Living Earth Community - 7. Fluid Histories Oceans as Metaphor and the Nature of History

Living Earth Community - 7. Fluid Histories



Living Earth Community
7. Fluid Histories


SECTION III: PRACTICES FROM CONTEMPORARY ASIAN TRADITIONS AND ECOLOGY


Fig. 5 Yamuna River, near the Himalayas. Photo by Alexey Komarov (2015), Wikimedia, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Yamuna_River_-_panoramio_(2).jpg#/media/File:Yamuna_River_-_panoramio_(2).jpg
7. Fluid Histories: Oceans as Metaphor and the Nature of History

Prasenjit Duara


© Prasenjit Duara, CC BY 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0186.07

Time and tide wait for no man.

The field of pre-history is said to be characterized by the absence of a writing system. History is the study of human activity over the last 5,000 years or so based on texts and artefacts. Indeed, it is only recently that non-artefactual recording processes, such as carbon dating, tree-rings, the age of dental remains and bones have begun to be used in historical studies. John McNeill has proposed the idea of ‘superhistory’, distinguished from the academic discipline of Big History, which locates human history within the larger story of evolution. He explains that ‘Big History changes everything and changes nothing. It tells us that our species’ story conforms to a larger pattern. But it does not change our species story.’1 Rather, superhistory is the effort to link the history of humans to natural factors, beyond the specialized field of environmental history, and beyond the textual and artefactual. It will be a revolution in methodology, geared towards grasping how humans have interacted with the climate, and how the climate has interacted with humans. Mine is a related effort: to grasp the relation of historical time to natural time at a metahistorical level.

I seek to understand the temporality of historical flows through the model of oceanic circulations of water. I will seek:
to probe what I have called ‘circulatory histories’ as fundamental historical processes that are not tunneled, channeled or directed by national, civilizational or even societal boundaries, but are circulatory and global, much like oceanic currents. Processes emerging in one form in place A flow to many places, B, C, etc., where they interact with other local and trans-local forces to re-emerge often in place A, though recognized as something else.2 Older cosmologies, rhythms, and technologies of organizing time were closely in sync with natural patterns, even though they were not reducible to the latter.
to de-couple historiographical time from historical time, and re-link the latter to the temporal medium of natural flows. The flow of historical time can be viewed not only through the metaphor of ocean flows, but is also naturally continuous with the latter. The basic medium of temporal contact and intertemporal communication in historical time are the natural (including organic) and built environment which serve not only as its infrastructure but also its provisioner. Historical time is co-created by actors and actants, much as the ocean waters are the medium and co-creators of its flows with oceanic beings — both organic and inorganic.
by disclosing the metaphorical and natural links between historical and oceanic time, I want to reveal the consequences for the world as we know it, of the growing gap between historiographical time on the one hand, and historical and natural time, on the other.
Circulatory Histories and Oceanic Flows

In my recent work, I have introduced the idea of ‘circulatory history’ — a kind of history that is interested principally in the flow of time.3 Circulatory, in my usage does not necessarily reference a return to a starting point, but a movement or distribution from place to place. Historians have engaged with various conceptions of time, including the phenomenological, whereby different societies experience time differently. National and civilizational histories engage with evolution within a teleological framework of progress. The advocates of Big History and Journey of the Universe conceive historical time as embedded in processes of evolutionary complexity. But let us begin by asking what media — bodies, vehicles, and agencies — best allow us to recognize and measure the flow of time. The first candidate would be sunlight, with its diurnal and seasonal cycles. Another natural candidate is water, and may be more interesting for historical time, because, although water is a re-cycling element, we never step into the same water twice.

My interest in circulatory histories coincided with the burgeoning of inter-Asian studies, including important work by historians of South Asia who wrote about connected and entangled histories. Overwhelmingly, the picture we get of Afro-Eurasia is of a deeply interconnected historical sphere populated by sprawling networks, expanding and contracting empires, traveling ideas and practices, circulating microbes and species of all kinds. Our aim is to take stock of what kinds of intellectual, conceptual, and perhaps even epistemological significance this genre of trans-border work can have, not simply for Asian studies, but globally.

Since the publication of Rescuing History from the Nation in 1995, I have sought to dislodge historical writing from serving as the instrument of the nation’s sovereign legitimacy.4 The rationale for this is both simple and deep: the nation-form has been the dominant mode of identity for most of the world over the last couple of centuries, and it is structured to engage in a competitive race for global resource domination; in turn, it has led most visibly to two World Wars and to the ravaging of the global environment as we enter the Anthropocene.

The forces for global cooperation and checks against predatory activities upon people and nature have been much weaker, in great part because of the nationalist imperative for GDP growth and the assemblage of interests legitimated by this imperative. In turn, I have argued that national histories are the principal means of establishing the imagined solidarity and destiny of the nation. I try to show here that history is by no means linear and tunneled, predestined to tell the story of the nation.

The oceanic metaphor of historical time allows us to grasp how historical ownership of science, technology, culture, civilization — the question of sovereignty itself — can only be sustained when historical process or flow is separated from historiographical understanding (i.e., not only in the historical discipline). When we attend to temporalities of different processes, we recognize that human history shares significantly with other organic and natural processes and that it is a collective planetary heritage. This recognition is imperative if we are to address the problems of planetary sustainability.

This, however, is not to say that there are no subjects — or agency, now recognized to be distributed between different humans and nonhumans — in history that seek to control or shape processes, but, beyond a point, the process escapes these subjects. Analytically, we need to distinguish between historical time and historiographical time, which includes purposive reflexivity. To be sure, the two are practically difficult to distinguish because this reflexivity also shapes the process. Nonetheless, the process exceeds the determinate purpose of the actor as it emerges in the circulatory flow of historical time. Historical time flows on, shaping and being shaped, carrying with it, to paraphrase the process philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, the ‘many’ from the ‘disjunctive universe’ which it gathers.5 And in its carrying, there are also memories and brandings that are cognized by some and recognized by others as a return. But for a start, we need to analytically differentiate the reflexive moments from the process itself.

Historical time is not fundamentally different from the flow of time in nature, which too remains irreversible.6 The flow of historical time is expressed in routine repetitive acts (never exactly identical) as well as the gathering or morphing into events caused by global interactions and contingencies, human and natural.7 The model of natural processes that I find most useful to understand history is the circulatory flow of oceanic water. Unlike rivers, they are not tunneled and bounded; their channeling is more interactive.

Ocean currents develop in interaction with changing atmospheric conditions of heat and wind, geological features and tidal activity. The Coriolis Effect, trade winds, the Gulf Stream, Equatorial Currents and Counter Currents, El Niño, La Niña, monsoons, cyclones, tsunamis, upwellings, and thermohaline circulation are some of the well-recognized oceanic processes. The oceans and seas are realms where spaces and temporal processes interact at varying scales. Take, for instance, the Mediterranean Sea — a waterbody that has been well-studied due to the fact that it is relatively enclosed. This Sea is a microcosm of an ocean and like it, has surface, intermediate and deep-water masses, the circulatory patterns of which are relatively autonomous, but also influence the North Atlantic circulation regime. The geography of islands and their shelves affect the circulation of these waters significantly. Thus, the converging of the Sardinian and Tunisian shelves directs the inflowing Atlantic waters southwards whereas decaying eddies in the north are constrained to flow northwards off Western Corsica.8

Oceans reveal circulatory currents of differing temporalities and effects, dependent on the diverse conditions they travel through. Surface currents are faster moving, because they carry heat and are shaped by winds; eddies are still faster, and more temporary gyres churn up smaller spaces. Deep currents are heavier, because water becomes colder at the poles and is pulled down by salinity and gravity. Nonetheless, deep currents also flow across the various oceans and cycle through roughly once every thousand years.

Over the last several decades, this deep-water flow across the oceans has been understood as a ‘conveyor belt’, reflecting the relatively stable pathway through which the warm waters pushed to the poles, overturned and made its way across the oceanic world. Recently, scientists have ‘deconstructed’ the model of the conveyer belt, suggesting that while overturning and coursing remain true, the conveyor belt idea was too simple. Rather, several different pathways have appeared, formed by surface eddies and wind-fields.9 This suggests that their temporality — the rate of flow and the types of activity they produce — has been maintained at the level, but they are also interactive with other geo-atmospheric forces. Even the deepest level is affected, and, in turn, affects the rest. The impact of anthropogenic activity on the conveyer belt has alarmed the scientific community in recent years. The massive polar ice melt has already and, is expected to, increasingly lighten and warm the polar water with excessive freshwater and thus to slow (or even halt) the flow of the conveyer belt carrying tropical waters to the north. One major consequence of this is the generation of colder weather in North America and Europe.

Compare currents to historical processes — ideas, practices, and material — that flow through time and space. Let me cite a case of a circulatory ideational complex across continents over the last two hundred years. In 1833, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, a polyglot thinker and reformer, deist, and Unitarian, who is often called the ‘father of modern India’, was visiting Bristol in the United Kingdom. In Salem, Massachusetts, at the time, Unitarians were circulating a locket with a curl of his hair in preparation for his visit, which, however, never happened, since Raja Ram Mohan died in Bristol that year. New England Transcendentalists, particularly, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, read Roy’s translations of the Upanishads and the principal Vedas, texts they deeply admired and cited profusely. American transcendentalists influenced a wide range of global ideas and practices, including abolitionism, proto-environmentalism, and civil disobedience founded upon transcendentalist conceptions of self-cultivation of the powers of the mind and consciousness of ultimate reality. Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience (1849)10 influenced many people, including Leo Tolstoy, who in turn was an important influence on Mahatma Gandhi. In the 1890s in South Africa, Gandhi adopted the phrase ‘civil disobedience’ as the English version of his satyagraha (truth force) experiment. During Martin Luther King’s civil rights movement in post-war USA, it was Gandhi and not Thoreau who was seen as its patron saint.

We can continue to trace this circulatory current, which merges, re-emerges, submerges, converges, and de-merges with various related or novel processes right up into the present. Thoreau’s insights were carried on by spiritual naturalists — John Muir (Sierra Club), Aldo Leopold, and Arne Naess — and these insights today have transformed and emerged as a significant American environment movement (although with many different channels). E. F. Schumacher, Gary Snyder, the deep ecologists, and feminist ecologists, among others, have been influenced by Asian and Indigenous traditions. Many of these ideas around environmental spiritualism and moral protest have cross-fertilized with movements of Indigenous people, forest dwellers, civil society and religious groups across the world, climaxing (at least for millions of Catholic schoolchildren) with Pope Francis’s radical encyclical of 2015 on ecology and justice.11 What was for almost two centuries a sub-cultural and inconspicuous ‘countercurrent’ may yet swell into a movement of significance.

On a different level, consider the various temporal scales of historical processes. Modern nationalism (which developed symbiotically, for the most part, with competitive capitalism) has developed as the axiomatic principle of legitimacy globally over the last two hundred years. The nation-form built around the self-other binary is the most enduring circulatory feature that has permeated all parts of the world which emerged from empires and other political forms built around more complex forms of belonging. The ideal nation-form is a confessional form that compacts people-state-culture for competitive control of global resources. Its immediate predecessor was the confessional state of the Reformation and Counter-Reformation in Europe, where a compact of church-state-believer believed itself to be saved as the chosen people, and other(s) to be damned.12

The ecology that sustains this doxic and durable temporality from the early nineteenth century has to do with the system of nation states that has been its most necessary condition for over two centuries. The fundamental raison d’être for the nation state is competition, even if competition alone is insufficient to account for nationalism in a particular time and place. At this level, the identitarian polity that is the nation, is mediated by a host of other forces such as religion, language, political regime, historical relations, etc. — forces that are often changing and mixing. Note that the institutions of the capitalist competitive order have not always been the most durable formations; consider, for instance, the period of Soviet and Maoist socialism. I believe that Maoism itself needs to be understood within a world-order of competitive states that ultimately pushed China towards capitalism.

Emergent historical forces or currents shaping societies at this level of mediation possess a kind of middling temporality. The temporality may be seen in the mediatory form of Chinese nationalism which changed in accordance with the change in China’s place in the international order during the 1980s: simply put, a change from a Maoist socialist state, to a globally participating market society. It changed gradually from the socialist model of the civic nation state that was built, however rhetorically, upon the fraternity of nationalities within and socialist and third-world internationalism abroad, to an ethnic model of privileging the culture of the Han majority. In practice, this shift was also facilitated by the need to attract powerful overseas Chinese capitalist networks based on Chinese culturalism and Confucianism. At the same time, the relative weakness of development in the western regions of China and among the ethnically marginal communities also fostered ethnic nationalism among these minorities that we are witnessing daily today. Finally, at the most variable level, like eddies and gyres, nationalism can function as an ideology, as political strategy, as mobilization politics and as ideals and dreams, changing according to contexts and constituencies.
The Nature of History

What we call history is fundamentally a natural process upon which humans have created artificial technologies of recording, including, of course, the exclusive prerogative of historical writing and reflection. What can we learn from re-embedding history in the natural process?

Natural processes too register their activities, whether in geological layers, in tree-rings, in DNA (which is a record of our species’ epidemiological history), and, not least, in memory, language, and practices — the record of our social history. These are natural or elemental media for recording temporal processes which the inscriptions of historical humans mimic. Beings in time, of course, cease to exist; but not without registering their presence or trace — whether for functional purposes or not. To be sure, traces and records must be recognized and recalled. Biological organisms also leave information for the species and for others.

Human reflexivity and the technologies it has generated are said to distinguish historical knowledge from data produced by other organisms. But the sophisticated technologies of scientific observation reveal that the nonhuman world is constantly registering and responding to environmental changes, faster than ever in the Anthropocene. The Star Moss Cam is a sensor technology that does not merely sense mosses over time, but observes how the moss itself is a sensor that is detecting and responding to changes in the environment.13

Thus, Susan Schuppli argues, matter itself bears witness to events. It registers and documents change internally within its substrates and molecular arrangements, and is often expressed as a material aesthetic, increasingly in ‘dirty pictures’, be it of black carbon on polar snow, radioactive leakage or oil spills that transform the Arctic. Inuit hunters who followed a predictable ecological sign system have lost their moorings and capacity to hunt not only with the rapid changes in the snowscape, but because the geo-atmospheric changes have brought about new optical regimes: the sun appears to be setting farther west and the stars seem to be no longer where they were.14 The naked eye trained for generations to scope for life, can no longer do its job.

While many organisms may not have reflexive capacities, they certainly have cognition and communication. Just as the terrestrial earth, the ocean too is a storehouse of records and information for species and interactive organic forms. Cetaceans or marine mammals like dolphins and whales appear to differentiate sounds — phonations in water travel four times faster than in air — possibly identifying who must be responding to whom through the rapidly intensifying — and life destroying — din in the ocean.15 A recent report on whale songs reveals that whales do not communicate only for mating purposes, but are constantly transforming and evolving forms of communication across hundreds of kilometers.16 Some even claim that dolphins have an aquatic public sphere! In the words of John Durham Peters:

Maybe the whole ocean is their [cetaceans’] auditory apparatus and archive; by joining their water-based inner ear with the outer ear of the ocean, perhaps they have a medium for being in time that resembles our recording media but contrasts with the apparent instantaneity of our oral communication. What is perhaps natural for them — nonlinear data access — is a matter of cultural techniques for us, and is only made by recording media.17

Peters, a philosopher of communication technology, has argued that since the appearance of technological media of distant communication in the nineteenth century, we have forgotten the idea that media is primarily natural. In Marvelous Clouds, he argues that air, water, ground, fire, light, clouds are the elemental media of communication for beings. His point of departure in the philosophy of communication is — to simplify radically — Marshall McLuhan’s idea of ‘the medium is the message’. However, Peters demonstrates that the two — medium and content — are not entirely separable and shape each other. In the example given above, the properties of water and the sonic capacities of the cetaceans must be considered together as the communication medium.

The natural and built environments are the medium of communication across time and space.

Following Peters’ conceptualization, this composite environment is not only the container or infrastructure of historical or intertemporal communication. Rather, it also provisions beings in time. At the same time as the media provision beings, beings (i.e., content makers) ‘read’ and interpret these traces and signs to subsist, thus generating emergences. In the oceans, water is the principal medium for beings, but water is itself shaped by geo-atmospheric forces and even by the techniques of water beings. Peters asserts that ‘Dolphins and whales’ techniques shape the environment to enhance their techniques. Tuna for example, take advantage of vortices to propel themselves through the water at speeds much greater than would be predicted from their body size and strength, benefiting from hydraulic phenomena their swimming creates’.18 Humans use their technological capabilities to record and reflect upon processes which, in turn, re-shape the environmental media in which they are borne.

Let us explore the historical process as a medium. The historical is typically thought to be activity engaged by humans; but human-initiated activity is enabled and exceeded by chains of actors/actants, each of which may be linked in other chains. Historical time is the chain of events and activities, emergences and circulations of materials, practices and ideas which leave traces and records in their built and natural environment. The natural and built environment provides both the medium of flow and reshapes the messages channeled across time and space. Some of these sequences die out, others have con-sequences and take on new lives, and others return or are renewed, whether they are recognized or not.

The ‘ontological turn’ in social sciences has tended to break down the subject-object binary by attributing agency or quasi-agency to animals, organisms, instruments — for identifying, measuring, evaluating, or attaining — and, not least, the natural elements, in any consideration of a human undertaking. To be sure, this hardly displaces the fundamental condition of human knowledge for understanding these roles. But we might note that animals and organisms can and do process chains of action; and the great variety of human knowledge forms alerts us to ways in which sequences of action and knowledge are exceeded.

Historical processes may be indicated and evidenced through tiny traces such as Roy’s circulating lock of hair, itself an adaptation of circulating religious reliquaries. These traces can carry historical forms and ideas across continents and time. Regarding material history, it is now the gargantuan nuclear and hydro-power projects and millions of miles of fiber-optic cables on the ocean-bed that generate possibly still more con-sequences and counter-finalities that historiography and scientists may or may not be able to capture.

The point of this exercise is to suggest that the medium of intertemporal communication has a natural ground that humans share with other organisms, albeit with different proportions or relations of the nature-culture dialectic of the evolving, ‘living earth’.19 The communicator, the message/communication, and the medium are interdependently creative, much as the ocean waters are the medium and co-creators of its flows with oceanic beings. It is not then entirely surprising that historical processes are expressed in temporal patterns that resemble patterns and interactivities that we find in oceanic flows. At a fundamental level, the historical process engaging humans is also natural. Processes generate other processes. Events impact, churn, and disperse; parts die, and other parts transform, transmute, and return. As such, the flow of oceanic waters is not just a model or even a metaphor. The historical process is continuous with it.

It was not till the second half of the eighteenth century that the notion of history as the property of a subject — a nation or civilization — in linear time, tunneling through the past into the future, became the dominant mode of temporal knowledge, first in northwest Europe and subsequently across the world in the twentieth century. The factors that combined to produce the linear conception of time in Europe are also complex; conceptions of religion, science, and the quest for global resources generated the temporal framework for a capitalist mode of endless accumulation.

The ideal of the conquest of nature as the means to achieve human satisfactions is the driving force of modern history as conceived by nation states. The nation states’ apparatuses of knowledge production also set up — to put it in the barest terms — the opposition between history and nature. This cosmological reversal from the pre-modern era perhaps saw its greatest triumph when humans — particularly early modern Europeans — began to successfully navigate the deepest oceans. For most humans, oceans had presented the limits of their capacities. Well into the Renaissance, the Pillars of Hercules that marked the passage between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic Ocean were said to bear the warning Non plus ultra, ‘nothing further beyond’, cautioning sailors and navigators to go no further.

Over the last two hundred years, humans have begun to colonize the ocean itself. This colonization has been industrial in nature, battering the ocean by massive commercial traffic and fishing, nuclear testing, constant bombardment for oil and gas explorations and militarized island buildings, among other invasions. Not least, it is being strangled as the dumpsite of the terrestrial planet. To my mind, the modern idea of the conquest of nature, and the institutionalized and technologized modes of exhausting it is radically unprecedented. We now come face to face with the hubris that human history can destroy, negate, and transcend the medium of its sustenance.

I have argued that historical time should to be understood in the terms of natural processes, more than has been done heretofore. As such, historical time is continuous with the nature of oceanic flows. For this purpose, I have rendered the historiographical process that is uniquely human to the background as something to be grasped in relation to historical-oceanic time. Reflexive historiography remains powerful; after all, it is a necessary condition of the capacity of humans to dominate nature. Can this reflexivity be turned to develop another relationship to nature?

Merely reducing fossil fuel emissions cannot address our problems. The massively growing scale of consumption and destruction of natural materials and organisms for increased production has depleted and destroyed the earth and the oceans. The treadmill of ever-increasing consumption for profits and GDP growth embedded in the deeply institutionalized cosmology of our times demands change. Is there still a way to reconcile the creative capacities of humans with the limits of nature? The re-direction of historiographical knowledge to accord better with the nature of historical time and the sovereign planet would mark an important step towards it.

The powers of symbolic representation that gave humans the capacity to race ahead of all species in the evolution of life may well have met its match in the revenge of the oceans. The greatest threats to the human world today appear from the oceans, from rising sea levels to geo-atmospheric transformations of recognizable climate patterns. The question that arises today is the extent to which the Anthropocene, an era where human activity has the greatest influence on climate and the environment, will ravage the ocean and the degree to which the ocean will ravage us.
Bibliography

Duara, Prasenjit, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226167237.001.0001

— The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139998222

— Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).

El-Geziry, T. M., and I. G. Bryden, ‘The Circulation Pattern in the Mediterranean Sea: Issues for Modeller Consideration’, Journal of Operational Oceanography, 3.2 (2010), 39–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/1755876x.2010.11020116

Gabrys, Jennifer, ‘From Moss Cam to Spillcam: Techno-Geographies of Experience’, in Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 57–80, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816693122.003.0003

Goody, Jack, The Theft of History (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511819841

Lozier, M. Susan, ‘Deconstructing the Conveyor Belt’, Science, 328.5985 (2010), 1507–11, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1189250, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5985/1507

McNeill, John, ‘Historians, Superhistory, and Climate Change’, in Methods in World History: A Critical Approach, ed. by Janken Myrdal, Arne Jarrick, and Maria Wallenberg Bondesson (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2016), pp. 19–43, https://doi.org/10.21525/kriterium.2.b

Peters, John Durham, ‘Of Cetaceans and Ships’, in The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 53–114.

Raj, Kapil, ‘Beyond Postcolonialism… and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science’, Isis, 104.2 (2013), 337–47, https://doi.org/10.1086/670951

Robbins, Jim, ‘Oceans are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats to Marin Life’, New York Times, 21 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noise-offshore-drilling.html

Schuppli, Susan, ‘Dirty Pictures’, in Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project 2014–16, ed. by Mirna Belina (Amsterdam: Sonic Acts Press, 2016), pp. 189–210.

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Swimme, Brian, and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).

Thoreau, Henry David, ‘Resistance to Civil Government’, in Aesthetic Papers, ed. by Elizabeth Peabody (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam, 1849), pp. 189–213.

Tucker, Mary Evelyn, and John Grim, ‘Four Commentaries on the Pope’s Message on Climate Change and Income Inequality’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 91.3 (2016), 261–70.

Weintraub, Karen, ‘These Whales are Serenaders of the Sea’, New York Times, 7 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/science/whales-songs-acoustics.html

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1 John McNeill, ‘Historians, Superhistory, and Climate Change’, in Methods in World History: A Critical Approach, ed. by Janken Myrdal, Arne Jarrick, and Maria Wallenberg Bondesson (Lund: Nordic Academic Press, 2016), pp. 19–43, at 22, https://doi.org/10.21525/kriterium.2.b


2 In addition to my own The Crisis of Global Modernity: Asian Traditions and a Sustainable Future (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2015), see chapter 2, https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9781139998222, from which I cite some of my examples, see also Jack Goody, The Theft of History (New York, NY: Cambridge University Press, 2006), https://doi.org/10.1017/cbo9780511819841; and Kapil Raj, ‘Beyond Postcolonialism… and Postpositivism: Circulation and the Global History of Science’, Isis, 104.2 (2013), 337–47, https://doi.org/10.1086/670951


3 Duara, The Crisis of Global Modernity.


4 Prasenjit Duara, Rescuing History from the Nation: Questioning Narratives of Modern China (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1995), https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226167237.001.0001


5 Methodologically, I follow process philosophy, particularly the idea of ‘emergence’ as delineated in the work of Alfred North Whitehead. Emergence is a form of creativity — which, for Whitehead, is the ultimate principle (also known as God). He writes that ‘“Creativity” is the principle of novelty. An actual occasion is a novel entity diverse from any entity in the “many” which it unifies. Thus “creativity” introduces novelty into the content of the many, which are the universe disjunctively. The “creative advance” is the application of this ultimate principle of creativity to each novel situation which it originates’ (my emphases). Thus, historical processes and events may be seen fundamentally as emergences. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality, ed. by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York, NY: Free Press, 1985), p. 21.


6 In the Newtonian conception of time, natural processes can be reversible, but the temporal medium in which they occur is absolute time, which is not reversible; it depends on nothing external and moves in a linear way. See Brent D. Slif, Time and Psychological Explanation (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), pp. 273–74. The phenomenological conception, while not denying the idea of absolute time, finds it inadequate to the task of explaining how consciousness experiences a temporal object.


7 Routine repetitive acts — for instance, the activity of institutions — to be sure are still emergent occasions, because they are separated by ‘degrees of difference’ not necessarily visible in everyday activities.


8 T. M. El-Geziry and I. G. Bryden, ‘The Circulation Pattern in the Mediterranean Sea: Issues for Modeller Consideration’, Journal of Operational Oceanography, 3.2 (2010), 39–46, https://doi.org/10.1080/1755876x.2010.11020116


9 M. Susan Lozier, ‘Deconstructing the Conveyor Belt’, Science, 328.5985 (2010), 1507–11, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.1189250, http://science.sciencemag.org/content/328/5985/1507


10 First published under the title ‘Resistance to Civil Government’, in Aesthetic Papers, ed. by Elizabeth Peabody (New York, NY: G. P. Putnam, 1849), pp. 189–213.


11 See Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, ‘Four Commentaries on the Pope’s Message on Climate Change and Income Inequality’, The Quarterly Review of Biology, 91.3 (2016), 261–70.


12 The making of modern nation states since the nineteenth century is a complex and multidimensional process. However, two aspects, in particular, are important here. Firstly, nation states and nationalists seek to create a centralized, homogenized, and mobilizable political body to gain advantage in the competition of global resources for domestic growth. Secondly, nations are themselves products of circulatory forces morphologically similar to each other generated by importing and exporting ‘best practices’, to use an anachronistic term. See Prasenjit Duara, Sovereignty and Authenticity: Manchukuo and the East Asian Modern (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2003).


13 For more on the Star Moss Cam, see Jennifer Gabrys, ‘From Moss Cam to Spillcam: Techno-Geographies of Experience’, in Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2016), pp. 57–80, https://doi.org/10.5749/minnesota/9780816693122.003.0003


14 Susan Schuppli, ‘Dirty Pictures’, in Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project 2014–16, ed. by Mirna Belina (Amsterdam: Sonic Acts Press, 2016), pp. 189–210.


15 Jim Robbins, ‘Oceans are Getting Louder, Posing Potential Threats to Marine Life’, New York Times 21 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/22/science/oceans-whales-noise-offshore-drilling.html


16 Karen Weintraub, ‘These Whales are Serenaders of the Sea’, New York Times, 7 January 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/07/science/whales-songs-acoustics.html


17 My emphasis. John Durham Peters, ‘Of Cetaceans and Ships’, in The Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2015), pp. 53–114, at p. 96.


18 Ibid., p. 88.


19 See Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker, Journey of the Universe (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).
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A Prophetic Voice: Thomas Berry | Center for Ecozoic Studies

A Prophetic Voice: Thomas Berry | Center for Ecozoic Studies

A Prophetic Voice: Thomas Berry

by Herman Greene

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A Prophetic Voice: Thomas Berry

By Marjorie Hope and James Young

Introduction

Whenever Thomas Berry looks out over the Hudson River from his home at the Riverdale Center for Religious Research, he experiences anew “the gorgeousness of the natural world.” The Earth brings forth a display of beauty in such unending profusion, a display so overwhelming to human consciousness, he says, that “we might very well speak of it as being dreamed into existence.”

But this Passionist priest and cultural historian—who calls himself a geologian—also reflects on the disastrous damage humans have wrought on the Earth. What is happening today is unprecedented, it is not just another change, he says. We are changing the very structure of the planet. We are even extinguishing many of the major life systems that have emerged in the 65 million years of this, the Cenozoic era—an era that has witnessed a spectrum of wonders, including the development of flowers, birds, and insects, the spreading of grasses and forests across the land, and the emergence of humans.

The Earth is changing, and we ourselves, integral aspects of the Earth, are being changed, he says. Religion must now function within this context, at this order of magnitude. But Western religion has been assuming little or no responsibility for the state or fate of the planet. Theology has become dysfunctional.

As a member of a Roman Catholic order, Berry directs much of his criticism at the tradition he knows best, Christianity. But his intention is to address people of any belief, and his searching mind and wide acquaintance with Chinese, Indian, Southeast Asian, Native American, and other cultures ‐ indeed, the entire pageant of cultural history ‐ make him catholic in the, non‐ sectarian sense of the term. His whole lifetime has been devoted to pursuing an understanding of the human condition and the condition of other beings on this planet.

Of course, he is thinking of present‐day human beings who live under the spell of Western culture when he writes: “We have lost our sense of courtesy toward the Earth and its inhabitants, our sense of gratitude, our willingness to recognize the sacred character of habitat, our capacity for the awesome, for the numinous quality of every earthly reality.” For Berry, the capacity for intensive sharing with the natural world lies deep within each of us, but has become submerged by an addiction to “progress.” Arrogantly we have placed ourselves above other creatures, deluding ourselves with the notion that we always know best what is good for the Earth and good for ourselves. Ultimately, custody of the Earth belongs to the Earth.

In the past, the story of the universe has been told in many ways by the peoples of the Earth, but today we are without one that is comprehensive. What is needed is nothing short of a new creation story, a new story of the universe, he asserts. Creation must be perceived and experienced as the emergence of the universe as both a psychic‐spiritual and material‐physical reality from the very beginning.

Human beings are integral with this emergent process. Indeed, the human is that being in whom the universe reflects on and celebrates itself in the deep mysteries of its existence in a special mode of conscious self‐awareness.

Everything tells the story of the universe ‐ the wind, trees, birds, stones. They are our cousins. Today it is harder to hear them. Berry has concentrated over the years on listening to the story told by the physical sciences, the story narrated by human cultures, the story recounted through cave paintings, visions of shamans, the pyramids of the Egyptians and Mayans. Each narrative is unique. But ultimately, they all tell the same story too.

We need a narrative that will demonstrate that every aspect of the universe is integral with a single organic whole, he insists. Its primary basis is the account of the emergent universe as communicated through our observational sciences. The universe as we know it today not only has cyclical modes of functioning, but also irreversible sequential modes of transformations. From the beginning of human consciousness, all cultures experienced the cyclical modes: the ever‐renewing sequence of seasons, of life and death. But today scientists and some others have begun to move from that dominant spatial mode of consciousness to a dominant time‐ developmental mode, time as an evolutionary sequence of irreversible transformations. We are beginning to recognize that our might can do temporal damage that is also eternal damage.

The new narrative will encompass a new type of history, a new type of science, a new type of economics, a new mode of awareness of the divine—in the very widest sense, a new kind of religious sensitivity. Such ideas as these do not always sit well with traditional Christians, nor with the followers of some other religions.

We realized on our first meeting with him at the Riverdale Center that Berry does not fit the common image of a nonconformist. A man with a gentle smile, bright eyes, and tousled whitening hair opened the door of the three story brown house and introduced himself simply as “Tom Berry.” It was a little hard to imagine that this retiring man, dressed in an old shirt and subdued in his speech could write so passionately of the dance, song, poetry, and drumbeats through which human beings have expressed their exultation and sense of participating in the universe as a single community. He led us through the inside of the house, which appeared to be one vast library with special collections of books, many in original languages, on Hindu, Confucian, Buddhist, Shinto, and Native American cultures. He then seated us on the plant‐ filled sun‐veranda overlooking the Hudson. Despite his shy manner, he responded easily to our questions, and sometimes took the initiative.

Noticing that our eyes had been drawn to the majestic red oak outside the window, he told us that it had endured more than four hundred years of nature’s buffets, and had withstood even human‐made disasters, like the massive tremors from a gas tank explosion that uprooted its fellow oak several years ago. To him it stood as a symbol of hope. Indeed, it was to this tree that he had dedicated The Dream of the Earth: “To the Great Red Oak, beneath whose sheltering branches this book was written.”

As we listened, occasionally looking across the river at the Palisades, we sensed that the Riverdale Center, set in the valley that had witnessed a story that included the emergence of the Palisades, the appearance of trees and birds and bears, then the long habitation by Native Americans, is a fitting place to contemplate the fate of Earth. It seemed fitting, too, that scientists, educators, environmentalists, and people of many faiths from all over the world would gather here, in small groups, to dream a new vision of the Earth into being.

Although clearly reticent about personal matters, he told us that his own life story began in 1914 in Greensboro, North Carolina. The third of thirteen children in a middle‐class Catholic family, he managed to develop a congenial relationship with his parents, but at the same time a certain distance.

This trait of distance, combined with a growing attachment to the land, surfaced often as he talked of his boyhood. The family had a horse, cow, chickens, and dogs; he felt close to the animal world. He often roamed the hills alone, except for the companionship of a collie, sensing the freedom of the woodlands and delighting in the clear streams, the songs of the birds, the subtle smells of the meadows. “But even at the age of eight,” he recalled, “I saw that development was damaging nature. At nine, I was collecting catalogues for camping equipment, canoes, knives, all the things I’d need to live in the Northwest forest. I felt the confrontation between civilization and wilderness, and I was acting on it.”

At nineteen, Berry went on, he decided to enter a religious community that would offer the best opportunity for contemplation and writing. He wanted to “get away from the trivial.” Sometimes he has wondered how he got through religious life, but he did, and yet managed to maintain that certain distance between himself and the establishment all the way.

After ten years in various monasteries, he pursued a doctorate in history at Catholic University in Washington, D.C., then spent a year studying Chinese in Beijing. After teaching at the Passionist seminary college, he became a chaplain with NATO in Germany; traveled in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East; and went to England to meet the distinguished historian of cultures, Christopher Dawson, who had helped awaken him to the role of religion as a powerful factor in shaping culture. Later he taught Japanese history at Seton Hall University, helped found a seminar on Oriental thought and religion at Columbia University and an Asian Institute at St. John’s University, built up Fordham University’s history of religions program, and for eleven years served as President of the American Teilhard Association. During these years he continued his search to discover how people find meaning in life. Always drawn to Native Americans because of their sense of integrity and freedom, their bond with the riches of nature, he came to know many, including Sioux chief Lame Deer, Onondagan leader Oren Lyons, and the poet Paula Gunn Allen. He continued his studies of history and philosophy, and aided by knowledge of Sanskrit and Chinese, deepened his exploration of Eastern religious traditions. Over the years he also published a large number of papers and books on subjects ranging from Buddhism to the religions of India, the creative role of the elderly, the spiritual transformation of Carl Jung, and the thought of Teilhard de Chardin. Philosophers ranging from Confucius to Thoreau and Bergson; poet/visionaries extending from Dante to Blake and Chief Seattle; ecologists and scientists from Rachel Carson and Ilya Prigogine to Anne and Paul Ehrlich, all came to influence his conception of the Earth Community.

“But Teilhard had the greatest influence on what might be called your ecological vision?”

“Yes. As a paleontologist as well as philosopher, he had a grasp of the need for healing the rift between science and religion. I would say that he appreciated the important role of science as a basic mystical discipline of the West. He was the first great thinker in the modern scientific tradition to describe the universe as having a psychic‐spiritual as well as a physical‐material dimension from the very beginning. Teilhard had a comprehensive vision of the universe in its evolutionary unfolding. He saw the human as inseparable from the history of the universe. Also, he was keenly aware of the need in Western religious thought to move from excessive concern with redemption to greater emphasis on the creation process.”

“And Teilhard’s thought inspired you to delve into science?”

He nodded. “I needed some general knowledge of geology, astronomy, physics, other sciences. But I must emphasize that in an ecological age, Teilhard’s framework has its limitations. Remember, he died in 1955. He believed in technological ‘progress,’ and saw the evolutionary process as concentrated in the human, which would ultimately achieve super‐human status. He could not understand humans’ destructive impact on the Earth. When others pointed it out, he could not see it. Science would discover other forms of life! Well, his work remains tremendously important. The challenge is to extend Teilhard’s principal concerns further, to help light the way toward an Ecozoic Age.”

“Teilhard posed the greatest challenge of our time: to move from the spatial mode of consciousness to the historical, from being to becoming. The Church finds difficulty in recognizing the evolution of the Earth. For a long time it wouldn’t accept even the evolution of animal forms. To this day there is no real acceptance of our modern story of the universe as sacred story. As a child I was taught by the catechism that Earth was created in seven days, 5000 years ago. There was no sense of developmental, transformative time in the natural world.”

“And the church, as so often, is behind the times instead of leading?”

He looked at us for a long moment. “There is some concern, of course, but it does not go far enough,” he said slowly. “The Vatican, for example, makes vague statements on being careful about the environment, but there is emphasis on making the natural world useful to human beings. So far, the most impressive Catholic bishops’ statement comes from the Philippines. It’s called ‘What is Happening to our Beautiful Land?’“ Over lunch we learned more about the ever‐widening scope of Thomas Berry’s activities and about some of the people who are helping to carry out his work. He told us that on occasion he spoke at New York’s Cathedral of St. John the Divine, which has become the most ecologically‐ minded church that he knows of, largely because of the enthusiasm of its Dean, James Parks Morton. He speaks on occasion at gatherings at Genesis Farm, a religiously‐based center seeking to develop a model of bioregional community; at the California‐based Institute in Culture and Creation Spirituality, headed by radical priest Matthew Fox; and at Grailville, an educational center and laywoman’s community stressing ecological living. He also has spoken at Au Sable Institute where practical and theoretical programs in ecology are integrated with biblical studies. He has participated in many conferences, including the seminal 1988 meeting of the North American Conference on Christianity and Ecology, the first (1988) Global Conference of Spiritual and Parliamentary Leaders on Human Survival, and international gatherings in Costa Rica at the United Nations University for Peace. He helped the Holy Cross Center in Port Burwell, Ontario build an institution for spirituality and ecology. In Puebla, Mexico, a Jesuit group has founded the Institute for Ecological Personalism based on his ideas. Letters come in continually from people in countries all over the world.

During the afternoon our talks continued, touching on animism, Taoism, and Buddhism, as well as Buddhist ideas for human habitats, which Berry considered models of ecological functioning because they disturb the natural world very little.

Pulling the Strands of Berry’s Thought Together

Since that day we have met Berry several times, studied his more recent writings, and gradually gained a clearer picture of the transforming vision he presents.

In 1988 Berry brought out a collection of his essays in a volume entitled The Dream of the Earth. In 1991 he and Jesuit priest Thomas Clarke published a dialogue, Befriending the Earth: a Theology of Reconciliation Between Humans and the Earth, which had appeared as a thirteen‐ part series on Canadian television. Years earlier, in 1982, he teamed up with Brian Swimme to begin a decade of work on a daring venture: The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era, which was published in 1992.

Their partnership has been an unusual one. Swimme, a physicist and a mathematical cosmologist, is younger, and lives thousands of miles away, on the West Coast. Brian Swimme’s early book is entitled The Universe is a Green Dragon. Now they have written the story of the universe as a single comprehensive narrative of the sequence of transformations that the universe has experienced. Grounded in present‐day scientific understanding, it parallels the mythic narratives of the past as they were told in poetry, music, painting, dance, and ritual. Nothing quite like this coupling of science and human history has been published before..

Planet Earth is surely a mysterious planet, say Swimme and Berry. One need only observe how much more brilliant it is than other planets of our solar system in the diversity of its manifestations and the complexity of the joy of its development. Earth appears to have developed with the simple aim of celebrating the joy of existence. Through this story, they hope that the human community will become present to the larger Earth community in a mutually enhancing way. Our role is to enable Earth and the entire universe to reflect on and celebrate itself in a special mode of conscious self awareness. We have become desensitized to the glories of the natural world and are making awesome decisions without the sense of awe and humility commensurate with their impact. We need a new mystique as we move into the Ecozoic era, and this process will need the participation of all members of the planetary community.

The various living and nonliving members of the Earth community have a common genetic line of development, the authors tell us. It begins with the Beginning: the primordial Flaring Forth of the universe some 15 billion years ago. It starts as stupendous energy, and evolves into gravitational, strong nuclear, weak nuclear, and electromagnetic interactions. Before a millionth of a second has passed, the particles stabilize. From this point we are carried through the seeding of galaxies, and the appearance of galactic clouds, primal stars, the first elements, supernovas, and galaxies. These are magnificent spiraling moments, carrying the destiny of everything that followed. They are moments of grace. Some five billion years ago the solar system forms, and a billion years later, the living Earth. We travel through the Paleozoic Era (in which vertebrates, jawed fishes, and insects appear); the Mesozoic Era (witnessing the first dinosaurs, birds, and mammals), and the Cenozoic (beginning with the emergence of the first rodents and bats, and carrying through to the arrival of various orders of mammals and humans), up to today.

After the emergence of the first humans, Homo habilis, some 2.6 million years ago, the new species evolves to Homo erectus, and then to Homo sapiens, with its marvelous new gifts of expression—ritual burials at first, then language, musical instruments, cave paintings, and other skills and artifacts that we associate with human civilization. Homo sapiens evolved through periods of the Neolithic village, classical civilizations, the rise of nations, and the “modern revelation.”

The latter refers to a new awareness of how the ultimate mysteries of existence are being manifested in the universe. This revelation, a gradual change from a dominant spatial mode of consciousness to perception of the universe as an irreversible sequence of transformations, might be called a change from “cosmos” to ever‐evolving “cosmogenesis”. It can be seen as beginning with the discoveries of Copernicus, and embracing those of Kepler, Galileo, Francis Bacon, Descartes, Newton, Kant, Darwin, Einstein, Whitehead, Teilhard, Rachel Carson, and many other scientists and philosophers.

Throughout the book the two men write from a unified point of view as they present some cardinal principles. Among them, that the birth of the universe was not an event in time; time begins simultaneously with the birth of existence. There was no “before,” and there was no “outside.” All the energy that would ever exist erupted as a single existence. The stars that later would blaze, the lizards that would crawl on the land, the actions of the human species, would be powered by the same mysterious energy that burst forth at the first dawn. Another cardinal principle is that the universe holds all things together, and is itself the primary activating power in every activity. It is not a thing, but a mode of being of everything. Recent scientific work has shown that it is not workable to think of a particle or event as completely determined by its immediate vicinity. Although in practical terms their influence may be negligible, events taking place elsewhere in the universe are directly related to the physical parameters of the situation. It is beyond the scope of this summary to present the authors’ account of this phenomenon. However, it underlines their conclusion that “since the universe blossomed from a seed point, this means that a full understanding of a proton requires a full understanding of the universe.”

Articulating the new story so that humans can enter creatively into the web of relationships in the universe will require, to some degree, reinventing language and the meaning we attach to words. For example: what is gravitation? In classical mechanistic understanding, it is a particular attraction things have to each other. Newton called it force, and Einstein, the curvature of the space‐time manifold. But the bond holding each thing in the universe to everything else is simply the universe acting. Therefore, to say “The stone falls to Earth” misses the active quality of that event. To say that gravity pulls the stone to Earth implies a mechanism that does not exist. To say that Earth pulls the rock misses the presence of the universe to each of its parts. It is more helpful, say Berry and Swimme, to see the planet Earth and the rock as drawn by the universe into bonded relationship, a profound intimacy. “The bonding simply happens; it simply is. The bonding is the perdurable fact of the universe, and happens primevally in each instant, a welling up of an inescapable togetherness of things.” Thus we can begin to grasp what is meant by the statement that gravity is not an independent power; it is the universe in both its physical and spiritual aspects that holds things together and is the primary activating power in every activity. We can begin to understand the idea that the universe acts, that it is not a thing, but a mode of being of everything. Each process, then, is ultimately indivisible.

Primal peoples of every continent understood this bonding, this intimacy, although obviously not with the tools and complex theories developed by modern science. Recent centuries have witnessed a concerted effort to rid scientific language of all anthropomorphisms. Instead, it has become mechanomorphic and reductionist. But let us consider the Milky Way. Its truth cannot be realized by focusing only on its early components, helium and hydrogen. Its truth also rests on the fact that in its later modes of being it is capable of thinking and feeling and creating—of evolving into creatures such as human beings. The Milky Way expresses its inner depths in Emily Dickinson’s poetry, for Emily Dickinson is a dimension of the galaxy’s development. In the long process of evolution, the sensibility of a poet derives from the Milky Way, and her or his feelings are an evocation of being, involving sunlight, thunderstorms, grass, mountains, animals, and human history. They are the evocation of mountain, animal, world. Poets do not think on the universe; rather, the universe thinks itself, in them and through them.

Thus, the vibrations and fluctuations in the universe are the music that called forth the galaxies and their powers of weaving elements into life. Our responsibility is to develop our capacity to listen. The eye that searches the Milky Way—the eye of humans or that of telescopes—is itself an eye shaped by the Milky Way. The mind searching for contact with the Milky Way is the very mind of the Milky Way searching for its inner depths.

The appearance of humans on this planet brought with it a new faculty of understanding, a consciousness characterized by a sense of wonder and celebration, and an ability to use parts of its external environment as instruments. Even in the time of Homo habilis (2.6 million to 1.5 million years ago), an intimate rapport between humans and the natural world was developing. And in the much later period of classical civilizations (3500 BCE to 1600 CE), the human social order was integrated with the cosmological order. Neither was conceivable without the other.

Yet while there was a great deal of teaching about humans’ relationship with the natural world in the Western, and especially the Eastern classical civilizations, there was also great devastation. Many Chinese philosophers and painters, for example, depicted that intimacy in eloquent terms, but endless wars and stripping the forests for more cultivation despoiled the countryside.

In the West, particularly, there developed an exaggerated anthropocentrism. When the Plague struck Europe in 1347, this changed to theocentrism, for since there was no germ theory to explain such a calamity, humans concluded that they must be too attached to Earth and should commit themselves to salvation from the Earth, absorption into the divine. Anthropocentrism and theocentrism, however, both denied the unity between the natural, human, and divine world. The mystical bonding of the human with the natural world was becoming progressively weaker. Closely associated with this insensitivity to the natural world was an insensitivity to women; patriarchal dominance reigned.

Since the late eighteenth century, the West has considered its most important mission to be that the peoples of Earth achieve their identity within the democratic setting of the modern nation‐state. Nationalism, progress, democratic freedoms, and virtually limitless rights to private property are the four fundamentals of this mystique. That unless their limits are recognized, these might bring catastrophe upon the natural world was not even considered. Land became something to be exploited economically rather than communed with spiritually. Wars of colonial conquest were related to the mission of propagating Western bourgeois values.

The “modern revelation”—characterized as it is by gradual awareness that the universe has emerged as an irreversible sequence of transformations enabling it to gain greater complexity in structure and greater variety in its modes of conscious expression—is a new mode of consciousness. This change in perception from an enduring cosmos to an ever‐transforming cosmogenesis has awesome implications that humans have not yet come to grips with. Our predicament is itself the result of a myth—the myth of Wonderland. If only we continue on the path of progress it tells us, happiness will be ours—happiness virtually equated with the ever‐ increasing consumption of products that have been taken violently from Earth or that react violently on it.

We need a new myth to guide human activity into the future. It should be analogous to the sense of mythic harmonies that suffused the fifteenth century Renaissance. At the beginning of the scientific age, the universe was perceived as one of order and harmony, in which each mode of being resonates with every other mode of being.

Somehow this sense of an intelligibly ordered universe has directed the scientific quest, say Swimme and Berry. But only recently have we been able to comprehend the depths of these harmonies, and thus fully recognize the mission of science. The scientific meditation on the structure and functioning of the universe that began centuries ago has yielded a sense of what can be called “the curvature of the universe whereby all things are held together in their intimate presence to each other.” Each thing is sustained by everything else.

We are on the verge of the Ecozoic era. What will it mean? This is a question explored in The Universe Story and Befriending the Earth, and in essays on economics, technology, law, bioregionalism, education, and planetary socialism in The Dream of the Earth. The basic answer begins to be found when we question some of our implicit assumptions:

 The assumption that we need constant economic growth, for example. How could we believe that human well‐being could be attained by diminishing the well‐being of the Earth? That we could achieve an ever‐expanding Gross Domestic Product when the Gross Earth Product is declining? Since the threat to both economics and religion comes from one source, the disruption of the natural world, should economics not also be seen as a religious issue? If the water is polluted, it can neither be drunk nor used for baptism.

 The implicit assumption that we could cure sick people by technologies and by focusing on their present problems. How can we have well people on a sick planet?

 The widespread idea that the primary purpose of education is to train people for jobs. We need jobs, certainly, but is it not more important for people to be educated for a diversity of roles and functions? Is it not more realistic, in the long run, to view education as coming to know the story of the universe, of life systems, of consciousness as a single story—and to help people understand and fulfil their role in this larger pattern of meaning? Even in the arts, rather than focusing on producing specialized professionals, would it not be better if all of us played music, if all children painted and wrote poetry?

 The conviction that a democracy that is exploiting the natural world is the highest form of governance. The anthropocentrism of the word is implicit in the root; “demo” refers to people, not to all beings on Earth, beings whose fate we are controlling in the name of human life, liberty, and happiness. We need a biocracy, a rule that will emerge from and be concerned with all the members of the community.

Re‐evaluating these and other “truths” that we hold as “self‐ evident” should enable us to realize that Earth is primary, while the human is secondary; that the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. We should be enabled to step back a little from our diligent efforts to impose our will on life systems. We will then be free to listen to the natural world with an attunement that goes beyond our scientific perceptions and reaches the spontaneous sensitivities in our own inner being.

All human professions need to recognize that their primary source is the integral functioning of the Earth community. It is the natural world that is the primary economic reality, the primary educator, the primary governance, the primary technologist, the primary healer, the primary presence of the sacred, the primary moral value. The professions do not have the words for the type of transformation required; we need a new language. We need to transform the legal profession, for instance, and invent a new language in law, and then move from the ideal of democracy toward the more comprehensive paradigm of biocracy. One example: a constitution that recognizes not only the human on this continent, but the entire North American community, including animate beings, geographical structures, life systems.

Religion needs to appreciate that the primary sacred community is the universe itself. Our ethical sensitivities need to expand beyond suicide, homicide, and genocide, to include biocide and geocide.

Interwoven in all this is the need to fully recognize women’s gifts and their roles in the future, both for themselves and for the well‐being of Earth. The need to limit human population is modifying the traditional roles of women and men, indeed the entire human situation. As women are liberated from the oppressions they have endured in most traditional civilizations, a new energy should be released throughout the Earth.

Albeit slowly, changes are already happening, as divisions of learning begin to overcome their isolation. Fundamental to a real sea‐change, however, will be the move from a human‐centered to an Earth‐centered language. Words like good, evil, freedom, society, justice, literacy, progress, praise should be broadened to include other beings of the natural world.

A basic principle of the emerging Ecozoic era is that the universe requires two modes of understanding: it has cyclical modes of functioning, yes, but also irreversible sequential modes of transformation. The law of entropy must evoke a certain foreboding in human consciousness.

The Cenozoic era emerged quite independent of human influence, but Homo sapiens will enter into virtually every phase of the Ecozoic era. We cannot create trees, fish, or birdsong, but they could well disappear unless we choose to temper our awesome power with humility. We must follow three basic axioms in our relations with the natural world: acceptance, protection, fostering: Acceptance of the given order of things. Protection of the life‐systems at the base of the planetary community. Fostering a sense of active responsibility for the larger Earth community, a responsibility that devolves upon us through our unique capacity for understanding the universe story.

Our fundamental commitment in the Ecozoic era should be to perceive the universe as a communion of subjects rather than as a collection of objects. A major obstacle to this is our reluctance to think of the human as one among many species. Moreover, the change in consciousness required is of such enormous proportions and significance that it might be likened to a new type of revelatory experience.

In the new era we shall need to recapture the basic principle of balance. Its prototype lies in the awesome reality that the expansive original energy of the primordial Flaring Forth keeps the universe from collapsing and gravitational attraction holds the parts together, enabling the universe to flourish. So, too, on Earth: The balance of containing and expanding forces keeps the Earth in a state of balanced turbulence.

In the industrial age, however, humans have upset the equilibrium. In the Ecozoic era the task will be to achieve a creative balance between human activities and other forces on this planet. When the curvature of the universe, the curvature of the Earth, and the curvature of the human are in proper relation, then the Earth and its human aspect will have come into celebratory experience that is the fulfilment of Earthly existence.

Where does God fit into this story? This is a word that Berry rarely uses. It has been overused, and trivialized, he says. The word has many different meanings to people. His principal concern is to reach the larger society, including people who would not call themselves religious.

Although Berry does not say it in so many words, he implies that in the West, especially, we spend too much time defining God and arguing over definitions rather than recognizing—in both theological and experiential ways—the ineffable. The term “God,” he says, refers to the ultimate mystery of things, something beyond that which we can truly comprehend. Many primal peoples experience this as the Great Spirit, a mysterious power pervading every aspect of the natural world. Some people dance this experience, some express it in song, some find it in the laughter of children, the sweetness of an apple, or the sound of wind through the trees. At every moment we are experiencing the overwhelming mystery of existence.

Berry prefers to speak of the Divine, of the numinous presence in the world about us. This is what all of us, child or elder, Christian or Muslim or Buddhist or agnostic, can experience; this is the ground that all of us can truly know.

Since the universe story is the way the Divine is revealing itself, humans become sacred by participating in this larger sacred community. The gratitude that we feel in this experience, we call “religion.” For Berry, it would seem, all this is more real and less abstract than theology, because it emanates from experience of the emergent universe, an experience so basic that it is shared by other members of the Earth community.

Perhaps because of his comprehensive Weltanschauung, embracing non‐theistic faiths, Berry never speaks of a God who commands, judges, rules over a paradisiacal afterlife, or watches over human actions. He does not go into traditional religious questions like good, evil, Heaven, Hell, or individual salvation. Yet he points out that his position follows quite directly from Saint Paul’s Epistle to the Romans. In the first chapter Paul declares that “Ever since God created the world, this everlasting power and deity—however invisible—have been there for the mind to see in the things He has made.”

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In our discussions with Berry, he has stressed that his primary interest is that humans come to see the visible created world with whatever clarity is available. In his writings he does not go into all the basic theological questions like that of ultimate origins, but the first step, as Saint Paul suggests, is perception of the created world. In Berry’s view, God is not our first clear perception. Rather, the sense of God emerges in and through our perception of the universe. Just how the divine is perceived obviously varies among different peoples. In any case, it seems that the divine is perceived “in the things He has made.” The knowledge of God emerges in the human mind not directly, but through this manifestation.

Perhaps a major difficulty for many believers lies in Berry’s view that the universe is not a puppet world without an inner power through which it functions. Rather, God enables beings to be themselves, and to act in a way to bring themselves into being—not independently of deity, but still with a valid inner principle of life and activity. This activity of creatures is known as Second Cause, while the deity remains First Cause. These causes are not “real” in the same way, nor do they function in the same manner. But to deny the reality of the created world and the validity of its proper mode of activity, is to deny the capacity of the divine origin of things to produce anything other than ephemeral appearances. Ultimately our perception of the divine depends precisely on our perception of the reality of the visible world about us.

Speaking of the universe as a single multiform sequential celebratory event and of the human as that being in whom the universe reflects on and celebrates itself in a special mode of conscious self‐awareness, is speaking in and of the “created” order. That it says nothing directly about “God,” does not to Berry indicate any denial of the divine. It is, rather, the proper way of speaking to our times without getting into a preaching mode that would do more damage to religion than anything else. Humans can participate in the great celebration that is the universe itself, and the celebration is ultimately the finest manifestation of the divine. It is our way of seeing the divine “in all things that are made.” This great celebration might also be considered the Grand Liturgy of the universe, the shared liturgy that we enter into through our own humanly contrived pluralistic liturgies.

As we have seen, Berry is highly critical of many aspects of Christian doctrine and practice, since all of Western civilization has been profoundly affected by the biblical Christian tradition. Thus Christianity is involved not as a direct cause of our ecological crisis, but as creating the context. To summarize briefly:

 Thefirstproblemistheemphasisonatranscendent,personaldivinebeing,asclearly distinct from the universe.

 AsecondrelatedproblemisChristianity’sexaltationofthehumanasaspiritualbeingas against the physical nature of other beings—the human is so special that the human soul has to be created directly by God in every single case.

 Thethirdproblemisthatredemptionisseenassomekindofout‐of‐this‐world liberation.

 Thefourthistheidea,developedparticularlybyadevoutChristiannamedDescartes, that the world is a mechanism.

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All these “transcendencies” ‐ transcendent God, transcendent human, transcendent redemption, transcendent mind—foster entrancement with a transcendent technology which shall liberate us from following the basic biological laws of the natural world. In this manner we create a transcendent goal, a millennial vision harkening back to the Book of Revelation, with which to go beyond the human condition, says Berry.

While the Christian tradition until the Renaissance included elements of seeing the natural world as having a soul, since the time of Descartes, particularly, there has been a progressive loss of the cosmic dimension. Although there have always been strands in the tradition that deal well with the natural world, this is not emphasized in Christianity as it is preached. There is no adequate emphasis in the catechism, or Biblical commandments concerning the natural world.

The Bible introduced an emphasis on the divine in historical events. Its historical realism stimulates a dynamism toward developmental processes.

Like many other religions, Christianity, with its intense monotheism, tends toward narrowness. Among religious people, the more intense the commitment, the more fundamentalist they tend to be. What is needed today is not intensity, but expansiveness. By the same token, humans should have moved beyond the idea that any one religion has the fullness of revelation.

Narrowness also is evident in the traditional Christian hostility to animism. Saint Boniface, for example, cut down sacred oak trees. Today that would seem absurd. Could we not entertain the idea that instead, the future of Christianity will involve assimilating elements of paganism?

In view of all this, Berry makes the startling suggestion that we consider putting the Bible on the shelf for perhaps twenty years, so that we can truly listen to creation. One of the best ways to discover the deep meaning of things, he says, is to give them up for a while. Thus, we would be able to recover the ancient Christian view that there are two Scriptures, that of the natural world and that of the Bible. We would be able to create a new language, more adequate to deal with our present revelatory moment. Unfortunately, at present we are still reading the book instead of reading the world about us. We will drown reading the book.

Organized religion is frequently a destructive force—yet religion in the more basic sense is an important part of our being, he asserts. Among other things, it brings us together in celebration, and gives us the gift of delighting in existence.

We must recognize that the revelations of most religions as they are practiced today are inadequate to deal with the task before us. The traditions of the past cannot do what needs to be done, but we cannot do what needs to be done without all traditions. The new story of the universe does not replace them; it provides a more comprehensive context in which all the earlier stories can discover a more expansive interpretation.

It is of pivotal importance, Berry says, to be open to ongoing revelations, including those emerging from the scientific venture. Science does not reduce the mystery of the world, but actually enhances it. Indeed, in a broad sense scientific understanding is the key to the future of religion.

It is too early to appraise Berry’s influence, especially in a period when economic growth, land development, invention of mega‐technologies, and winning computerized wars against Third World upstarts continue to define our nation’s measures of might and our sense of personal power. The full import of Berry’s message may not sink in for many years.

But some of his influence is clearly visible. He cannot keep up with requests for speaking engagements. The demand for his writings grows every year, and his work is now being translated into other languages. During the course of our own travels, in conversations with people as diverse as Buddhists in Japan, Muslims in Egypt, and agnostics in Russia, speaking of Berry has always provoked great interest and requests for copies of his work.

One criticism of his thought is that he exaggerates the extent to which the Bible provides a context for an exploitative attitude toward the Earth. Another is that the challenges we face are more complex than rediscovering an integral relationship with Earth, and inevitably involve specific, personal, economic, and political questions about our own communities. A frequent objection is that his biocentric vision denies the chosen status of “man,” vice‐regent of God. Berry listens to such criticisms, sometimes adapts his thought to accommodate them, and sometimes replies with a helpful rejoinder.

Even critics admire his realism, sweeping synthesis, imaginative insights, and courage to confront the narrowness of traditional theology. They also respect the fact that although he often uses abstract terms, he always lends them a vivid—at times biting—concreteness. He describes environmental, economic, and political problems with down‐to‐earth examples. When looking to the future, he illustrates his ideas with examples ranging from methods of appropriate technology to bioregionalism or steady‐state economics. He even proposes, not entirely tongue‐in‐cheek, running every other truck on our highways into a ravine. It is not that he eschews all technological advances. But our new technologies must harmonize with natural processes, which operate on self‐nourishing, self‐ healing, self‐governing principles.

It is our observation that Berry, contrary to conventional wisdom, is becoming not less but more radical as he advances in years—and sees the time left for saving the planet running out. He is “radical” in the original sense of the word, harkening back to the Latin word radices, roots. It is as if he is driven by the thought “They just don’t get it. They don’t comprehend how deeply rooted it is, the crisis that confronts us!”

Sometimes one can hear the anger in this gentle man as he speaks of “the order of magnitude of the present catastrophic situation.” It is, he says, “so enormous, so widespread, and we don’t know what we are doing.” The people who built the automobile, the people who built the nuclear program, the people who dreamed up the Green Revolution in agriculture, were unable to make the connection between these and their adverse effects. Vandana Shiva says the Green Revolution initially produced great increases in India’s food supply, but in the end, it devastated the whole agricultural system. We made 50,000 nuclear bombs, and now we don’t know what to do with them!

We fool ourselves into thinking that recycling cans and papers will do it. Of course we must recycle. But basically that is designed to keep the system going. It can help mitigate the problem, but only until we can do the fundamental changes. Meanwhile, when ecology groups try to protect the last bit of our first‐growth forest, the entrepreneur types say these radicals are trying to do away with jobs. If these are the only jobs we can imagine, it is a sick society, and we need cultural therapy. We can’t solve this crisis by meliorism.

Yet Berry sees hope in the upwellinging of movements and modes of perception that suggest an awakening. He points to the growth of bioregional movements, Green political organizations, and confrontational movements launched by activist groups such as Greenpeace and Earth First! He talks about shifts of consciousness revealed in New Age thinkers, countercultural writers, and feminist, antipatriarchal movements. On the international level, he has been encouraged by shifts within the World Bank toward more viable programs, and the addition of an environmental department; the spread of vital information through organizations like The International Union for the Conservation of Nature, the World Resources Institute, the Worldwatch Institute, and various United Nations programs; and even stirrings among some national and multinational business organizations.

Our awesome power spells our danger, but it also presents our opportunity, an unparalleled opening to a larger creativity, he observes. The danger lies in the mystique that pervades our patriarchal, plundering industrial society. It is a mystique that could propel us not into an Ecozoic era, but into one that could be called Technozoic, led by people—epitomized in the corporate establishment—who are committed to an even more controlled order. In the future. The dominant struggle will be the struggle between entrepreneur and ecologist. Our task is to reinvent the human, at the species level. Basic to this task is creating a new integration of the human with the forces of the natural world, and celebrating that integration.

Who will lead us into the future? The intimacy with the cosmic process that is needed describes the shamanic personality, a type that is emerging again in our society. As in earlier cultures, today the shaman may be woman as well as man. Certainly, to fulfil the function of healers, shamans must represent the feminine principle, embodied in the growing scientific perception of our planet as a single organism, alive, self‐governing, self‐ healing. True, nurturance is not the only role for women. Nurturing roles, however, are the key to the future; they are epitomized in the archetype of woman but reside in the capacities of each one of us.

Taking our cues from earlier peoples, we can create, or recreate, renewal ceremonies. We need to celebrate the great historical moments in the unfolding of the universe, cosmic events that constituted psychic‐spiritual as well as physical transformations. Such celebrations might begin with the primordial Flaring Forth and the supernova implosions, moments of grace that set the pattern for emergence of this planet. They might go on to include the beginning of photosynthesis, followed by the arrival of trees, then flowers, then birds, and other aspects of this wondrous evolution.

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Once we begin to celebrate this story we will understand the fascination that draws scientists to their work. Without entrancement in this new context it is unlikely that humans will have the psychic energy needed for renewal of Earth.

That entrancement comes from the immediate communion of humans with the natural world. We are rediscovering our capacity for entering into the larger community of life. Every form of being is integral with this story. Nothing is itself without everything else.

Berry’s shamanic voice raises a challenge. Is the human species viable, or are we careening toward self‐destruction, carrying with us our fellow Earthlings? Can we move from an anthropocentric to a biocentric vision—and more importantly, actualize it in a biocracy? How can we help activate the intercommunion of all members of the Earth community? What shall we be leaving the children—the young of our own families, our own species and of other species whose fate we share?

Can we find the guidance we need in religions as they exist today?

References

Berry, Thomas. 1991. The Dream of the Earth. San Francisco: Sierra Club Books.
Berry, Thomas with Clarke, Thomas. 1991. Befriending the Earth. Mystic: Twenty‐Third

Publications.

Swimme, Brian and Berry, Thomas. 1992. The Universe Story. San Francisco: Harper, San Francisco.

Copyright retained by author(s)

This article has been reprinted from Trumpeter (Vol. 11, No. 1, 1994), ISSN: 0832‐6193. Marjorie Hope and James Young, deceased, are the authors of The Faces of Homelessness, Macmillan/Lexington, 1986; The South African Churches in a Revolutionary Situation, Orbis, 1982; The Struggle for Humanity, Orbis, 1977. This paper, “A Prophetic Voice,” was intended to be a chapter of their book‐in‐progress, tentatively entitled The New Alliance: Faith and Ecology.