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Now 87, with three books to his name that address fundamental
issues of our relationship with the cosmos and with Earth, 1
Berry’s creativity is undiminished. Preferring the title
of ‘geologian’ to that of ‘theologian’, and
having been heard many times to call for the Bible to be placed
on a shelf for twenty years while attention is paid to the ‘primary
sacrament’, namely the Universe itself, Thomas is now busy
with generating ideas and principles by which our legal structures
and thinking may be altered. Jurisprudence – the philosophy
of law and the assumptions couched in all national constitutions,
written or unwritten – has become his primary focus for tackling
the deep-rooted causes of human destruction of nature.
Caroline Webb met Thomas Berry and discussed his work on creating
an ‘Earth jurisprudence’ at a conference held in honour
of his work in Berkeley, California called The Cosmological
Imagination: Transforming World Views for the Planetary Era.2
Caroline Webb: As Caduceus is a
magazine concerned with healing, transformation and wholeness,
I’d like to start with asking how you approach the question
of healing – whether for an individual, a community or the
planet. What do you see as its essence?
Thomas Berry: Healing presupposes
the integral unity of things. What is the context of healing?
Human health is a subsystem of the Earth’s health. You cannot
have well humans on a sick planet. And that is what we are trying
to do, with all our technologies: we are trying to have well humans
on a sick planet. The same principle applies for economics: you
cannot have a viable human economy by destroying the Earth’s
economy. So a person could apply this in different ways. Everything
we have is derivative from the larger community out of which we
come and to which or in which we are fulfilled.
We have a sense of spirituality that is
still very anthropocentric, and your interest in an Earth jurisprudence
gives me a different sense about what it means to be spiritual
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To think that we can have a viable
human economy by destroying the
Earth economy is absurd
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We talk about spirituality but first of all humans are not spirits.
That’s why I don’t use the word ‘spirit’ or
‘spirituality’ much. ‘Spirit’ has no inner
reference to body, or to matter. We are ensouled beings. The soul
is that vital principle in a living organic body, and all living
beings are ensouled beings. Humans have an intelligent soul, a
soul that is capable of reflecting on itself and on the deeper
aspects of the universe. In the human it’s not so much that
we know the universe, but the universe knows itself in us. And
in a certain sense we could apply this to every aspect of things
– like ‘governance’. The human has been trying
to establish a human governance out of its own needs, or its own
functioning, but in reality human governance is a function of
the universe, particularly of planet Earth, so planet Earth is
the unit of governance. The ecology issue emerges out of the fact
that humans have been constructing a government for humans, by
humans and with its destiny in developing the human – but
that won’t work because if the human is looking for its own
benefit rather than the benefit of the larger community, if we
become predators on the natural community, then we lose in every
way.
The American constitution is a disaster for everything that is
not human. It may be wonderful for humans to have all these rights,
including rights of property without restriction on the part of
government as to what they own or what they do with it, but if
there are no rights and no protections for anything that is not
human, then we establish a predator relationship. And so humans
in this country are just devouring everything – because
that’s what this constitution stands for – for humans
to devour, to manipulate, to use. So the whole idea of
humans being human is gone. We’ve been caught up in
a mechanistic world, because what we make, makes us. We
make the automobile, the automobile makes us. We make an
industrial economy, the industrial economy makes us. We
are now in a weird dream world of industrial technological imagination.
Who would be so destructive to the very basis out of which we
exist, that we spoil our water and our air? For what? To invent
an industrial economy. We are so brilliant scientifically and
so absurd in any other way. We are into a deep cultural pathology
– in ordinary language, we are crazy. To think that we can
have a viable human economy by destroying the Earth economy is
absurd.
I see what you mean, but the whole world
is currently committed to the idea that not only is an industrial
economy inevitable but it is a positive benefit. It seems to be
the only way we can think of ‘progress’.
We have all grown up with the indoctrination of industrial processes
and we don’t know anything else; we are captured by this
pathology. We present our whole industrial process as benign,
as a benefit, as the only way to go, when it is obviously so inhuman.
It distorts education, political life, economics and all aspects
of the community’s existence.
What I am proposing is the development of an integral human order
within the order of the planet Earth: that we begin to
think of an integral relationship of every aspect of existence
with all other aspects, because in the design of Nature things
are inherently supportive of other things.
It’s a question of developing a qualitative relationship
instead of a quantitative one. We are so quantitatively oriented
that we see the planet Earth as a natural resource to be used.
That’s the basic distortion of modern times that comes from
Descartes who said there is only ‘mind’ and ‘matter’
– with humans being the only ones with ‘mind’.
So the idea arose that there is no living principle in living
organisms: it’s just a mechanistic process that biologists
would say is an ‘emergent property’ of matter. And if
there is nothing ‘there’ then obviously it is something
to be used. But as soon as the person begins to think of living
beings as ensouled beings and thinks of the planet as a qualitative
presence, to be communed with primarily, not simply as
a natural resource to be used, then we can restore the key element
in human-earth relationships that has been distorted in the West
ever since the 16th and 17th centuries.
How does one make a living, how does one
survive without in some way using what’s around us? Are you
saying we shouldn’t be using nature?
We can’t survive without using what’s around us but
we have to do it in such a way that we recognize this mystique
of the community of the Earth. It is time to step back and find
the human place in the natural world and not think that we can
make the human world primary and the natural world secondary.
We have got to say to ourselves, ‘Let’s begin to try
to understand the natural world and find a way of prospering the
natural world first.’ Then find our survival within
that context. Because if we think we can put ourselves first and
then fit the natural world into our programme, it’s not going
to work. We have got to fit the human project into the Earth project.
That is what I am suggesting with Law. You have got to fit human
law into the structure and functioning of planet Earth.
So being aware of that mystique would
make all the difference?
All the difference in the world. In other words it’s the
mystique of the mountains and the birds, the sea – it’s
what makes us sing. It’s what makes our literature. Even
though we have worked out a mechanics that is fairly helpful,
it doesn’t give us an interior world. The natural world gives
us an interior world. It gives us a healing presence, a fulfilling
presence. By the term 'presence' I mean that indwelling quality
that manifests itself throughout the natural world. We find this
awesome presence in the sun and moon and stars in the heavens,
in the mountains and seas of Earth, in the dawn and sunset, in
the forests and meadows and wildlife. We are immersed in an ever-renewing
wonder-world that evokes our music and dance, our poetry and literature
as well as our philosophical reflection and our scientific inquiry.
None of our industrial productions brings such inspiration as
we obtain from these sources.
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We should do away with the
light pollution in cities so that
children can see the stars
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So, even if we use solar energy, without some mystique of the
Sun and the Earth, it won’t work. We should do away with
the light pollution in cities so that children and all of us can
see the stars. Our children don’t have the experience of
seeing the stars, and they are crippled, emotionally and in other
ways. And that’s the danger of putting children into this
context of computers and machines, because what we make, makes
us. Children don’t have contact with anything natural, they
don’t wander through the meadows and see butterflies, fireflies,
lizards and frogs and so they do not have contact with reality
– they are living in an artificial world. The greater difficulty
is not the physical damage to our lungs from industrial pollution;
it is what is happening to our souls, our minds and our emotions.
You are developing a response to these
problems with your work on creating a jurisprudence for the Earth.
Can you tell me what this is about ?
It comes from the realization that we cannot carry out an environmental
programme within the present legal structures of our society.
We are actually re-thinking law within the context of Earth as
a whole, so that we are into a world democracy, or what Vandana
Shiva calls ‘Earth democracy’, which means that every
component of the community of Earth needs to have its say, and
to find its place and needs a spokesperson. There is no such thing
as a human community separate from the Earth community, and to
legislate simply in relation to humans, in an isolated context,
giving all rights to humans, is unrealistic. The planet Earth
functions as an integral community and no part of that community
can be guided in its activities except with reference to the total
community. Just like a body cannot function in some parts without
integration with all the other parts. That’s why in economics,
human economy is an extension of Earth economy. So with political
affairs, human legislation must insert itself into the structural
functioning of the planet Earth. If we have a Bill of Rights for
humans, we should have a Bill of Rights for the natural world
because otherwise it’s a distortion.
So the principles you have written would become a foundation for
constitutions and actual laws?3
Yes. The basic idea of what I have written should be in the prologue
of every constitution. Instead of 'We, the people of this country
ordain this and that…', it would be a question of: 'We the
people, recognizing ourselves as a member of this great Earth
community, hereby do this and that, with responsibility not only
to ourselves but to the integral community of the planet Earth'.
This would be the prologue, the basis of everything that follows.
Practically speaking, the principles of Earth jurisprudence cover
the four basic establishments that rule our lives: the government-legal,
the economic, the educational and the religious. Each of these
functions in this larger context. Religion is founded on this
deep meaning that is conveyed by the mysterious functioning of
the universe that surrounds us, by the stars in the heavens and
by all the wonders of Earth. So in economics, human economy functions
in integral relationship with the Earth economy. And the same
with government: Government must function in relationship with
the governing principles that are observed throughout the planet.
And then education must be primarily an awakening in the human
mind to the teachings of the universe.
Some critics of ecological philosophy
say that we are advocating that we go back to a pre-industrial
stage. Are you saying it is not a technological future?
No, it is a technological future – but with a difference
from how we are doing things today. We can never go back to being
pre-industrial. But we can think of being post-industrial.
The way to look at it is to have human technologies that are coherent
with Earth technologies. It’s the coherence – that is,
the proper interplay and their mutual interaction – that
fosters both the natural systems and the human systems.
We need to work out patterns of interaction where the human and
the natural world interact creatively. We need a mutually beneficial
mode of human presence on the planet Earth. For instance, we should
improve the fertility of the land rather than dis-improve
it by exploiting it. That’s the criminal aspect of our whole
chemical cultivation of the soil.
Are there initiatives taking place that
reflect the ideas you are speaking of here?
Yes, many. To mention a few that I know: Richard Register, an
architect in California doing new designs for cities; John and
Nancy Todd in Burlington, Vermont who have worked out ways for
dealing with human waste through artificially constructed wetlands;
Wes Jackson in Kansas who is restoring the native prairie grasses
that has potential for helping with our food problem. Then religiously
there is Miriam Therese McGillis and her Eco-Literacy farm, Genesis
Farm in New Jersey. And there is Liz Hosken of the Gaia Foundation
in London who organized a meeting in April 2001 based originally
on my principles for a new jurisprudence at the Airlie Conference
Center outside Washington. A group of people involved in the law
and with indigenous peoples came together from South Africa, Britain,
Colombia, Canada and the United States. The outcome of that meeting
is Wild Law,4 an excellent book on Earth jurisprudence
written by environmental lawyer, Cormac Cullinan, which was launched
at the World Summit for Sustainable Development in Capetown 2002.
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Indigenous people still live in a universe,
but we don’t; we live in an economic system
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You frequently place your ideas in the
context of 'cosmology', but many people I meet do not understand
this word. What, in our contemporary situation, does it mean?
Well, a better word is ‘comprehensive community’. The
universe is a community of subjects, not a collection of objects.
It is intimate. Every aspect is intimately present to all other
aspects. With varying styles, various techniques, humans have
always understood this. Seeing the universe as a great cosmic
liturgy, they always validated the human by a ritual insertion
of the human into the universe, into the cosmological order. This
is done at transforming moments, and humans have always had springtime
rituals, summer harvest rituals and the winter solstice at the
moment of decline. This is the order of the universe and ritual
is the way in which humans establish their basic rapport with
the natural world in visible form.
Transformation moments are sacred moments. It’s like the
day-night ritual. As the night draws on, the body quiets down
and the mind and the emotions become very sensitive and aware
of the more spiritual moments or the more meaningful qualitative
moments in inter-human relations and in human-Earth relations
and in human-Cosmos relations. We become aware of the vastness
of the universe and of our relationship with it. At transformation
moments the small self meets the great Self. Everything in the
universe is necessary for each part of the universe. So everything
in the universe has two modes: its particular mode and its universal
mode, because we are present to the whole universe, as the physicist
says, ‘without passing through the intervening space’.
That’s one of the most remarkable discoveries of physics,
and it’s one of the least understood, how things are present
to – and influencing each other – without passing through
the intervening space. So I would say, the appreciation of that
makes the difference between someone who is humanly more fulfilled
and more true and more developed, and those who are in some manner
unfulfilled, because they cannot be fulfilled within ‘mechanism’.
It is that subjective presence of things to each other.
Indigenous people still live in a universe, but we don’t;
we live in an economic system. We’ve got all kinds of scientists
but we don’t have a universe. There is an Earth out there,
but for us it’s just a collection of resources to be exploited.
It’s got no dignity. But really it is a communication of
wonder.
Let me recite a poem I wrote about children. It expresses what
I mean about ‘cosmology’:
The child awakens to the universe
The mind of the child to a world of wonder
Imagination to a world of beauty
Emotions to a world of intimacy
It takes a universe to make a child
Both in outer form and inner spirit
It takes a universe to educate a child
It takes a universe to fulfil a child
And the first obligation of any generation to its children
Is to bring these two together
So that the child is fulfilled in the universe
And the universe is fulfilled in the child
While the stars ring out in the Heavens
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References
1. Berry, Thomas, The Dream of the Earth, Sierra Club Books,
San Francisco, 1988
Berry, Thomas and Swimme, Brian, The Universe Story: From the
Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era, Harper Collins,
San Francisco, 1992
Berry, Thomas, The Great Work: Our Way into the Future,
Bell Tower, New York, 1999
2. The conference was organized by the Philosophy, Cosmology and
Consciousness faculty of the California Institute of Integral
Studies in November 2002. See
www.ciis.edu/pcc/
3. Thomas Berry has formulated these principles in The Origin,
Differentiation and Role of Rights, which is available on
the website version of this article.
4. Cullinan, Cormac, Wild Law , SiberInk, South Africa,
2002 . This book may be obtained through www.earthjurisprudence.
net or from The Gaia Foundation, 18 Well Walk, London NW3
1LD. Telephone: +44 207435 5000. email: liz@gaianet.org
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Further information
Brian Swimme will be speaking in London on May 24th 2002, at Friends
Meeting House, Euston Road at a meeting convened by GreenSpirit.
More information at: www.greenspirit.org.uk
The Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness programme at the California
Institute of Integral Studies is hosting the Thomas Berry Institute
Summer MA program in June 2003 www.ciis.edu/pcc
email: pcc@ciis.edu
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Caroline Webb is a photographer
and film-maker, with a background in documentary production for
British television on international environment and development
issues. She is an MA student in the Philosophy, Cosmology and
Consciousness department of the California Institute of Integral
Studies, San Francisco, writing a thesis on the sacred implications
of the phenomenon of photosynthesis and how we may awaken a new
sense of cosmology founded on the sciences. Website:
www.lifewebb.com
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© Caduceus, 2003.
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