Sustainability Class 3

1. SustainabilityClass 3 Thomas Berry’s Dream of the Earth

2. Thomas Berry • Thomas Berry, “Renewal Project” • Dream of the Earth, Ch 3, “Human Presence”

3. Setting Up the “Dream” • “For too long we have been away somewhere, entranced with our industrial world of wires and wheels, concrete and steel, and our unending highways, where we race back and forth in continual frenzy.” (p1) • Causes me to reflect “on what we have gained and what we have lost in the lifestyle that we have adopted; on the encompassing technocratic, manipulative world that we have established; even on the sense of religion that we have developed. We must not overromanticize primitivism…yet when we witness the devastation we have wrought on this lovely continent, and even throughout the planet, and consider what we are doing now, we must reflect.” (p8) • “Our relationship to earth involves something more than pragmatic use, academic understanding, or aesthetic appreciation. A truly human intimacy with the earth and with the entire natural world is needed.” (p 13)

4. Issue: Role of Humans 2 fold • 1. “we find ourselves pondering the role of the human within the life systems of earth” (p36) • 2. what is the human purpose and how does this connect to the divine through earth’s bounty?

5. Problem: Destruction of Earth • “Through human presence the forests of earth are destroyed. Fertile soils become toxic and then wash away in the rain or blow away in the wind. Mountains of human-derived waste grow ever higher. Wetlands are filled in. Each year approx ten thousand species disappear forever. Even the ozone layer above the earth is depleted. Such disturbance in the natural world coexists with all those ethnic, political and religious tensions that pervade the human realm. Endemic poverty is pervasive in the Third World, while in the industrial world people drown in their own consumption patterns. Population increase threatens all efforts at improvement.” (p36)

6. Cause: Human Entrancement • “By the mid-18th C the invention of new technologies had begun whereby we could manipulate our environment to our own advantage. At this time also an “objective world” was born—a world clearly distinct from ourselves and available not as a means of divine communication, but as a vast realm of natural resources for exploitation and consumption.” (p40) • “…That is what needs to be explained—our entrancement with an industrially driven consumer society. Until we have explained the situation to ourselves, we will never break the spell that has seized us. We will continue to be subject to this fatal attraction.” (p 38) • “Much of our trouble during these past 2 centuries has been cause by our limited…modes of thought. We centered ourselves on the individual, on personal aggrandizement, on a competitive way of life, and on the nation, or the community of nations, as the guarantor of freedom to pursue these purposes.” (p44)

7. Transition: to Ecological Age • “Our present awakening from this enchantment with technology has been particularly painful. We have altered the earth and human life in irrevocable ways…most of been destructive beyond imagination.” (p41) • “We are entering another historical period, one that might designated as the ecological age…in that its primary meaning as the relation of an organism to its environment, but also as an indication of the interdependence of all the living and nonliving systems of the earth.” (p42-3). • A) human-nature relationship; B) interconnection of all

8. How: Humans as Conscious Agents • “It is not simply adaptation to a reduced supply of fuels or to some modification in our system of social or economic controls. What is happening is something of a far greater magnitude. It is a radical change in our mode of consciousness.” (p42) • “What is happening is unthinkable in ages gone by. We now control forces that once controlled us, or, more precisely, the earth process that formerly administered the earth directly is now accomplishing this task in and through the human as its conscious agent.” (p42)

9. Solution: Way Forward • “No adequate scale of action can be expected until the human community is able to act in some unified way to establish a functional relation with the earth process, which itself does not recognize national boundaries…a primary allegiance to this larger community is needed. It will do little good for any nation to seek its own well-being by destroying the very conditions for planetary survival.” (p43) • “The earth is mandating that the human community assume a responsibility never assigned to any previous generation…the human community is passing from its stage of childhood into its adult stage of life. We must assume adult responsibilities.”( p47)

10. 3 Principles for Ecological Age • “the Ecological age must now activate these principles in a universal context if the human venture is to continue.” (p44) • 1. Differentiation: Diversity of life and mulitiple modes of expression • 2. Subjectivity: psychic unity increases with greater complexity of being…to connect to the greater universe and Earth becomes subject to “free interplay of self-determining forces.” • 3. Communion: Unity of connection with the universe—a single, if multiform, energy event.

11. The future • “Ecological age into which we are presently moving is an opposed, though complimentary, age that succeeds the technological age.” • Governing Principles of the Universe: “In a deeper sense this new age takes us back to certain basic aspects of the universe which were evident to the human mind from its earliest period, but which have been further refined, observed, and scientifically stated in more recent centuries.” • “The ecological age must now activate these [governing] principles in a universal context if the human venture is to continue.” (p44).

12. Otherwise… • “Only such a comprehensive vision can produce the commitment required to stop the world of exploitation, of manipulation, of violence so intense that it threatens to destroy not only the human city, but also the planet itself.” (p46-7)