New York: Father Thomas Berry & his Books
Thomas Berry (born 1914) is a Catholic priest, cultural historian and
ecotheologian (although cosmologist, or “Earth scholar”. Among
advocates of deep ecology and “ecospirituality” he is famous for
proposing that a deep understanding of the history and functioning of
the evolving universe is a necessary inspiration and guide for our own
effective functioning as individuals and as a species. He is
considered a leader in the tradition of Teilhard de Chardin. Berry
wrote his book The Dream of the Earth (Sierra Club Books) beneath an
ancient oak in New York City, on a slope overlooking the Hudson River.
That tree, to which he dedicated his book, lived through many changes,
beginning with the arrival of the Europeans and the end of traditional
Native American ways. It lived through the disappearance of the wood
bison, the passenger pigeon, the great American chestnuts, the
wolverines who prowled the shores of the Hudson, the Atlantic salmon
that were once so numerous they threatened to carry away fishermen’s
nets. It stood there as men cut down the neighboring trees,
demolishing the forest where its life began. It lived through the
pouring of billions of tons of concrete, the erection of brick
buildings and rigid structures of steel. Born in 1914, when there were
fewer than 2 billion people in the world, Berry, too, has lived
through many changes. Berry has spent much of his life trying to
understand why our culture is bent on destroying the natural world.
When he was twenty, he entered a Passionist monastery, and for ten
years, he got up at two every morning for liturgy. Then, from 3 a.m.
on, he studied the foundations of Western thought. He discovered that
environmental degradation is not a recent development: by the time
Plato wrote his Republic, the Greeks had already cut down the forests
of their homeland. At thirty, Berry went to the Catholic University of
America, where he earned a doctoral degree in history. Berry’s latest
book is The Great Work: Our Way into the Future (Crown Publishing).
The “great work” facing humanity, he says, is to move from mindlessly
extracting and consuming the earth’s resources to establishing a
mutually beneficial relationship with nature. “The environmental
crisis can only be forestalled when there is a broad new cultural
understanding of what it means to be human. Sources of this new
understanding would be myth – New Story…… a spiritually based on an
understanding of nature as the primary revelation of the devine”
http://www.dancewithdestinydocumentary.com/synopsis/62-father-thomas-berry.html
— Posted to http://forestpolicyresearch.com via gmail to posterous and
also to forestpolicyresearch@yahoogroups.com