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Passing of Father Thomas Berry, noted ecological thinker
Sue Sturgis, Grist
Thomas Berry, a Catholic priest and self-described “Earth scholar,” passed away June 1 in Greensboro, N.C., where he was born in 1914. He was 94 years old.
A member of the Passionist order that was founded to teach people how to pray, Berry went on to become an influential eco-theologian—though he preferred to call himself a “geologian.” By the age of 8 he had concluded that commercial values were threatening life on Earth, and three years later had an epiphany in a meadow in which he came to understand that the evolution of the universe was for humans the “primary revelation of that ultimate mystery whence all things emerge into being.
Berry entered a monastery at the age of 20 and later went on to earn a doctorate in history from the Catholic University of America. He was deeply influenced by the work of Teilhard de Chardin, a French philosopher and Jesuit priest who developed the concept of the “noosphere”—the realm of human thought comparable to the atmosphere and biosphere. Berry also studied Native American culture and shamanism.
Berry went on to become one of the most profound thinkers in the environmental movement, with his books including “The Dream of the Earth,” “The Universe Story” and “The Great Work” exploring the place where ecology and theology connect.
In 2006, Southern nature writers John Lane and Thomas Rain traveled to Greensboro to talk with Berry about how nature writers can help resolve the current imbalance between humans and the rest of the natural world. Berry was critical of the idea prevalent in among some evangelical Christians that the Bible says that “man shall have dominion over all the land,” noting that a more accurate translation is that “man shall be steward to the land.” He was also critical of some environmentalists, suggesting they lack a deep understanding of how the human mind functions.
(2 June 2009)
Berry essay posted at the Thomas Berry website: The Meadow Across the Creek.
It Isn’t Nice
Ted Glick, ZNet
Off and on, for the last five years that I’ve been actively involved with the climate movement, I and others have analogized what we need to be doing on this issue to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. What we’ve meant is that we need a mass movement that is sweeping, that is broadly-based and grounded in the grassroots, that forces civil society to choose between what is right and what is wrong, that uses a wide variety of tactics, and that ultimately is successful in bringing about change.
But there’s a much harder lesson from the civil rights movement that, so far, the climate movement as whole, or even significant sections of it, have not internalized: that when faced with deeply-rooted, powerful institutions, it will take people making sacrifices, putting their bodies on the line, if we are to have a realistic chance of bringing about the changes urgently needed.
Or to put it another way: electing Barack Obama as President isn’t enough. Especially when his political party and too many of its Congressional members get sizeable amounts of campaign contributions from Big Oil and Dirty Coal.
This inconvenient truth has been dramatically revealed with the public release two days ago, after a month and a half of internal Democratic Party negotiations, of a 932-page legislative proposal, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, by Henry Waxman’s House Energy and Commerce Committee.
It’s virtually impossible to be a self-respecting climate activist and support this corporate-polluter-influenced document. According to an initial analysis by the 1Sky campaign, 58% of the proceeds from the potential sale of permits to emit greenhouse gasses would be “polluter giveaways and fossil fuel industry handouts.” A Dow Jones Newswire story on May 15th stated that “the proposed legislation would give away up to 85% of the carbon allowances to industry and states, leaving only 15% to be auctioned off and for the government to decide what to do with the proceeds.
… And we have to stop being so “nice.”
There’s a great song from the civil rights movement, “It Isn’t Nice.” Written by Malvina Reynolds, it speaks to us from the past about what we need to be doing right now. Among its verses are these:
It isn’t nice to block the doorway,
It isn’t nice to go to jail,
There are nicer ways to do it,
But the nice ways always fail.
It isn’t nice, it isn’t nice,
You told us once, you told us twice,
But if that’s Freedom’s price,
We don’t mind.
(2 June 2009)
A Promise to Be Ethical in an Era of Immorality
Leslie Wayne, New York Times
When a new crop of future business leaders graduates from the Harvard Business School next week, many of them will be taking a new oath that says, in effect, greed is not good.
Nearly 20 percent of the graduating class have signed “The M.B.A. Oath,” a voluntary student-led pledge that the goal of a business manager is to “serve the greater good.” It promises that Harvard M.B.A.’s will act responsibly, ethically and refrain from advancing their “own narrow ambitions” at the expense of others.
What happened to making money?
That, of course, is still at the heart of the Harvard curriculum. But at Harvard and other top business schools, there has been an explosion of interest in ethics courses and in student activities — clubs, lectures, conferences — about personal and corporate responsibility and on how to view business as more than a money-making enterprise, but part of a large social community.
(30 May 2009)
