“The naive assumption that the natural world is there for humans to own and use without restriction for their own benefit cannot be accepted. The earth belongs to itself and to all members of the earthly community. The earth is here as a fascinating celebration of life in all its enchanting qualities. Every earthly being participates in this cosmic celebration as a fulfillment of their potential to fully express themselves.”
Thomas Berry
An excerpt from Thomas Berry's book The Great Work – Our Journey to the Future (from the sixth chapter, "The Viable Man"), which we are preparing to publish at Malvern Publishing House. Translated by Jiří Zemánek and Marie Vlachová.
We need to move from our current norm of reality and values, which is exclusively human, to one that is Earth-centered. Only then can we fulfill our human role in the functioning of the planet on which we live. The Earth within the solar system is the immediate context of our existence. Beyond the Sun is our galaxy, and beyond that, the universe of galactic systems, which originated approximately fourteen billion years ago from a primordial source that is beyond our human comprehension.
All considerations of human affairs need to be developed within this larger context, for only in this way are we able to identify any satisfactory frame of reference in our search for a viable human presence within the larger dynamics of the universe. The universe itself is she permanent fact and she lasting value, even if it manifests itself in an ever-changing sequence of transformations.
The universe, by giving birth to the Earth, its living forms, and human intelligence, has discovered, as far as we know, the most developed expression and manifestation of its deepest mystery. Here, in its human mode, the universe contemplates itself and celebrates itself in a unique mode of self-aware consciousness. (…)
However culturally shaped man is, his basic physical as well as psychological nourishment and support come from the natural environment. When we speak of the world of nature, we are not speaking merely of the physical world, but of the psycho-physical mode of being that is found in every articulated entity of the phenomenal world. Human society would not have survived in its early days if it had not been able to fulfill its essential role in the wider community of the Earth, made up of all its geological and biological elements. If man has exerted a certain pressure on other forms of life from his earliest beginnings, this is entirely in keeping with the order of things, since such pressure takes place within the framework of the general norms of interspecies relations.
Once we realize that we need to shift from a human-centered norm of reality and values to an Earth-centered norm of reality and values, we can begin to ask how we might get there and how it might work. We can begin by recognizing that the community of life, the community of all living species, including humans, is a greater reality and a greater value. The primary concern of the human community—even for its own survival—must be to preserve and strengthen this larger community.
Although people have their own distinctive reality and their own unique value, these must be articulated within a larger context. After all, people discover their own being within this context of community. To think that one is strengthened by the restriction of the other is an illusion. This is indeed the great illusion of the current industrial age, which seeks to promote human well-being at the expense of the geological and biological structure of the planet and its functioning.
This exploitation of the natural world is opposed by the ecological movement, which seeks to create a more viable context for human development within the overall planetary process. However, we must clearly understand that this question of viability is not a problem that can be solved in any permanent way. It will be a long-term matter for an indefinite period of time. In fact, today we are participating in an unprecedented transformation of the relationship of man to the Earth. The planet, which in the past millennia directly governed itself, now determines its future largely through human decision-making. Such is the responsibility that the human community accepted as soon as we dared to embark on the path of empirical sciences and their associated technology. In this process, whatever its benefits, we have endangered ourselves and all living beings on the planet and have transformed the entire way it functions. (…) What is most at stake right now is the degradation of the planet, which involves widespread damage and a pervasive weakening of the entire life system of the Earth.
Because this decline is the result of our rejection of the intrinsic limits of human existence and our attempt to alter the natural functioning of the planet in favor of a human-constructed one of the wonderful world, resistance to this destructive process must focus its efforts on how to live creatively within the organic workings of nature. The Earth as a biospiritual planet must become our fundamental frame of reference in determining our own future.
We now have ecologists and a large number of ecological organizations that oppose industrial, commercial, and financial corporations and defend a viable way of human functioning within planetary processes. The opposition between the industrial-commercial entrepreneur and the environmentalist can be seen today as both the main human problem and the main problem of the Earth in the 21st century. It is clear that after centuries of industrial efforts to create a miraculous world, we are actually creating a devastated world of waste that does not represent a situation that is viable for our human way of being. The truly miraculous world of nature, regardless of its own problems, is available as a context for the development of a viable human situation. The difficulty today is that financial and industrial corporations have such extensive power over the planet that a change as fundamental as I have proposed here would be extremely difficult.
Industrial, commercial and financial companies have the planet when it comes to natural resources, essentially in their own right; either directly or indirectly with the support of governments that serve various corporations. This ownership is of course established within certain limits. Sub-regions of the planet have been or will be set aside as territories to be preserved in their natural state or to be economically exploited later. So far, these regions quite often survive with the consent of the ruling corporations.
For the ecologist, the very reduction of the planet to a reservoir of resources for consumer use in an industrial society is an unacceptable situation. The planet and all its components are reduced to commodities whose very purpose is to be used by humans. Our own human experience of a meaningful world has been weakened as money and utility values have taken precedence over numinous, aesthetic, and emotional values. Correspondingly, any restoration of the natural world in its full splendor will require not only a new economic system but also the experience of a profound transformation within the human psychic structure.
Our present situation is the result of cultural rigidity, addiction, and emotional insensitivity, none of which can be remedied by some hastily devised adaptation. Nature has been severely and in many cases irreversibly damaged. Healing is often available, and new life can sometimes be awakened, but it will not be without intensive care and a concentrated, energetic effort that would equal in magnitude the efforts that first caused the damage. Without such healing, the viability of humans at any acceptable level remains questionable.
As regards right, the basic orientation of American jurisprudence is focused on personal human rights, with the natural world understood as existing purely for the purposes of human ownership and human use. The natural world has no inherent right to existence, to a home (habitat), or to the freedom to fulfill its role in the vast community of life for the industrial-commercial world. Yet there can be no sustainable future, even for the modern industrial world, unless these inherent rights of the natural world are accorded legal status. The whole question of ownership and use of the Earth, whether by individuals or by corporations, must be thought through in a deeper way than Western society has hitherto done.
The naive assumption that the natural world is there for humans to own and use without restriction for their own benefit cannot be accepted. The Earth belongs to itself and to all members of the earthly community. The Earth is there as a fascinating celebration of life in all its enchanting qualities. Every earthly being participates in this cosmic celebration as a fulfillment of their potential to fully express themselves. The reduction of the Earth to an object intended primarily for the purpose of human ownership and human use is unthinkable in most traditional cultures.
In order to achieve viable human-terrestrial relations, the new jurisprudence must understand as its main task the articulation of the conditions for the integral functioning of the terrestrial process, with particular regard to the development of a mutually enriching relationship between man and the Earth. Within this context, the various components of the Earth – soil, water, air and the complex of life systems – would be the commons, and together they would form an integral manifestation of the Greater Commons of Planet Earth, and would be shared proportionately among all members of the terrestrial community according to need.
In this context, each individual being is supported by every other being in the earthly community. And in turn, each being contributes to the well-being of all other beings within the community. Justice would therefore consist in the realization of this complex of creative relationships. Within the human community, it would be necessary to formulate patterns of social relations in which both individual and group rights would be recognized and defended. The basic elements of personal security and personal property would be protected, although the meaning of property would be a limited personal relationship to property, which would accordingly require its use for one's own benefit and for the benefit of the community as well as for the benefit of the individual owner. This would require the creation of a whole complex of political and social institutions, as well as economic organizations. But all of these organizations would be so inextricably linked to the larger earthly economy that they would support rather than obstruct each other.
Another important aspect of contemporary life, in which the entrepreneur has a dominant position, is languageBecause we are locked into an industrial culture and consumer economy, the words we use have their meaning and their value within that culture. The main value concept that our society uses is the word progress. This word has a wide range of meanings, whether it is our increasing scientific understanding of the universe, our increasing personal and social development, or the achievement of better health and longer life. Thanks to modern technology, we can produce more products more easily. We can travel faster and with greater comfort. And so we continue this endless progress with the feeling that everything is fine.
But then we find that the price of our human progress is the devastation of the natural world. This “degradation” of the Earth is considered a necessary condition for human “progress.” The Earth is a kind of sacrifice. Yet there is still little awareness in human society that the integral survival of the planet in its seasonal rhythms of renewal is itself a condition not only for human progress but for our very survival. The ecologist is often at a loss as to how to proceed. The language in which our values are expressed has been co-opted by the industrial establishment and is being used, through the most extravagant forms of commercial advertising, to create the illusory world in which modern industrial nations now live.
One of the most important tasks of an ecologist is to create a language through which it will be possible to communicate to our society the true meaning of reality, values, and progress. Progress is, in a sense, necessary to help people alleviate certain age-old hardships and illnesses they are born with. However, progress in this sense is being used as an excuse for the horrific destruction of the planet for financial gain, even as its consequences include new kinds of psychological and physical suffering for people.
The concept needs to be corrected. profit. Profit according to what rules and for whom? Corporate profit today means a deficit for the Earth. The profit of industrial enterprise that pursues only its own benefits can also be considered a deficit in the quality of life. We must review our language in its entirety.
There are also questions of “gender” to ponder. The industrial establishment represents an extreme manifestation of the patriarchal tradition with its pervasive sense of domination, whether it is the dominance of rulers over people, men over women, or people over nature. Only with immense psychological and social effort and revolutionary processes has this patriarchal control been mitigated in terms of women’s rights. The rights of the natural world of living beings are still at the mercy of modern industrial societies as the highest manifestation of patriarchal domination over the entire planetary process.
We also need to begin to recognize the rights of ethnic groups and the impoverished classes of our society. For the ecologist, the grand model of all existence is the natural ecosystem, which governs itself as a community, in which each part has its own unique rights and its own all-encompassing influence. Ecologists, who have a greater sense of understanding man as a caring being within the larger community of geological and biological modes of earthly existence, support a mode of human activity that is much closer to feminine than to masculine types of being and activity.
As regards education, its purpose, as is now assumed, is to enable people to be “productive” within an industrial society. One must become literate in order to perform a function within this system. Whether in the acquisition or processing of raw materials; in the production or distribution of products in a manner that brings commercial profit; in the management of the entire process or finances; or finally in the spending of the net profit through the accumulation of wealth and its continued ownership and use. This means that the entire process of our lives is included in the industrial process. All professional careers today operate within the industrial-commercial establishment, even including education, medicine, and law.
In this new context of a viable human mode of being, the primary teacher, as well as the primary lawgiver and healer, would be the natural world itself. The integral Earth community would be a self-educating community within the context of a self-educating universe. Education at the human level would be about increasing our sensitivity to the profound communication created by the universe around us, the sun, moon and stars, the clouds and rain, the shapes of the Earth and all its living forms.
The music and poetry of the universe would flow into the student; and also a sense of the profound mystery of existence, as well as insight into the architecture of the continents and the governing powers that make the great hydrological cycles work in moderating the Earth's temperature and providing habitat and food for a vast array of living creatures.
This orientation to the natural world should be understood in connection with all our human activities. The earth would be our primary teacher in industry and economics. It would teach us a system in which we would create a minimum of entropy and in which there would be a minimum of useless or unproductive waste.