TOP STORY: RELIGION AND THE ENVIRONMENT: Eco-theologian says fate of the Earth hangs in the balance

c. 1996 Religion News Service (RNS)-Nearing the end of his intellectually rich life, Thomas Berry, 81, cultural historian, Catholic priest and scholar, comes now to the conclusion that we, too, are perilously near the end. We, the human species, he means. “The peril of the planet, if not its tragic fate,” he calls us. Having […]

c. 1996 Religion News Service

(RNS)-Nearing the end of his intellectually rich life, Thomas Berry, 81, cultural historian, Catholic priest and scholar, comes now to the conclusion that we, too, are perilously near the end.

We, the human species, he means. “The peril of the planet, if not its tragic fate,” he calls us.


Having burned a hole in the atmosphere, depleted the Earth’s genetic stock through mass exterminations and threatened the planetary oxygen supply by clear-cutting its rain forests, man is close to tipping Earth into a biological implosion not seen since the death of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, Berry believes.

That’s the bad news.

The good news, what there is of it, is that the warning signs are all around, if only humankind’s institutions-not the least its religious institutions-will awaken to see them.

But that means learning to see the Earth, the universe and evolution itself in a different way, as a “sacred” process-“the best evidence of God’s revelation,” prefiguring and complementing even the Bible, Berry says.

The warning comes from a self-described “geologian” and a pioneer in a field where theology, cultural history and environmental studies intersect.

“In his own way, he’s in the first rank. He’s sort of the visionary forefather in the field,” said Eugene Bianchi, a professor of religion at Emory University in Atlanta.

Berry is a patriarch in a young but growing field vaguely known as eco-theology or environmental philosophy.

Remarkably, he came to it late in a lifetime of scholarship.

As a young Passionist monk in 1934 Berry absorbed Thomas Aquinas in the original Latin; he later learned Chinese and Sanskrit to explore the religious traditions of China and India.


For most of his career, he was a historian of religion, setting up that field of study at New York’s Fordham University.

While his peers prepared for retirement, Berry began to address the ever-more alarming findings of the environmental movement, searching for religious themes in the crises, and perhaps in the rescue.

Until recently he ran the Riverdale Center of Religious Research in Riverdale, N.Y.; now he lives with his brother near Greensboro, N.C., still writing.

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“The last 15 years have been the greatest of his life,” said Dan Sheridan, assistant vice president for academic affairs at Loyola University in New Orleans and a friend of almost 30 years. “He’s probably the world’s foremost thinker on religious values in the ecology movement-certainly one of the two or three most important.”

Yet Berry asks not to be referred to by his religious title.

“He’s working in an area where there are a lot of people who don’t care a hoot about religion,” Sheridan said. “As soon as you put `Father’ in front of your name, some people stop listening. And he wants them to listen.”

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In “The Dream of the Earth” (Sierra Books, 1988) and “The Universe Story” with physicist Brian Swimme (HarperCollins, 1992), Berry argues that the human species must come to see its role in creation in a profoundly new way: not as a God-given dominion to shape to human ends, as described in Genesis; nor as a temporary place of trial-“this valley of tears” in the words of one Catholic prayer-from which to be launched to heaven.


Indeed, Berry and a few others argue that the Western ideal of a transcendent God outside nature, as well as “over-attachment” to the idea of personal salvation from a flawed world, helped Western man devalue the Earth as something to be utilized for the glory of God, rather than nurtured as part of God’s glory.

Man may save himself, Berry believes, if he changes his view of nature to place himself in an interdependent network of life forms, believing that evolution “is from the beginning a spiritual as well as physical process.”

The result is a sense, perhaps best understood by the American Indian, that to grind down a mountain for its gold, silver and copper and flush it into nearby rivers is “to extinguish modes of the divine in our midst”-not merely questionable public policy, but literally profane.

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Ironically, Loyola, the scene of a recent round of lectures by Berry, has been enmeshed in months of ethical debate over accepting contributions from Freeport-McMoRan Inc., operator of the world’s largest such mine, in Indonesia.

“Sheer madness,” he said of the Freeport effort in an interview at Loyola this week.

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Berry’s thought puts him at odds with much of conservative Protestantism, where some critics believe he treads close to pantheism. Many others reject any devaluation of the Bible as the single, paramount vessel of God’s revelation to man.


But Berry insists he is not a pantheist. “Nature is not divine,” he said. “But in it are reflected aspects of the divine.” And the idea that nature is a kind of Scripture dates back to Aquinas, although it disappeared thereafter once the role of the Bible became ascendant.

In that sense, Berry argues that he is a traditionalist, not a radical.

But his arguments for a limit on human population, for instance, run counter to the Vatican’s solution to the problem of global poverty, which is essentially a call to the West to extend economic and technical development assistance to the under-developed world.

But that’s precisely the human activity that’s killing the planet, Berry argues-the kind from which it needs to be freed.

“The Earth will not be ignored, nor will it long endure being despised, neglected or mistreated,” he wrote in “The Dream of the Earth.”

“The dynamics of creation are demanding attention once more in a form unknown for centuries to the orthodox Christian.”

MJP END NOLAN

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