The Dream of the Earth Paperback – March 17, 1990
by Thomas Berry (Author), Brian Swimme (Foreword)
4.5 out of 5 stars 69 ratings
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This acclaimed inaugural volume of the Sierra Club Nature and Natural Philosophy Library considers our ecological fate from a species perspective, the way The Fate of the Earth viewed our prospects for nuclear annihilation. Thomas Berry's seminal thesis proposes a universal "biocratic" criterion to evaluate human history, development, and activity. He contends that the validity of any human enterprise is the degree to which it enhances the universal life force.
Berry builds his case on a comprehensive review of the history of ideas, and he points toward a transformation of consciousness that is needed if we and the planet are to survive. The Dream of the Earth provides the insights, inspiration, and ethical guidance we need to move beyond exploitation or disengagement toward a transcendent vision of a restorative, creative relationship with the natural world.
Drawing upon the wisdom of thinkers from Buddha and Plato to Teilhard de Chardin and E. F. Schumacher, from ancient Chinese philosophy and Native American shamanism to contemporary astrophysics, Berry forges a balanced, deeply felt declaration of planetary independence from the sociological, psychological, and intellectual conditioning that threatens the death of nature, offering a path that will avert ecological catastrophe and move our traumatized planet toward health.
Berry builds his case on a comprehensive review of the history of ideas, and he points toward a transformation of consciousness that is needed if we and the planet are to survive. The Dream of the Earth provides the insights, inspiration, and ethical guidance we need to move beyond exploitation or disengagement toward a transcendent vision of a restorative, creative relationship with the natural world.
Drawing upon the wisdom of thinkers from Buddha and Plato to Teilhard de Chardin and E. F. Schumacher, from ancient Chinese philosophy and Native American shamanism to contemporary astrophysics, Berry forges a balanced, deeply felt declaration of planetary independence from the sociological, psychological, and intellectual conditioning that threatens the death of nature, offering a path that will avert ecological catastrophe and move our traumatized planet toward health.
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This landmark work, first published by Sierra Club Books in 1988, has established itself as a foundational volume in the ecological canon. In it, noted cultural historian Thomas Berry provides nothing less than a new intellectual-ethical framework for the human community by positing planetary well-being as the measure of all human activity. Drawing on the wisdom of Western philosophy, Asian thought, and Native American traditions, as well as contemporary physics and evolutionary biology, Berry offers a new perspective that recasts our understanding of science, technology, politics, religion, ecology, and education. He shows us why it is important for us to respond to the Earth's need for planetary renewal, and what we must do to break free of the "technological trance" that drives a misguided dream of progress. Only then, he suggests, can we foster mutually enhancing human-Earth relationships that can heal our traumatized global biosystem.
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Editorial Reviews
Review
"This volume quite possibly is one of the ten most important books of the twentieth century." -- Dr. Donald B. Conroy, President, North American Conference on Religion and Ecology
From the Publisher
"This volume quite possibly is one of the ten most important books of the twentieth century."
--Dr. Donald B. Conroy, President, North American Conference on Religion and Ecology
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Product details
Publisher : Sierra Club Books; Reprint edition (March 17, 1990)
Language : English
Paperback : 264 pages
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3.0 out of 5 stars The best message I got from this book was that all ...
Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2015
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Almost done with this book and although it has some inspiring notes, I found it to be rather repetitious throughout.
It kind of goes in circles about how humans are damaging the earth and how we need to do something about it.
The best message I got from this book was that all the elements of our cultures and personalities come from nature. We basically create our consciousness from our perception of animals, plants, smells, etc....this is a powerful thought because the more species we lose each year limits and basically shrinks our consciousness. The less there is to perceive, the less our cultures can evolve.
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Nancy Flinchbaugh
5.0 out of 5 stars Beautiful prose, a plea for the earth
Reviewed in the United States on September 16, 2012
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Thomas Berry writes beautiful prose, in this incredibly vibrant plea for our struggling planet. If you've never read Berry, this would be a good way to start. He will awaken your admiration for creation and call you out to enter into this, our Eco Age. I hope you will join the ever growing community of those who are working to build a better, sustainable future for the People of Earth. This, he says, is our "Great Work." It's amazing to me that this book, written almost 25 years ago now, explains the challenges of our reality. A Catholic priest, who dedicated his life to this work, lives on in his remarkable writing.
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Bugs
5.0 out of 5 stars A Fine Guide To Earth/Universe Connectivity
Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2004
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Thomas Berry has put together in this one book what a thousand other writers have attempted and that is: a complete format for human perception of reality that should and can pervade through all our earthly activities, esp. religion, politics and economy. Let Earth and it's biolgical processes teach and guide us to a rational, sustainable, regenerative, healthy existence.
There are many potent passages all through this work and I picked out one that I felt was inclusive of the gist of the book.
..."This universe itself, but especially the planet Earth, needs to be experienced as the primary healer, primary commercial establishment, and primary lawgiver for all that exists within this life community. The basic spirituality communicated by the natural world can also be considered as normative for the future ecological age."- Page 120
This is an excellent treatise on reverence for the creative life forces that sustain us and treat us daily to a plethora of interactive life processes and our need to acknowledge this gift by treating it with the awe and respect it deserves.
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William FH Zersen
1.0 out of 5 stars A Deep View!
Reviewed in the United States on September 22, 2017
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I had trouble following many of the articles that were in the book. It was a little above what I was looking for.
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Annie Dragonfly
5.0 out of 5 stars The Epitome of Deep Ecology
Reviewed in the United States on September 25, 2009
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This is THE book on deep ecology. It is beautifully written, requiring slow thoughtful reading - I found myself chewing each sentence 22 times, wishing I could write out each thought and pin it on the wall to consider in every waking moment. In this masterpiece of environmentalism and spirituality, Berry tells how we got Earth into this mess, and how our collective thinking must change to save our one and only Home. It cannot be said any better than this. While I try to rotate other books so as not to hoard wisdom, this cherished book will stay in my library permanently and be read again and again.
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Jim
5.0 out of 5 stars Berry knew we are Nature.
Reviewed in the United States on September 14, 2011
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Thomas Berry knew we had to work with Nature itself rather than dictating our needs to Nature. A new book, The Awakened Earth, teaches us how to form a partnership with Nature to heal environments out of balance. It does what Berry said we must do, listen to Nature, then co-create solutions with Nature to rebalance and heal stressed environments. Indigenous people as well as American Indians knew this and did listen as they saw they were part of Nature itself, not a dominator of Nature as many now behave. Berry's principles are realized in The Awakened Earth. (It too, is for sale on Amazon as well as its own website.)
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D. M. ONEILL
5.0 out of 5 stars Great reflective book regarding environmental consciousness.
Reviewed in the United States on September 15, 2020
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Great theological and ecological reflection.
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Penny G. Oconnell
5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars
Reviewed in the United States on October 26, 2015
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What a wonderful book....I so wish I had met Thomas Berry. A thoughtful man with a knowledge unsurpassed!
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Emily Crow
Apr 15, 2017Emily Crow rated it really liked it
Shelves: nature-writing, read-in-2017, nonfiction, modern-life
It took me forever to get through this relatively short book, due to both the dry, academic prose and the sheer number of interesting ideas per page. Although it is a challenging read--and, in some ways, a bit dated--it is definitely worth the attention of anyone with a serious interest in environmental philosophy.
The core of the message is simple: We absolutely have to find a new way of relating to the earth, or we will destroy it, and thus destroy ourselves. All of our current modes of being--in economics, religion, science, politics--are not only insufficient, but contributing to the problem.
Or as Barry puts it: "Our secular, rational, industrial society, with its amazing scientific insight and technological skills, has established the first radically anthropocentric society and has thereby broken the primary law of the universe, the law that every component member of the universe should be integral with every other member of the universe and that the primary norm of reality and of value is the universe community itself in its various forms of expression, especially as realized on the planet Earth."
I enjoyed how he broke down his argument into different segments, such as how science and commerce and our own historical world view (the latter going back to the Middle Ages in the beginnings of this pathology, which provided a new and interesting perspective for me), but the most convincing argument was, for me, the spiritual one:
"We should be clear about what happens when we destroy the living forms of this planet. The first consequence is that we destroy modes of divine presence. If we have a wonderful sense of the divine, it is because we live amid such awesome magnificence." Yes, this!!! A million times over!
I did find it interesting that, although the author was a Catholic priest of the Passionist order, his religious views are quite nonconformist and would probably upset many main stream Christians. He believes that the emphasis on personal salvation and the insistence that we live in a fallen world detract from the experience of our connection with natural world--the sort of nature mysticism of traditional Native American religions, for example. He shows how this view helped to lead to the industrial plundering of the earth (sorry about all the quotes in this review, but Berry just says things so much better):
"Just as the doctrine of divine transcendence took away the pervasive divine presence to the natural world, so the millennial vision of a blessed future left all present modes of existence in a degraded status. All things were in an unholy condition. Everything needed to be transformed. This meant that anything unused was to be used if the very purpose of its existence was to be realized. Nothing in its natural state was acceptable."
And:
"The Christian world is the world of the city. Its concerns are primarily supernatural. The rural world is the world of the pagan. The natural world is to be kept at a distance as a seductive mode of being."
Actually, I would be extremely interested to read a thoughtful, ecologically aware Christian response to these arguments, as my gut instinct says that Berry's view would be considered heretical, and yet I know that many Christians are concerned about the environment. I would hate for the Ann Coulters and Sarah Palins of this world to drown them out. And yet Coulter and Palin are obviously building upon a dynamic--and extremely destructive--cultural foundation when they so vociferously insist that the earth exists only for our consumption. I wonder what Berry would say about them if he were still alive today.
I copied down pages upon pages of quotes from this book--the author's insights were just that amazing. It's tempting to keep sharing more of them, but instead I'll recommend that everyone who loves the earth read this book. My one quibble with it (besides the stilted prose) was that I found it to be a complete downer (probably one of the reasons I could only read it in small doses). Writing in 1988, Berry seems to believe that we were on the cusp of a new ecological paradigm. If anything, the opposite is true. Every day I am bombarded with depressing news about more and more drilling, mining, fracking, and logging carried out on public lands. Entire mountain tops are being blown sky-high in Appalachia for coal production. The keystone XL pipeline has just been approved by one of the most aggressively exploitative presidents in history. Native rights are being trampled at Standing Rock and elsewhere. It is enough to make one weep, and I sometimes do. Unfortunately, some thirty years later, Berry's Dream of the Earth seems just that, a lovely dream that never came true. (less)
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Amy
Jul 27, 2008Amy rated it it was amazing
Required reading for everyone on the planet.
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Erik Akre
Mar 14, 2016Erik Akre rated it liked it
Recommends it for: visionary ecologists; shamanic personalities
Shelves: human-ecology, ecology
My first impressions of this book were that it is not particularly "well-written." I had a hard time gelling with Berry's writing style, and I never did quite get the hang of it. It had the feel of being second-rate. I shouldn't say that first off, but there it is.
That said, I must also say that its ideas are powerful and compelling. I will explain by listing the ways it inspired me, the things it inspired me to learn more about:
1. the sequence and detail of the galactic cosmology
2. the sequential phases of human development, from Paleolithic to ecological (into which we are currently transitioning)
3. the great classical cultures of the world and their achievements
4. the scientific-technological phase of human development itself, considering power, harms, helps, and ramifications
5. the possibilities of the new ecological age
6. the rediscovery of foundations for human values
The book provoked a lot of interest in the above, and there are many, many references to further reading in these and other areas. If for no other reason, these inspirations are worth the read. In the midst of everything else in my life, it took me years to explore these things further, but I have in my way, and I still do. I owe something to Berry for the motivation I still have.
In the end, Berry concludes that we need more visionary consciousness and less blind reliance on reason. This conclusion ties things together well. It is the "shamanic personalities" that must be the guides as we move forward to a new relationship with the earth. (less)
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Andrea McDowell
Feb 05, 2013Andrea McDowell rated it it was ok
Shelves: green, life-is-too-short
I have tried so hard to like Thomas Berry.
I give up. I can't do it. Dense, unreadable prose based on the sketchiest types of half-evidence, stitched together with such slender chains of reasoning that a good sneeze could rip it apart. Nice ideas. Lovely philosophy. A wonderful world would result if, indeed, there were any basis for his proposals or if they were implementable by animals with the sorts of brains human beings have. But they're not, and I can't waste one more second of my life believing that there is anything useful to be learned from a book that makes the argument that there were pre-partriarchal women-ruled societies in which the environment was treated well. Mr. Berry, you meant well, and I respect you as an ally; but to all his successors, I beg of you, please sully yourself with some form of actual evidence, and stop confusing "fact" with "someone else's opinion that you found in print." (less)
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Eddie Black
Jan 05, 2009Eddie Black rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: philosophy, pagan, environment
We need more voices like Thomas Berry.
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Sev
Nov 07, 2013Sev rated it really liked it
Shelves: library
It's strange reading a fervent environmental call to action almost thirty years after its publication, sitting in a world worse off than the one which inspired its writing. An important book. (less)
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Ingrid
Apr 05, 2018Ingrid rated it it was amazing
Very insightful ideas regarding the connections with our planet. I found Thomas Berry's explanations for the dream of the earth and the solutions to our current ecological crisis innovative and encouraging. (less)
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Elizabeth
Sep 26, 2009Elizabeth rated it really liked it
Recommends it for: psychologists and adult devt
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from the library computer:
Publishers Weekly Reviews
This first volume in a new series, the Sierra Club Nature and Natural Philosophy Library, explores human-earth relations and seeks a new, non-anthropocentric approach to the natural world. According to cultural historian Berry, our immediate danger is not nuclear war but industrial plundering; our entire society, he argues, is trapped in a closed cycle of production and consumption. Berry points out that our perception of the earth is the product of cultural conditioning, and that most of us fail to think of ourselves as a species but rather as national, ethnic, religious or economic groups. Describing education as ``a process of cultural coding somewhat parallel to genetic coding,'' he proposes a curriculum based on awareness of the earth. He discusses ``patriarchy'' as a new interpretation of Western historical development, naming four patriachies that have controlled Western history, becoming progressively destructive: the classical empires, the ecclesiastical establishment, the nation-state and the modern corporation. We must reject partial solutions and embrace profound changes toward a ``biocracy'' that will heal the earth, urges the author who defines problems and causes with eloquence. (October) Copyright 1988 Cahners Business Information.
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Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership
Dec 22, 2010Cambridge Programme for Sustainability Leadership rated it it was amazing
Shelves: the-top-50-sustainability-books
One of Cambridge Sustainability's Top 50 Books for Sustainability, as voted for by our alumni network of over 3,000 senior leaders from around the world. To find out more, click here.
The Dream of the Earth is a collection of essays which all advance a deeply spiritual and ecological interpretation of the world, its current woes and potential solutions. Berry believes we understand and interpret the world and our role within it based on our 'story of the universe', our dream or world-view. The story is the source of a society's collective psyche and not only explains the past, but also guides our future. While other animals have their behaviour embedded in their DNA, we humans need stories to find our way and understand what to do.
The underlying theme of the book is that our vision, or dream, of progress has brought a lot of good, but is now sowing the seeds of its own destruction. This is because we have lost our connection to the planet, a connection that has existed since ancient times and today remains only with some indigenous communities. Our story has become corrupted, or empty of deep meaning. (less)
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Wendy Babiak
Sep 28, 2009Wendy Babiak rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: books-that-made-me-a-better-person
Thomas Berry, a monastic who chose to use his solitude to study everything from comparative religion and philosophy to agricultural production and particle physics, has synthesized his wide and deep knowledge in this volume with a thoughtfulness rare in this or any age. The book is a call to awaken to a new and more productive geopolitical paradigm involving a recognition of the rights of the earth and all its inhabitants. Reading it is like being blessed with a new set of eyes with which to see the world. (less)
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Jonathan Wichmann
Jun 16, 2012Jonathan Wichmann rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Recommended to Jonathan by: Bill Plotkin
Wonderful to read -- he writes with the language of a philosopher, though I think it's clearer and more direct than most people think of as philosophy. I found it beautiful and inspiring. Probably my favorite part is that he reminds us every three pages that humans are closing down the basic life systems of the planet. Awful, but it's surprisingly nice to hear someone say it how it is.
His ideas can be challenging, but I think they're right on. (less)
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Joshua
Jun 13, 2009Joshua added it
Shelves: hippie, summer09
I would rate this as a better book that "The Great Work", if only because it is more prescient (written a decade earlier), as it contains all of the main ideas, developed sufficiently enough.
I am considering using Chpt 8, "The American College in the Ecological Age" (pp. 89-108) as a reading for a freshman seminar discussion. It is as timely now as it was 20 years ago.
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David Weber
Feb 12, 2012David Weber rated it it was amazing
Berry's eyes, mind, and heart were wide open. He could see the connectivity of everything, he had the ability to convey the unity of all things eloquently, and thus he enabled us to know better the love of the Other in which all must fully live, move, and have our being.. (less)
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JeanAnn
Aug 28, 2020JeanAnn rated it it was amazing · review of another edition
Shelves: morning-coffee
“We can understand this Peace of Earth, however, only if we understand that the earth is a single community composed of all its geological, biological, and human components. The Peace of Earth is Indivisible. In this context the nations have a referent outside themselves for resolving their difficulties. The earth fulfills this role of mediator in several ways. First, the earth is a single organic reality that must survive in its integrity if it is to support any nation on the earth. To save the earth is a necessity for every nation. No part of the earth in its essential functioning can be the exclusive possession or concern of any nation. The air cannot be nationalized or privatized; it must circulate everywhere on the planet to fulfill its life giving function anywhere on the planet. It must be available for the nonhuman as well as for the human lifeforms if it is to sustain human life. So it is with the waters on the earth. They must circulate throughout the planet if they are to benefit any of the lifeforms on the planet.” (less)
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