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Author: Sitebeheerder
Reflection Paper Eco-Justice
Reflection paper :
1. Diversity of life and the Trinity: The three principles of the Cosmos
Look at the diversity of life on Earth, grown over 3.5 billion years of evolution.Sit with the delicate interconnectedness of all species, life forms and ecosystems.See how they are interdependent with each other: atmosphere, seas, rivers, lakes, land itself.
What has human presence over the past hundreds of years meant for the Earth community? What will happen if this trend will continue. All life will be radically impoverished.
2. The Call
We are faced with the greatest challenge ever. All our intelligence, generosity, commitment is needed.
For all religious traditions and spiritual movements there is a radical reason for commitment. It is more than scientific, medical, economic, aesthetic and cultural reasons that motivate a radical commitment to biodiversity.
Judaism. Christianity, Islam all profess faith in the One God who creates the universe.
The Creator breathes life in all living things. ( Gen. 2:7, Job., 34, 12-15, PS. 104, 29)
Diversity of creatures can be seen as self expression of the Trinity- ecological relationships are coming from the life of the Trinity.
Abundance of life, as expressed in the community of Life, stems from the abundance of the divine communion; God saving us, through Jesus and the Spirit.
See what God has been doing for us in the word made flesh and the Spirit poured out.
The Trinity is ecstatic in being with each other – but also in being with the whole of creation.
The diverse species we find on Earth can be seen as sacraments of God. All the species in their own way tell us who God is, Therefore no one can be missed.
Ruthless destruction of species and their habitats is a diminishment of the expression of who God is. We are challenged with the demand of an ethical practice that honors and celebrates diversity.
Inspirations: D. Edwards in Ecology at the Heart of Faith
3. Ecological Justice: the process
Take an inventory of the occasions and acts of injustice that you are aware of in your bioregion, in the institutions with which you interact.
What do you fee, think , and respond to from your collective awareness of injustice?
What does the new cosmology have to tell us about justice-making?
What can it mean in the causes you have discovered? How can the three principles of the universe be a guide in the process of transformation needed?
How does your understanding of new cosmology and ecological justice assist you in comprehending the magnitude of the problems and concerns that confront us?
What concrete action might you undertake to begin to heal the injustice that is present in the human-Earth community?
In your own way take time for prayer, reflection on the gift of abundance in nature. Celebrate this abundance, celebrate the divine communication between the Creator and every being and part of creation that you become aware of today.
What can a commitment to biodiversity mean for you today?
Write about the new insights, aspects of new worldview that you have discovered in the understandings of ecological justice, Earth Democracy and Earth Rights.
Write the ten commandments for Earth Justice
Mandala Hildegarde of Bingen,
4. Hildegard of Bingen on Justice in Creation
It is through water that the Holy Spirit overcomes all injustice, bringing to fulfillment all his gifts…
gifts, such that humankind might thrive in the moisture of justice and stream to spiritual things in the current of truth.
Has humankind never discovered God on the path of justice? Have people never observed how the earthly seeds comes to growth when it falls to the ground and is soaked by rain and dew?
As if this could come to pass thru any other than the creator of all things!…When a person understands Justice, the self is let go.
The first seed of the longing for Justice blows through the soul like the wind. The taste for good will plays in it like breeze. The consummation of this seed is a greening in the soul
That is like that of a ripening world. Now the soul honors God By the doing of just deeds.
Meditations with Hildegard of Bingen: G. Uelein. ISBN 0-939680-12-2
Elly Verrijt
Integrity of Creation
This term first surfaced on the Assembly of WCC in 1983.
At that time people were still very much involved in the nuclear treats. The awareness that there was another big threat came very slowly: the collapse of the ecosystems of the Earth. Integrity of creation deals with nothing less than with all life on Earth.
Integrity of Creation: the value of all creatures in themselves, for one another, and for God, and their inter-connectedness in a diverse whole that has unique value for God.
J. Mc. Daniel
To forget the integrity of creation means to forget that the Earth is a beautiful whole in itself.
The integrity of creation has six dimensions:
1. The integrity of creation describes the integral functioning of endless natural transactions throughout the bio-sphere and even the geo-sphere. They comprise the specific exchanges and cycles from which all nature lives; we humans included atop of the food chain. They have an integrity that must not be violated. The behaviours of one domain are integrated with those of others. These exchanges are totally integrated. They have an integrity all together. Earth is a dynamic, but closed system.
2. The integrity of creation refers to nature’s restless self-organizing dynamics. While creation is finally one, its internally connected condition is dynamic. There is a persistent restlessness in nature, but this novelty is self-organizing. Nature is comprised of charged and changing stabilities. While all life is a restless adventure, it exists within vital boundaries and depends on elements working together as an astounding community.
Sometimes the changing relationships are harmonious, sometimes symbiotic, sometimes predatory, sometimes a mix of these. Destruction is certainly a part of nature’s creative process.
Integrity of creation means recognition and respect for these boundaries and integrated processes.
Recycling is a fundamental Earth dynamic. Waste in one phase normally becomes food or habitat in another, via cyclical and spiral processes.
Yet the natural recycling can be altered, in ways destructive of the processes themselves. E.g. destroy the ozone shield and see what happens on Earth and in the oceans. Earth is one and on the move. The fundamental law of nature is that human activities must stay within the boundaries of nature. If we transgress the boundaries, the consequences are that we alter nature in dangerous and unforeseen ways. In religious moral context this means the failure of humans to submit their power to Earth’s finitude and inhabit the Earth on terms it can accept.
3.The integrity of creation also points to Earth’s one -time endowment. The planet is self-renewing all the time, in ways seen and unseen. This totality is immensely rich, varied and dynamic. The Earth is also finite, limited, vulnerable, and subject to subversion and exhaustion. Our Earth is also fragile. Yet, we live as if the endowment were boundless and forever. We see now that the one – time endowment of the Earth is being violated.
4. The integrity of creation as a one-time, dynamic, natural endowment that can and is being jeopardized is related to another dimension, the integral relation of social and environmental justice. Earth is our shared home. AII, humans and otherkind alike, are relatives of one another as a consequence of basic relatedness on a closed planet. Earth knows this. The implication is that justice for people and for the rest of the planet are knotted together. Both poverty and affluence threaten and degrade basic life-support systems. (Affluence is responsible for roughly 70% of environmental degradation). At the same time human well – being and justice cannot be realized in an utterly devastated environment.
” The integrity of creation has a social aspect which we recognize as peace with justice, and an ecological aspect which we recognize in the self-renewing, sustainable character of natural ecosystems”.
Seoul conference, 1990.
5. The integrity of creation also names a divine source and a certain intrinsic dignity. It gives theological voice to faith’s conviction that creation in its totality and its differentiation is good and the work of a life-giving God. “Integrity” is a word for the preciousness integral to creation’s being.
“Creation” is a theological word rather than a scientific one. It means all things together, in, with, and before God, in their totality and in their differentiation as an expression of divine life.
6. The true understanding of integrity of creation carries more than the common conviction of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam about the interior goodness of creation as God’s. Creation is the gathering of independently good expressions of the divine love. This means deep respect for the otherkind as differentiated
It means respect for each creature and the fact that each creature has a right to do and be what it is created for.
More deeply, integrity of creation means here being with, as creation’s one way of being. Creation is social by nature, life requires mutuality. It means being- with rather than being above.
It also means consideration of other kind’s well-being as more than an extension of ours. The “integrity of creation’ carries moral freight of this kind. We are all symbionts. Evolution is the history of the total extended family.
An Earth Ethic that follows out of all this.
The integrity of creation pertains to all life-forms, not just to humans. For earth ethics, the integrity of creation means that all creatures are entitled moral consideration even when that does not issue in moral equality. Before God all creation has standing.
” A thing is right (for the Earth and the Earth community) when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” (Aldo Leopold)
How can humans be just towards plants, animals, streams, and land? How can we live morally just and preserve the integrity of creation? Nash proposes the following biotic rights;
1. The right to participate in the natural dynamics of existence. The right to flourish as nature provides this, without undue human alteration of genetic or behavioural “otherness” of non-human creatures.
2. The right to healthy and whole habitats.
3. The right to reproduce their own kind without humanly induced chemical radio- active, hybridized, or bio-engineered aberrations.
4. The right to fulfil their evolutionary potential with freedom from human induced extinctions. Extinctions are a natural part of the evolutionary process, but human-induced extinctions are unjust. Humanity’s exercise of its power ought not to undermine the existence of viable populations of non-human species in healthy habitats until the end of their evolutionary time.
5. The right to freedom from human cruelty, fragrant abuse, or profligate use.
6. The right to reparations or restitution through managerial interventions to restore a semblance of natural conditions disrupted by human abuse.
7. The right to a fair share of the goods necessary for individuals and species.
From a Conference of Justitia et Pax, S.America
Earth Community, Earth Ethics. L. Rasmussen ISBN 1-57075-186- 2
The Role of the Church in the Twenty-first Century
Thomas Berry, in :The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth, chapter 6
“When we talk of the role of the Church in the twenty first century, we must begin with the obvious reality of an industrial civilization ruining the natural world on which we depend for both our physical and our spiritual sustenance. The basic question is no longer the human-divine relations; nor, in my view, is it the inter-human relations. The basic issue is human-Earth relations. The future of the other two relations depends on this third relation, our human capacity to recognize our place in the structure of the universe and to fulfill our role in this setting.” ( page 46)
In this chapter Thomas Berry continues with the description of what is happening: the magnitude of the changes that are taking place – changes so much greater than a change in culture. He connects the changes also with what we have been doing to our planet and the consequences of these actions. How there is only a viable future for all human and non-human life on our planet, when we realize the devastation that we have caused and when we can be present to the planet in a mutually enhancing way?
He points at the root cause of the devastation that we have caused: we have replaced the human as the center of the universe and we do not look at the universe as the primary referent concerning reality and value in the phenomenal world.
And we have broken the unity of the universe and especially of the life systems on the Earth. He speaks about the pathology of our (Western) culture in how we deal with the rights of all living beings and have claimed the right for the human to exploit the Earth community. Now this deep pathology has been communicated all over the planet and the devastation is worldwide.
..”If we read our present historical situation in this context, then what is needed is an adjustment of the human to the universe. The basic issue before us is not the human-divine relations or inter-human relations but human-Earth relations. This adjustment on our part to the realities of the Earth requires that we move in to a new geo-biological period of the history of our planet. We need to move from the terminal Cenozoic to what might be designated as the emergent Ecozoic era in Earth history, the period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually enhancing manner. We need to establish ourselves in a single integral community including al component members of Planet Earth. ( 1 Cor. 12, 12-31 )
The broader integral community must be the primary concern in all human affairs before that of any particular member of the community. Even our sense of the divine comes to us mainly, not through any scriptural communication, but through the universe around us. The natural world is the fundamental locus for the meeting of the human and the divine……
In all these experiences communion takes place between ourselves and the numinous reality whence the universe came into being and by which it is sustained in its immense journey…”
( page 48-49)
“…At this moment of transition the twenty-first–century Church, which has lost a sense of its basic purposes in these past centuries, could restore its efficacy and extend its influence over human affairs. The Church could be a powerful force in bringing about the healing of a distraught planet. The Church could provide an integrating reinterpretation of our New Story of the universe. In this manner it could renew religion in its primary expression as celebration, as ecstatic delight in existence. This, I propose, is the Great Work to which Christianity is called in these times. …( page 53)
…”we need a more adequate understanding of the universe, of how it came into being, of its governing tendencies, and of the sequences of transformations whereby it has taken on its present forms of expression. We need to know how the solar system and Earth came into being, how life developed on the planet, and , finally, how we ourselves appeared and what our human role has been within this amazing process. All these things need to be understood as aspects of a spiritual as well as a physical process. Only such comprehensive and deep understanding can restore the integral functioning of planet Earth upon which human well-being depends. This is the fundamental task of the Church in the twenty first century”
(page 58)
Th. Berry, The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth. Ch. 6, ISBN978-1-57075-851-5
The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth: ISBN 978-1-57075-851-5
The Foundations of The Work that Reconnects
A breathtakingly new view of reality arises from deep ecology, systems thinking, and the resurgence of non-dualistic spirituality. These three streams attest to our mutual belonging in the web of life, and to powers within us for the healing of our world. They are basic to the core assumptions of the Work That Reconnects.
Core Assumptions of the Work That Reconnects
- Our Earth is alive. It is not our supply house and sewer; it is our larger body.
- Our true nature is far more ancient and encompassing than the separate self-defined by habit and society. We are as intrinsic to our living world as the rivers and trees, woven of the same flows of matter/energy and mind. Having evolved us into self-reflexive consciousness, the world can now know and see itself through us, behold its own majesty, tell its own stories—and also respond to its own suffering.
- Our experience of moral pain for our world springs from our interconnectedness with all beings, from which also arise our powers to act on their behalf. When we deny or repress our pain for the world, or view it as a private pathology, our power to take part in the healing of our world is diminished. Our capacity to respond to our own and others’ suffering can be unblocked.
- Unblocking occurs when our pain for the world is not only intellectually validated, but also experienced. Cognitive information about the crises we face is generally insufficient to mobilize us. But direct experience of our own deep emotional response can reveal our mutual belonging in the web of life, and free us to act.
- When we reconnect with life, by willingly enduring our pain for it, the mind retrieves its natural clarity. We experience not only our interconnectedness in the Earth community, but also mental eagerness to match this experience with new paradigm thinking. Significant learnings occur as the individual re-orients to wider reaches of identity and self-interest.
- The experience of reconnection with the Earth community arouses desire to act on its behalf. As Earth’s self-healing powers take hold within us, we feel called to take part in the Great Turning. The steps we take can be modest ones, but they should involve some risk to our mental comfort, lest we remain caught in old, “ safe” limits. Courage is a great teacher and bringer of joy.
Aims of the Work That Reconnects
The Work That Reconnects helps us discover our innate connections with each other and with the self-healing powers in the web of life. This aim is essential for the emergence of a life-sustaining culture.
In order to do this, we aim to:
- to provide people the opportunity to experience and share with others their innermost responses to the present condition of our world.
- to reframe their pain for the world as evidence of their interconnectedness in the web of life, and hence of their power to take part in its healing.
- to provide people with concepts– from systems science, deep ecology, or spiritual traditions– which illumine this power, along with exercises which reveal its play in their own lives.
- to provide methods by which people can experience their interdependence with, their responsibility to, and the inspiration they can draw from past and future generations, and other life-forms.
- to enable people to embrace the Great Turning as a challenge which they are fully capable of meeting in a broad variety of ways, and as a privilege in which they can take joy.
- to enable people to support each other in clarifying their intention, and affirming their commitment to the healing of the world.
Joanna Macy, see her website www.joannamacy.net
The Three Stories of Our Time
Joanna Macy on: The Tree Stories of our Time
1. Business as usual
One way of thinking about our times is that we are enacting a wonderful success story. Economic and technological development has made many aspects of our lives easier. If we ‘re looking at how to move forward, the path this story suggests is “more of the same, please.” We ‘re calling this story Business as Usual. This is the story told by most mainstream policy makers and corporate leaders. Their view is that economies can, and must, continue to grow. Even in the face of economic downturns and periods of recession, the dominant assumption is that it won’t be long before things pick up again.
Expressing his trust in the path of economic growth‘ in November 2010 President Obama said, “The single most important thing we can do to reduce our debt and deficits is to grow.”
For a market economy to grow, it needs to increase sales. That means encouraging us to buy, and consume, more than we already do. Advertising plays a key role in stimulating consumption, and increasingly children are targeted as a way of boosting each household’s appetite for goods. Estimates suggest that the average American child watches between twenty-five thousand and forty thousand television commercials a year. In the United Kingdom, it is about ten thousand.’
As we grow up, we learn by watching ethers. Our views about what‘s normal and necessary are shaped by what we see. When you’re living in the middle of this story, it’s easy to think of it as just the way things are. Young people may be told there is no alternative but to find their place in this scheme of things. Getting ahead is presented as the main plot, supported by the subplots of finding a partner, fending for your family, looking good, and buying stuff. In this view of life, the problems of the world are seen as far away and irrelevant to the dramas of our personal lives.
Economic growth is essential for prosperity
Nature is a commodity to be used for human purposes
Promoting consumption is good for the economy
The central plot is about getting ahead
The problems of other peoples, nations, species are not our concern.
2. THE SECOND STORY: THE GREAT UNRAVELING
In 2010 polls for both CBS8 and Fox News9 showed that a majority believed the conditions for the next generation would be worse than for people living today. Two years earlier, an international poll of more than 6I,600 people in sixty countries yielded similar results. With so many people losing confidence that things will be okay, a very different account of events is emerging. Since it involves a perception that our world is in serious decline, we take a term used by social thinker David Korten and call this story the Great Unraveling.”
In our work with people addressing their concerns about the world, we‘ re struck by how many issues are triggering alarm.
Five common areas of concern, and most likely you have some others you would add to this list. Facing these problems can feel uncomfortable, even overwhelming, but in order to get to where we want to go, we need to start from where we are. The story of the Great Unraveling offers a disturbing picture of where that is.
The Great Unraveling of the Early Twenty–First Century
Economic decline
Resource depletion
Climate change
Social division and war
Mass extinction of species
Amazone, S. America, free picture internet
3. The Third Dimension: Shift in Consciousness
What inspires people to embark on projects or support campaigns that are not of immediate personal benefit? At the core of our consciousness is a wellspring of caring and compassion; this aspect of ourselves– which we might think of as our connected se/f- can be nurtured and deve1oped. We can deepen our sense of belonging in the world. Like trees extending their root system, we can grow in connection, thus allowing ourselves to draw from a deeper pool of strength accessing the courage and intelligence we so greatly need now. This dimension of the Great Turning arises from shifts taking place in our hearts, our minds, and our views of reality involves insights and practices that resonate with venerable spiritual traditions while in alignment with revolutionary new understanding from science.
A significant event in this part of the story is the Apollo 8 space flight of December 1968. Because of this mission to the moon, and the photos it produced, humanity had its first sighting of Earth as a whole. Twenty years earlier, the astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle had said, “Once a photograph of the Earth taken from the outside is available, a new idea as powerful as any in history will be let loose.” Bill Anders, the astronaut who took those first photos commented, “We came all this way to explore the moon and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth.”
We are among the first in human history to have had this remarkable view. It came at the same time as the development in science of a radical new understanding of how our world works. Looking at our planet as a whole, Gaia theory proposes that the Earth functions as a self-regulating living system.
During the past forty years, those Earth photos, along with Gaia theory and environmental challenges, have provoked the emergence of a new way of thinking about ourselves. No longer just citizens of this country or that, we are discovering a deeper collective identity,
As many indigenous traditions have taught for generations, we are part of the Earth. A shift in consciousness is taking place, as we move into a larger landscape of what we are. With this evolutionary jump comes a beautiful convergence of two areas previously thought to clash: science and spirituality. The awareness of a deeper unity connecting us lies at the heart of many spiritual traditions; insights from modern science point in a similar direction. We live at a time when a new view of reality is emerging, where spiritual insight and scientific discovery both contribute to our understanding of ourselves as intimately interwoven with our world.
We take part in this third dimension of the Great Turning when we pay attention to the inner frontier of change, to the personal and spiritual development that enhances our capacity and desire to act for our world. By strengthening our compassion, we give fuel to our courage and determination. By refreshing our sense of belonging in the world, we widen the web of relationships that nourishes us and protects us from burnout. In the past, changing the self and changing the world were often regarded as separate endeavours and viewed in either–or terms. But in the story of the Great Turning, they are recognized as mutually reinforcing and essential to one another.
free picture NASA
ACTIVE HOPE AND THE STORY OF OUR LlVES
Future generations will look back at the time we are living in now. The kind of future they look from, and the story they tell about our period, will be shaped by choices we make in our lifetimes. The most telling choice of all may well be the story we live from and see ourselves participating in. It sets the context of our lives in a way that influences all our other decisions. ‘ In choosing our story, we not only cast our vote of influence over the kind of world future generations inherit, but we also affect our own lives in the here and now. When we find a good story and fully give ourselves to it, that story can act through us, breathing new life into everything we do. When we move in a direction that touches our heart, we add to the momentum of deeper purpose that makes us feel more alive. A great story and a satisfying life share a vital element: a compelling plot that .moves toward meaningful goals, where what is at stake is far larger than our personal gains and losses. The Great Turning is such a story.
- J. Macy, Active Hope, Chapter One The Three Stories of Our Time. Page 13-33 ISBN 978 1577 319726
- www.joannamacy.net Link to her website.please.
The Dream of the Earth
Thomas Berry on : The Dream of The Earth
…..We need guidance. Our immediate tendency is to seek guidance from our cultural tradition, from what might be designated as cultural coding. Yet in this case our need seems to be for guidance beyond what our cultural traditions are able to give. Our cultural traditions, it seems, are themselves a major source of our difficulties…. (DE, chapter 15, page 194)
It is a bitter moment especially because our hopes were so high, our arrogance unstrained even by simple modesty. It is a bitter moment, also, because the origins of our actions go so deep into our spiritual and cultural traditions, fostering a sense that we are the measure of all things….. We somehow did not belong to the community of earth. We were not an integral component of the natural world. Our destiny was not there. We deserved a better world, although we had not even begun to appreciate the beauty and grandeur of this world of its entrancing qualities….
The story of this dream vision and the manner of its transformation into the vision of progress has become the central story of the human community, even of the earth process itself…..The difficulty of our time is our inability to awaken out of this cultural pathology…(DE, chapter 15, page 204-205)
There are two radical positions – the industrial and the ecological – that confront each other, with survival at stake: survival of the human at an acceptable level of fulfillment on a planet capable of providing psychic as well as the physical nourishment that is needed. No prior struggle in the course of human affairs ever involved issues at his order of magnitude. If some degree of reconciliation has taken place, it remains minimal in relation to changes that are needed to restore viable mode of human presence to the earth…(DE, chapter 15, page 213)
… In relation to the earth we have been autistic for centuries. Only now we have begun to, listen with some attention and with a willingness to respond to the earth’s demands that we cease our industrial assault, that we abandon our inner rage against the conditions of our earthly existence, that we renew our human participation in the grand liturgy of the universe. (DE, chapter 15, page 215)
forests and mountains Rumania, internet free source
DE: Dream of the Earth, Thomas Berry, ISBN 0-87156-622-2
Creativity
Thomas Berry on Creativity
The universe can be seen as a single, if multiform, energy event, just as a particle such as a photon is itself perceived in its historical reality as an energy event. (DE, chapter 4, page 24)
The cosmological narrative is the primary narrative of any people, for this is the story that gives to a people their sense of the universe. It explains how things came to be in the beginning and how they came to be the way they are. It provides the first sense of creativity in a story that is generally recounted at any significant initiation event in the community or in a person. It is a healing story, a power story, a guiding story. All human roles are continuations, further elaborations, expansions, and fulfilments of this story. So any creative deed at the human level is a continuation of the creativity of the universe. (ET, chapter 5, page 59)
There is I propose, an unbroken continuity in the creative process throughout this expanse of the universe development. Both in our physical and in our psychic constitution, we are totally involved in that single vast creative process that reaches across all the distances of space and from the beginning of time to the present…. We are beginning to see ourselves as the universe that produced the human mind and the mind that knows the universe. The universe that human intelligence knows is the only universe that could possibly produce human intelligence. This relationship is amazingly close from the very moment of the emergence of the universe. …..(ET, chapter 5, page 59 -60)
We are now discovering our human presence within the larger context in which we have existence. We are entering a period of greater human identity with the natural world and its generative powers… We see ourselves as participating in these generative processes rather than as fixed and established in a clearly defined mode of being and functioning…. This participation brings with it awesome responsibilities and also demands a clear understanding of the universe with which we are dealing. For the universe functions by violent and destructive processes, as well as by peaceful and creative dynamics. Yet the universe has so far produced an amazing order and harmony and splendour in its total effect. This we observe in the arrangement of the stars in the sky and in a more limited but more comprehensive manner in our solar system. In the earth, particularly, we find the structuring of a magnificent plane, the million fold variety of life – forms, and the emergence of human consciousness. All this is evidence that we participate in a unique fashion. (ET, chapter 5, page 62)
This sense of creativity as the primary ever-present self-manifestation of the universe, alters profoundly our own sense of ourselves and the significance of our own human activity, since we are a dominant power in this entire process. (ET, chapter 5, page 63)
As humans we need to recognize the limitations in our capacity to deal with the comprehensive issues of the earth’s functioning. So, long as we under the illusion that we know best what is good for the earth and for ourselves, then we will continue our present course , with its devastating consequences on the entire earth community.
Our best procedure might be to consider that we need not a human answer to an earth problem, but an earth answer to an earth problem.
The earth will solve its own problems, and possibly our own, if we will let the earth function in its own ways. We need only listen to what the earth is telling us . (DE, Chapter 4, page 35)
free source, internet
ET: Evening Thoughts, Thomas Berry, ISBN 978-1-57805-130-4
Ethics and Ecology
Thomas Berry on :Ethics And Ecology
Now our concerns for the human community can only be fulfilled by a concern for the integrity of the natural world. The planet cannot support its human presence unless there is a reciprocal human support for the life systems of the planet. This more comprehensive perspective we might identify as macro phase ethics. This is something far beyond the actions of communities, or even of nations. We are presently concerned with ethical judgements on an entirely different order of magnitude.
Indeed, the human community has never previously been forced to ethical judgements on this scale because we never before had the capacity for deleterious actions with such consequences….(GW, chapter9, page 100-101)
We find ourselves ethically destitute just when, for the first time, we are faced with ultimacy, the irreversible closing down of the Earth’s functioning in its major life systems. Our ethical traditions know how to deal with suicide, homicide, or even genocide: but these traditions collapse entirely when confronted with biocide, the extinction of vulnerable life systems of the Earth, and geocide, the devastation of the Earth herself. (GW, chapter 9, page 104)
The present urgency is to begin thinking within the context of the whole planet, the integral Earth community with all its human and other-than-human components…. The ecological community is not subordinate to the human community. Nor is the ecological imperative derivative from human ethics….
The basic ethical norm is the well- being of the comprehensive community and the attainment of human well –being within that community. Here we find that we are dealing with a profound reversal in our perspective on ourselves and on the universe about us. …. (GW,chapter 9, page 105)
GW: The Great Work, Thomas Berry ISBN-0-609-80499
Free Photo, Internet
The Dynamics of The Future
Thomas Berry : The Dynamics of The Future
As we enter the twenty – first century we observe a widespread awakening to the wonder of the Earth….. The human venture depends absolutely on this quality of awe and reverence and joy in the Earth and all that lives and grows upon the Earth…. (GW, chapter 15, page 166)
Our present peril is not the first that the Earth and living things upon it have endured. The Earth found its way into being amid an amazing sequence of both creative and destructive experiences. A long sequence of cataclysmic events has shaped the continents and the various forms of life that have themselves engaged in a continuing struggle for survival. But the present danger to the planet is the first conscious intrusion on this scale into the natural rhythms of the Earth process…. (GW, chapter 15, page 167)
But while this peril is a cause for concern, it is also a cause for advancing consciousness. Responsible people no longer think of the world simply as a collection of natural resources. We have begun to realize that the Earth is an awesome mystery, ultimately as fragile as we ourselves are fragile. But our responsibility to the Earth is not simply to preserve it, it is to be present to the Earth in its next sequence of transformations. While we are unknowingly carried through the evolutionary process in former centuries, the time has come when we must in some sense guide and energize the process ourselves.
To succeed in this task of shaping the future, the will of the more comprehensive self must be functioning. The individual will can function in this capacity only through acknowledged union with the deeper structures of reality. Even beyond union with the human community must be union with the Earth, with the universe itself in the full wonder of its being. Only the Earth can adequately will the Earth. If we will the future effectively it will be because the guidance and the powers of the earth have been communicated to us, not because we have determined the future of the Earth simply with some rational faculty….(GW, chapter 15, page 173-174)
We must feel that we are supported by that same power that brought the Earth into being, that power that spun the galaxies into space, that lit the sun and brought the moon into its orbit. That is the power by which living forms grew up out of the Earth and came to a mode of reflexive consciousness in the human. This is the force that brought us through more than a million years of wandering as hunters and gatherers; that is that same vitality that led to the establishment of our cities and inspired the thinkers, artists, and the poets of the ages.
The same forces are still present: indeed, we might feel the impact at this time and understand that we are not isolated in the chill of space with the burden of the future upon us and without the aid of any power.
We are a pervasive presence. By definition we are that reality in whom the entire Earth comes to a special mode of reflexive consciousness.
We are ourselves a mystical quality of the Earth, a unifying principle, an integration of the various polarities of the material and the spiritual,
the physical and the psychic, the natural, the artistic, the intuitive and the scientific. We are the unity in which all these inhere and achieve a special mode of functioning. In this way the human acts as a pervading Logos……(GW, chapter 15, page 174-175)
We are not lacking in the dynamic forces needed to create the future. We live immersed in a sea of energy beyond all comprehension. But this energy, in an ultimate sense, is ours not by domination but by invocation. (GW, chapter 15, page 175)
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GW: The Great Work, Thomas Berry ISBN 0-609-80499-5