seem to be achieving magnificent
things at the microphase level of our functioning, we are devastating
the entire range of living beings at the macrophase level. The
natural world is more sensitive than we have realized. Unaware
of what we have done or its order of magnitude, we have thought
our achievements to be of enormous benefit for the human process,
but we now find that by disturbing the biosystems of the planet
at the most basic level of their functioning we have endangered
all that makes the planet Earth a suitable place for the integral
development of human life itself.
Our problems are primarily problems of macrophase biology. Macrophase
biology, the integral functioning of the entire complex of biosystems
of the planet, is something biologists have given almost no attention.
Only with James Lovelock and some other more recent scientists
have we even begun to think about this larger scale of life functioning.
The delay is not surprising, for we are caught in the microphase
dimensions of every phase of our human endeavor. This is true
in law and medicine and in the other professions as well as in
biology.
Macrophase biology is concerned with five basic spheres: land,
water, air, life—and how these interact with one another
to enable the planet Earth to be what it is—and a very powerful
sphere: the human mind. Consciousness is certainly not limited
to humans. Every living being has its own mode of consciousness.
We must be aware, however, that consciousness is an analogous
concept. It is qualitatively different in its various modes of
expression. Consciousness can be regarded as the capacity for
intimate presence of things to one another through knowledge and
sensitive identity. But obviously the consciousness of a plant
and the consciousness of an animal are qualitatively different,
as are the consciousness of insects and the consciousness of birds
or fish. Similarly, there is a difference in consciousness between
fish and human: for the purposes of the fish, human modes of consciousness
would be more a defect than an advantage. So too, tiger consciousness
would be inappropriate for the bird.
It is also clear that the human mode of consciousness is capable
of unique intrusion into the larger functioning of the planetary
life systems. So powerful is this intrusion that the human has
established an additional sphere that might be referred to as
a technosphere, a way of controlling the functioning of the planet
for the benefit of the human at the expense of the other modes
of being. We might even consider that the technosphere in its
subservience to industrial-commercial uses has become incompatible
with the other spheres that constitute the basic functional context
of the planet.
The biggest single question before us in the 1990s is the extent
to which this technological-industrial-commercial context of human
functioning can be made compatible with the integral functioning
of the other life systems of the planet. We are reluctant to think
of our activities as inherently incompatible with the integral
functioning of the various components of the planetary systems.
It is not simply a matter of altering our ways of acting on a
minor scale by recycling (which presupposes a cycling that is
devastating in its original form), by mitigating pollution, reducing
our energy consumption, limiting our use of the automobile, or
by fewer development projects. Our efforts will be in vain if
our purpose is to make the present industrial system acceptable.
These steps must be taken, but according to my definition of the
Ecozoic Era there must be more: there must also be a new era in
human-Earth relations.
Our present system, based on the plundering of the Earth's resources,
is certainly coming to an end. It cannot continue. The industrial
world on a global scale, as it functions presently, can be considered
definitively bankrupt. There is no way out of the present recession
within the context of our existing commercial-industrial processes.
This recession is not only a financial recession or a human recession
even. It is a recession of the planet itself. The Earth cannot
sustain such an industrial system or its devastating technologies.
In the future the industrial system will have its moments of apparent
recovery, but these will be minor and momentary. The larger movement
is toward dissolution. The impact of our present technologies
is beyond what the Earth can endure.
Nature has its own technologies. The entire hydrological cycle
can even be regarded as a huge engineering project, a project
vastly greater than anything humans could devise with such beneficent
consequences throughout the life systems of the planet. We can
differentiate between an acceptable human technology and an unacceptable
human technology quite simply: an acceptable one is compatible
with the integral functioning of the technologies governing the
natural systems; an unacceptable one is incompatible with the
technologies of the natural world.
The error has been to think that we could distort the natural
processes for some immediate human benefit without incurring immense
penalties, penalties that might eventually endanger the well-being
of the human as well as that of most other life forms. This is
what has happened in the twentieth-century petroleum economy we
have developed.
The petroleum at the base of our present industrial establishment
might at its present rate of use last another fifty years—probably
less, possibly more. But a severe depletion will occur within
the lifetime of young people living today. The major part of the
petroleum will be gone. Our youngest children may see the end
of it. They will likely see also the tragic climax of the population
expansion. And with the number of automobiles on the planet estimated
at six hundred million in the year 2000, we will be approaching
another saturation level in the technological intrusion into the
planetary process.
It is awesome to consider how quickly events of such catastrophic
proportions are happening. When I was born in 1914, there were
only one and a half billion people in the world. Children of the
present will likely live to see ten billion. The petrochemical
age had hardly begun in my early decades. Now the planet is saturated
with the residue from spent oil products. There were fewer than
a million automobiles in the world when I was born. In my childhood
the tropical rain forests were substantially intact; now they
are devastated on an immense scale. The biological diversity of
life forms was not yet threatened on an extensive scale. The ozone
layer was still intact.
In evaluating our present situation I submit that we have already
terminated the Cenozoic Era of the geo-biological systems of the
planet. Sixty-five million years of life development are terminated.
Extinction is taking place throughout the life systems on a scale
unequaled since the terminal phase of the Mesozoic Era.
A renewal of life in some creative context requires that a new
biological period come into being, a period when humans would
dwell upon the Earth in a mutually enhancing manner. This new
mode of being of the planet I describe as the Ecozoic Era, the
fourth in the succession of life eras thus far identified as the
Paleozoic, the Mesozoic, and the Cenozoic. But when we propose
that an Ecozoic Era is succeeding the Cenozoic, we must define
the unique character of this emergent era.
I suggest the name "Ecozoic" as a better designation than "Ecological."
Eco-logos refers to an understanding of the interaction
of things. Eco-zoic is a more biological term that can be used
to indicate the integral functioning of life systems in
their mutually enhancing relations.
The Ecozoic Era can be brought into being only by the integral
life community itself. If other periods have been designated by
such names as "Reptilian" or "Mammalian," this Ecozoic period
must be identified as the Era of the Integral Life Community.
For this to emerge there are special conditions required on the
part of the human, for although this era cannot be an anthropocentric
life period, it can come into being only under certain conditions
that dominantly concern human understanding, choice, and action.
When we consider the conditions required of humans for the emergence
of such an Ecozoic Era in Earth history, we might list these as
follows:
The first condition is to understand that the universe is a communion
of subjects, not a collection of objects. Every being has its
own inner form, its own spontaneity, its own voice, its ability
to declare itself and to be present to other components of the
universe in a subject-to-subject relationship. Whereas this is
true of every being in the universe, it is especially true of
each component member of the Earth community. Each component of
the Earth is integral with every other component. This is also
true of the living beings of the Earth in their relations with
one another.
The termination of the Cenozoic Era of Earth history has been
brought about by the incapacity of humans in the industrial cultures
to be present to the Earth and its various modes of being in some
intimate fashion. Ever since the time of Descartes in the first
half of the seventeenth century, Western humans, in their dominant
life attitudes, have been autistic in relation to the non-human
components of the planet. Whatever the abuse of the natural world
by humans prior to that time, the living world was recognized
until then in its proper biological functioning as having an "anima,"
a soul. Every living being was by definition an ensouled being,
with a voice that spoke to the depths of the human of wondrous
and divine mysteries, a voice that was heard quite clearly by
the poets and musicians and scientists and philosophers and mystics
of the world, a voice heard also with special sensitivity by the
children.
Descartes, we might say, killed the Earth and all its living
beings. For him the natural world was mechanism. There was no
possibility of entering into a communion relationship. Western
humans became autistic in relation to the surrounding world. There
could be no communion with the birds or animals or plants, because
these were all mechanical contrivances. The real value of things
was reduced to their economic value. A destructive anthropocentrism
came into being.
This situation can be remedied only by a new mode of mutual presence
between the human and the natural world, with its plants and animals
of both the sea and the land. If we do not get that straight,
then we cannot expect any significant remedy for the present distress
experienced throughout the Earth. This capacity for intimate rapport
also needs to be extended to the atmospheric phenomena and the
geological structures and their functioning.
Because of this autism my generation never heard the voices of
that vast multitude of inhabitants of the planet. They had no
communion with the non-human world. They would go to the seashore
or to the mountains for some recreation, a moment of aesthetic
joy. But this was too superficial to establish any true reverence
or intimate rapport. No sensitivity was shown to the powers inherent
in the various phenomena of the natural world, no depth of awe
that would have restrained their assault on the natural world
in order to extract from it some human advantage—even if
this meant tearing to pieces the entire fabric of the planet.
The second condition for entering the Ecozoic Era is a realization
that the Earth exists, and can survive, only in its integral functioning.
It cannot survive in fragments any more than any organism can
survive in fragments. Yet the earth is not a global sameness.
It is a differentiated unity and must be sustained in the integrity
and interrelations of its many bioregional contexts. This inner
coherence of natural systems requires an immediacy of any human
settlement with the life dynamics of the region. Within this region
the human right to habitat must respect the right to habitat possessed
by the other members of the life community. Only the full complex
of life expression can sustain the vigor of any bioregion.
A third condition for entering the Ecozoic Era is recognition
that the Earth is a one-time endowment. We do not know the quantum
of energy contained in the Earth, its possibilities or its limitations.
We must reasonably suppose that the Earth is subject to irreversible
damage in the major patterns of its functioning and even to distortions
in its possibilities of development. Although there was survival
and further development after the great extinctions at the end
of the Paleozoic and the Mesozoic Eras, life was not so highly
developed as it is now. Nor were the very conditions of life at
those times negated by such changes as we have wrought through
our toxification of the planet.
Life on Earth will surely survive the present decline of the
Cenozoic, but we do not know at what level of its development.
The single-cell life forms, the insects, the rodents, the plants,
and a host of other forms of life found throughout the planet—these
will surely survive. But the severity of the damage to the rain
forests, to the fertility of the soils, to species diversity,
and to the chances for survival of the more developed animals,
the consequences throughout the animal world of the diminishment
of the ozone shield, the extension of deserts, the pollution of
the great freshwater lakes, the chemical imbalance of the atmosphere—all
are signs of disturbance on a scale that might make restoration
to their earlier grandeur impossible, certainly within any time
frame that is conceivable to human modes of thinking or planning.
Almost certainly we have witnessed in these past centuries a grand
climax in the florescence of the Earth.
A fourth condition for entering the Ecozoic Era is a realization
that the Earth is primary and humans are derivative. The present
distorted view is that humans are primary and the Earth and its
integral functioning only a secondary consideration—thus
the pathology manifest in our various human institutions. The
only acceptable way for humans to function effectively is by giving
first consideration to the Earth community and then dealing with
humans as integral members of that community. The Earth must become
the primary concern of every human institution, profession, program,
and activity, including economics. In economics the first consideration
cannot be the human economy, because the human economy does not
even exist prior to the Earth economy. Only if the Earth economy
is functioning in some integral manner can the human economy be
in any way effective. The Earth economy can survive the loss of
its human component, but there is no way for the human economy
to survive or prosper apart from the Earth economy. The absurdity
has been to seek a rising Gross National Product in the face of
a declining Gross Earth Product.
This primacy of the Earth community applies also to medicine
and law and all the other activities of humans. It should be especially
clear in medicine that we cannot have well humans on a sick planet.
Medicine must first turn its attention to protecting the health
and well-being of the Earth before there can be any effective
human health. So in jurisprudence, to poise the entire administration
of justice on the rights of humans and their limitless freedom
to exploit the natural world is to open the natural world to the
worst predatory instincts of humans. The prior rights of the entire
Earth community need to be assured first; then the rights and
freedoms of humans can have their field of expression.
A fifth condition for the rise of the Ecozoic Era is to realize
that there is a single Earth community. There is no such thing
as a human community in any manner separate from the Earth community.
The human community and the natural world will go into the future
as a single integral community or we will both experience disaster
on the way. However differentiated in its modes of expression,
there is only one Earth community—one economic order, one
health system, one moral order, one world of the sacred.
As I present this outline of an emerging Ecozoic Era, I am quite
aware that such a conception of the future, when humans would
be present to the Earth in a mutually enhancing manner, is mythic
in its form, just as such conceptions as the Paleozoic, Mesozoic,
and Cenozoic are mythic modes of understanding a continuing process,
even though this continuing process is marked by an indefinite
number of discontinuities amid the continuity of the process itself.
My effort here is to articulate the outlines of a new mythic
form that would evoke a creative entrancement to succeed the destructive
entrancement that has taken possession of the Western soul in
recent centuries. We can counter one entrancement only with another,
a counterentrancement. Only thus can we evoke the vision as well
as the psychic energies needed to enable the Earth community to
enter successfully upon its next great creative phase. The grandeur
of the possibilities ahead of us must in some manner be experienced
in anticipation. Otherwise we will not have the psychic energy
to endure the pain of the required transformation.
Once we are sufficiently clear as to where we are headed and
once we experience the urgency and the adventure of what we are
about, we can get on with our historic task. We can accept and
even ignore the difficulties to be resolved and the pain to be
endured, for we are involved in a great work. In creating such
a great work, the incidentals fall away. We can accept the pathos
of our times, the sorrow that we will necessarily go through.
We can, I think, assist the next generation as they take up this
creative effort, mainly by indicating just where they can receive
their instructions. It is the role of elders at the present time
to assist them in fulfilling their role in this moment of transformation.
Elders. We have a lot of older people but few elders. Tribal people,
for their part, depend on elders for their instructions. I was
privileged to see this process at work some years ago when I was
invited to participate at a meeting of indigenous Indian peoples—mostly
Ojibwa, Cree, and Six Nations—on Cape Croker along Georgian
Bay in northwest Ontario. The purpose of the meeting was to consider
the future and the direction their lives should take.
I hope we will be able to guide and inspire our next generation
as they attempt to shape the future. Otherwise they will simply
survive with all their resentments amid the destroyed infrastructures
of the industrial world and amid the ruins of the natural world
itself. The challenge itself is already predetermined. There is
no way for the new generation to escape this confrontation. The
task to which they are called and the destiny that is before them
are, however, not simply theirs alone. The human is linked to
every earthly being, to the entire planet. The whole universe
is involved. The successful emergence of the Ecozoic Era can presently
be considered the great creative task of the universe itself.
This destiny can be understood, however, only in the context
of the Great Story of the universe. All peoples derive their understanding
of themselves from their account of how the universe originally
came into being, how it came to be as it is, and the role of the
human in the story. We in our Euro-American traditions have in
recent centuries, through our observational studies, created a
new story of the universe. The difficulty is that this story was
presented in the context of the mechanistic way of thinking about
the world and so has been devoid of meaning. Supposedly, everything
has happened in a random, meaningless process.
It is little wonder, then, that we have lost our Great Story.
Our earlier Genesis story long ago lost its power over our historical
cultural development. Our new scientific story has never carried
any depth of meaning. We have lost our reverence for the universe
and the entire range of natural phenomena.
Our scientific story of the universe has no connection with the
natural world as we experience it in the wind and the rain and
the clouds, in the birds, the animals, and the insects we observe
around us. For the first time in all of human history the sun
and moon and stars, the fields and mountains and streams and woodlands
fail to evoke a sense of reverence before the deep mystery of
things. These wondrous components of the natural world are somehow
not seen with any depth of appreciation. Perhaps that is why our
presence has become so deadly.
But now all this is suddenly being altered. Shocked by the devastation
we have caused, we are awakening to the wonder of a universe never
before seen in quite the same manner. No one ever before could
tell in such lyric language as we can now the story of the primordial
flaring forth of the universe at the beginning, the shaping of
the immense number of stars gathered into galaxies, the collapse
of the first generation of stars to create the ninety-some elements,
the gravitational gathering of scattered stardust into our solar
system with its nine planets, the formation of the Earth with
its seas and atmosphere and the continents crashing and rifting
as they move over the asthenosphere, and the awakening of life.
Such a marvel is this fifteen billion year process; such infinite
numbers of stars in the heavens and living beings on Earth, such
limitless variety of flowering species and forms of animal life,
such tropical luxuriance, such magnificent scenery in the mountains,
and such springtime wonders as occur each year. Now we are experiencing
the pathos of witnessing the desecration of this sublimity.
We now need to tell this story, meditate on it, and listen to
it as it is told by every breeze that blows, by every cloud in
the sky, by every mountain and river and woodland, and by the
song of every cricket. We have lost contact with our story. Yet
we can come together, all the peoples of Earth and all the various
members of the great Earth community, only in this Great Story,
the story of the universe. For there is no human community without
the human community story, no Earth community without the Earth
story, and no universe community without the universe story. These
three constitute the Great Story. Without it the various forces
of the planet become mutually destructive rather than mutually
coherent.
We need to listen to one another's way of telling the Great Story.
But first we in the West, with our newly developed capacity to
observe the universe through our vast telescopes and to hear its
sounds as these come to us from the beginning of time and over
some billions of years, need really to listen as our own special
way of understanding and participating in the Great Story.
Whenever we forget our story we became confused. But the winds
and the rivers and the mountains never become confused. We must
go to them constantly to be reminded of it, for every being in
the universe is what it is only through its participation in the
story. We are resensitized whenever we listen to what they are
telling us. Long ago they told us that we must be guided by a
reverence and a restraint in our relations with the larger community
of life, that we must respect the powers of the surrounding universe,
that only through a sensitive insertion of ourselves into the
great celebration of the Earth community can we expect the support
of the Earth community. If we violate the integrity of this community,
we will die.
The natural world is vast and its lessons fearsome. One of the
most ominous expressions of the natural world has to do with nuclear
energy. When we go deep into the natural world and penetrate the
inner structure of the atom and in a sense violate that deepest
mystery for trivial or destructive purposes, we may get power,
but nature throws at us its most deadly consequences. We are still
helpless with regard to what to do once we have broken into the
mysterious recesses of nuclear power. Forces have been let loose
far beyond anything we can manage.
Earlier I mentioned five conditions for the integral emergence
of the Ecozoic Era. Here I would continue with a sixth condition:
that we understand fully and respond effectively to our own human
role in this new era. For while the Cenozoic Era unfolded in its
full splendor entirely apart from any role fulfilled by the human,
almost nothing of major significance is likely to happen in the
Ecozoic Era that humans will not be involved in. The entire pattern
of Earth's functioning is being altered in this transition from
the Cenozoic to the Ecozoic. We did not even exist until the major
developments of the Cenozoic were complete. In the Ecozoic, however,
the human will have a pervasive influence on almost everything
that happens. We are approaching a critical watershed in the entire
modality of Earth's functioning. Our positive power of creativity
in the natural life systems is minimal; our power of negating
is immense. Whereas we cannot make a blade of grass, there is
liable not to be a blade of grass unless it is accepted, fostered,
and protected by the human. Protected mainly from ourselves so
that the Earth can function from within its own dynamism.
There is, finally, the question of language. A new language,
an Ecozoic language, is needed. Our late Cenozoic language is
radically inadequate. The human mode of being is captured and
destroyed by our present univalent, scientific, literal, unimaginative
language. We need a multivalent language, one much richer in the
symbolic meanings that language carried in its earlier forms when
the human lived deep within the natural world and the entire range
of Earth phenomena. As we recover this early experience in the
emerging Ecozoic Era, all the archetypes of the collective unconscious
will attain a new validity as well as new patterns of functioning,
especially in our understanding of the death-rebirth symbol and
the symbols of the heroic journey, the Great Mother, the tree
of life.
Every reality in the natural world is multivalent. Nothing is
univalent. Everything has a multitude of aspects and meanings,
the way sunlight carries within itself warmth and light and energy.
Sunlight is not a single thing. It awakens the multitude of living
forms in the springtime; it awakens poetry in the soul and evokes
a sense of the divine. It is mercy and healing, affliction and
death. Sunlight is irreducible to any scientific equation or any
literal description.
But all these meanings are based on the physical experience of
sunlight. If we were deprived of sunlight, the entire visible
world would be lost to us and eventually immense realms of consciousness
and all of life. We would be retarded in our inner development
in proportion to our deprivation of the experience of natural
phenomena, of mountains and rivers and forests and seacoasts and
all their living inhabitants. The natural world itself is our
primary language as it is our primary scripture, our primary awakening
to the mysteries of existence. We might well put all our written
scriptures on the shelf for twenty years until we learn what we
are being told by unmediated experience of the world about us.
So too we might put Webster on the shelf until we revise the
language of all our professions, especially law, medicine, and
education. In ethics we need new words such as biocide and geocide,
words that have not yet been adopted into the language. In law
we need to define society in terms that include the larger community
of living beings of the bioregion, of the Earth, and even of the
universe. Certainly human society separated from such contexts
is an abstraction. Life, liberty, habitat, and the pursuit of
happiness are rights that should be granted to every living creature,
each in accord with its own mode of being.
I might conclude with a reference to the Exodus symbol, which
has exercised such great power over our Western civilization.
Many peoples came to this country believing they were leaving
a land of oppression and going to a land of liberation. We have
always had a sense of transition. Progress supposedly is taking
us from an undesirable situation to a kind of beatitude. So we
might think of the transition from the terminal Cenozoic to the
emerging Ecozoic as a kind of Exodus out of a period when humans
are devastating the planet to a period when humans will begin
to live on the Earth in a mutually enhancing manner.
There is a vast difference, however, in the case of this present
transition, which is one not simply of the human but of the entire
planet—its land, its air, its water, its biosystems, its
human communities. This Exodus is a journey of the Earth entire.
It is my hope that we will make the transition successfully. Whatever
the future holds for us, however, it will be an experience shared
by humans and every other earthly being. There is only one community,
one destiny.
Thomas Berry, a cultural historian deeply concerned with the
relation of cultures to the natural world, has long been the voice
of ecological wisdom in the religious community and beyond. In
1970, while teaching the History of Religions at Fordham University,
he founded the Riverdale Center For Religious Research and went
on to serve as its director for 25 years. In 1982, he became associated
with the scientist-cosmologist Brian Swimme. Together they published,
The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth until
the Ecozoic Era. Earlier he had published studies of Asian
religious traditions. In 1988 he published The Dream of the
Earth to indicate how the human community might live a mutually
enhancing mode of presence to the planet Earth
