Spirituality and Ecological Hope

Fostering Ecological Hope

Today from Margaret Swedish:

Today I want to share a reflection more than news and commentary.  It is something I read this morning in the new book by the noted “geologian,” the monk, Thomas Berry, a pioneer in the emerging Earth Spirituality of our time.  It comes from an essay, “Earth as Sacred Community,” in his new book, Evening Thoughts.

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     Something much greater is happening than is generally realized.  This is something more than the ‘end of the Enlightenment’ as is sometimes  suggested.  It is something more than a parallel with the fall of Rome.  It is something more than the demise of Western civilization.  It is a transition greater than any historical transition that has ever taken place in human affairs.  [emphasis added]  For this is a deleterious change not simply in human social order or cultural expression.   It is a change in the very chemistry of the planet that makes life possible.  It is a change in the biosystems of the planet.  It is a change in the geological structure of the planet.

      Not simply the human future is involved.  The future of every living being on the planet is at issue.  The fate of the planet itself in its most profound and psychic structure is being determined.  We are witnessing nothing less than the dissolution of the planet Earth and all its living systems in consequence of this strange distortion of our human role in the Earth process that has emerged from our modern Western world…

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Sounds pretty dire, doesn’t it?  But it is what is happening.  The chemistry of the planet is being altered permanently and we are hardly thinking at all about what this will mean, about what the outcome might be.  But we certainly are getting an inkling with the mass extinctions underway, the toxic polluting of air, soils, and water, overpopulation and consumption beyond the capacity of the Earth to replenish and sustain life.

I think he has it right.  He believes we can still alter the scenario if we are willing to alter human behavior.  What we need are changes commensurate with the scale and urgency of the crisis.  And underneath that and fundamental to it is changing radically how we think of this planet, how we experience ourselves within this biosphere, how we see ourselves in relationship with other living species, with the organic and inorganic elements of this Earth of which we are a part and without which, or altered too much, we are, well, extinct.

Just a thought for the day…