June/July 2006

INTERVIEW
It Takes a Universe
A visit with noted 'ecologian' Thomas Berry
 

BY JOHN LANE and THOMAS RAIN CROWE
 

The universe is always present in what we do in our homes, communities and bioregions, and our homes and habitat are always a part of the workings of the universe. This is how Passionist priest and earth scholar Thomas Berry speaks about "the great work" we are called to do to understand our place in the universe and function effectively within it.
 

Southern nature writers John Lane and Thomas Rain Crowe traveled to Father Berry's home at Wells Spring Assisted Living Center in Greensboro, N.C. They discussed, among other things, living and working congruently within the universe in the face of today's overwhelming odds.
 

Berry is one of the most profound, if not most celebrated, spokespersons for the preservation of the environment in the English-speaking world. His books The Dream of the Earth, The Universe Story and The Great Work are a liturgy of that place where theology and ecology connect. The term "ecologian" has been coined in his honor to emphasize the marriage of these two disciplines.
 

While looking for insights into the local, as one might expect, Lane and Crowe came back from their visit with Berry largely with illustrations and illuminations of the bigger picture.
 

Berry was born Nov. 9, 1914, in the early days of the automobile, and raised in Greensboro, then a small Southern town with a population of 15,000.
 

John Lane: What was this area of the Piedmont like in 1920, when you were growing up?
 

Thomas Berry: There was much more animal life. Frogs, deer and birds in particular. That's one thing I remember. Never ran into many wolves, as they were pretty well gone at that time. I did walk in the woods a great deal when I was a child. Already, the woods and nature were the most important things in my life. By the time I was 10 or 11 years old, I had a feeling that something was wrong. I didn't, of course, have the least idea of what this was all about, but I grew up with the feeling that I couldn't trust the developing industrial world in which I was living.
 

JL: Do you think that feeling might have been different if you had been born in New England or Oregon or Kansas?
 

TB: That's hard to say. America can possibly be considered the first of the nation states. This country took almost immediate leadership. It was dramatic. This new thing called "democracy" took a lot of nerve.... It was really the first time that a government of the people really took hold.
 

Thomas Rain Crowe: Did nationalism contribute to the beginnings of the destruction of the natural world?
 

TB: Definitely. That was what brought devastation, because the nation state came into being as a kind of almost religious sentiment. To this day, it's as profound a religion as most people have in this country. The challenge that developed as a result … was the industrial control over the natural world, based on the discovery that we could exploit the natural world and make money off of it.
 

The real anomaly of this country right now is that it has such contradictions. We're the richest country in the world, and we should be the one with the highest and most moral sense of nation. But if you look at something like our prisons, we have many times more people in prison than any of the other modern nation states. We have 10 times as many prisoners per population as say, not China, but Japan, and two or three times more than most countries of Europe. Our young people are growing up in a very, very insecure world. We spend, I believe, as much money on defense as the next 20 nations. Our defense budget is in the trillions!
 

JL: There is a doctrine developing in some evangelical churches called "cultural mandate," which says the relationship between the church and the earth should be one of subordination. Have you heard about this?
 

TB: I've heard about it. It's about subordination rather than finding a way to become better stewards. We need to be finding more ways to learn. The more precise translation of the contemporary biblical passage, "And man shall have dominion over all the land" is really closer in translation to, "And man shall be steward to the land." I would say that this whole direction by the contemporary church is a total misreading of the Christian religion as well as all other religions. All religions are founded on our experiences with the earth and the universe.
 

TRC: What should our relationship with the natural world be like?
 

TB: The proper relationship is the determining relationship of all forms. It's a primary structure that determines true law.… Every being has rights. To think that we have certain rights to intrude upon the living things and that the other beings don't have rights, this is a sacrilege. Every being has rights. Every being has free rights.
 

JL: What do you see as those rights being?
 

TB: The right to be. The right to habitat. And the right to fulfill one's role in the great community of the cosmos. I don't see how anybody could argue with these rights. I mean, for humans to think they are the only beings that have rights is just silly. All things get their rights from existence, from merely existing. This is something humans don't understand very well because they don't understand language. Most of our problems are, to a large extent, linguistic. We don't know how to think and we don't know how to use language. At the present time scientists think that the scientific approach is the only language that is valid. The difficulty here is that science is claiming truth, and it doesn't really think anything is truth except science. In truth, if I may so bold as to use the term idiomatically, that's why analogous thinking and imagination are the only way in which important things can be known. What does not enter into the conversation of scientists is the area of consciousness, which is more traditionally known as cosmology. Cosmology, from the root cosmos, means "universe." Logos means "understanding." So it's all about understanding the universe. But you cannot understand the universe in scientific language!
 

JL: What if two rights are conflicting? Our house in Spartanburg is situated on the edge of a flood plane. Another man owns the flood plane, and there are 80-year-old hardwoods in it. In the last 10 years, beavers have come back and dammed the creeks and all the hardwoods are dying. How do I convince my neighbor not to trap out all the beavers, or how do I convince him that the hardwoods aren't as important as he thinks they are in his small , brief look at time? He's saying, "Those hardwoods are money to me if I decide to cut them, and those beavers are killing them, therefore I've got to kill the beavers." How do you deal with conflicting rights?
 

TB: You have to go back to some basic ideas that belong to cosmology. That every being has rights. The beaver has rights. But at the same time, every being has responsibilities. No being supports itself in isolation. Every being is nourished by something outside itself, and every being is part of the great community of a self-supporting complexity of being. In this reality, they not only have the right of existence, they have the obligation to support other life, even with their own life. So, this all works out in the natural world. Beavers have forever been killing trees. Our disturbance only goes back 230 years in the Piedmont. Beavers have been here a lot longer than that.
 

We humans have eliminated the things that would normally take care of the beaver. The beaver would not naturally overpopulate, and that's one of the magnificent things about the natural world. It has its own discipline, its own balance, and it achieves this in one way or another. If humans step into the beaver's territory and destroy that balance, then humans need to take responsibility for it. What has happened is humans have taken upon themselves more than they can deal with or would like to deal with. We don't want to have to deal with any of this. We just want to keep exploiting things forever and ever and ever.
 

JL: Where is our responsibility in all this? How can we have an impact on this dynamic of exploitation?
 

TB: Now we're talking about the young people…. You raise children with poetry and imagination. You raise children with a broad range of intellectual experiences. They respond to these and to the natural world — its birds, trees and plants. I'm not convinced that children are all that happy with the gadgetry that they have these days that pretty much takes the place of experiences in nature. Rooms full of gadgets. They may be occupied, but not necessarily happy.
 

JL: In your book The Dream of the Earth, you wrote that "we have returned to our native place after a long absence." You're a native North Carolinian. Are humans restricted in their sense of nativeness? Can you be native to a place like Greensboro and also to the earth as a whole?
 

TB: We're native to both. In other words, every being is a universe-being. Every being is also a local being. But being limited and local has universal consequences. Fidelity to the local and to the universal is the same thing. But the primary base is the local. We don't breathe the air from Canada here in Greensboro, we breathe it from where we are. We drink the water where we are. We have our life experiences where we are. We choose and buy our clothing where we are.
 

JL: Does every particular place have its own lesson about the universe?
 

TB: Birds and animals work out their relationships within the larger context of the universe, but that frequently varies from animal to animal or from species to species. In terms of diversity, humans have a kind of comprehensive overview of things. Often we can get lost in this expansiveness and neglect the local. In a sense, we get over localized. We need to have some people who live more restrictive lives, and, at the same time, people living more expansive lives.
 

JL: What are some of the warning signs that you're living and thinking too locally?
 

TB: Signs for living too local would be dissatisfaction and lack of fulfillment. We all need a certain range of diversity in our lives, and this varies from individual to individual. Some of us need an expansive experience early on. Others, later in life. But in general, only recently have we discovered the universe that lies beyond the earth. To properly answer your question, the course of human history has to be taken into consideration, along with the acceleration of our learning process. What has happened with science is that a deluge of information has suddenly descended upon us, and we're using it in a wild and destructive manner.
 

JL: As we have discovered more of the universe, have we lost perspective on the local, or are we discovering more of the local as we struggle to gain a more balanced perspective?
 

TB: They should support each other. The broader sense should enhance the local, and the local has a need for the broader, just as different periods of history have a different range of expansiveness. Now, we've expanded out into the universe with our sciences and that has given us experiences that we've never had before. As long as science functions within an acceptable cosmology, the universe and the planet earth is safe. As soon as science thinks that it is the cosmology, the planet is in danger. Right now we're not functioning within a non-destructive developmental context. It's really a question of cosmology knowing how to relate to science. Science doesn't know how to relate to itself.. Ironically, our sciences are causing our lack of health, for example. We could be doing so much, but our children are not as healthy as they should be. Seventy percent are overweight. We're not a healthy people, and neither are we a well-behaved people. Our president has the illusion that he can force people to do what he wants them to do, by force.
 

JL: When you were a child, there were less than 2 billion humans on the planet. As predicted, the world's population rose to 6.5 billion in about 25 years. The South is the fastest growing region in the country. Can the South survive this population boom?
 

TB: I don't guess I think we can. It would be very difficult to survive with that much population. It goes against all odds with regard to carrying capacity. It's here that religion has been at fault, especially the Catholic religion, which has failed extensively in not paying attention to the decline of the natural world, and in this way, it's losing its own foundations, because the biblical world is thoroughly cosmological. Rituals are cosmological. They presuppose the universe.
 

JL: In the book The Naturalist Guide to the Piedmont by Michael Godfrey, it says that the original, primal piedmont before Europeans arrived is gone. We've utterly destroyed it. If we've lost that primal piedmont, what have we really lost? What's been lost once we've lost wildness? With Wal-Marts replacing farms, have we lost our souls?
 

TB: To some extent, nature does have a wonderful capacity of recovery, of restoration. While the 20th century will never exist again, new things are capable of developing. But it will not be the same and will not resemble the earth's original wonder and beauty.
 

In a certain sense, I have devoted my total life work to children, to help provide a world in which children can have an expansive human life. I wrote a little verse on the subject that goes this way:

The child awakens to a universe.
The mind of the child to a world of wonder.
Imagination to a world of beauty.
Emotions to a world of intimacy.
It takes a universe
To make a child, both
In outer form and inner
Spirit. It takes
A universe to educate
A child, a universe
To fulfill a child.
Each generation presides over
The meeting of these two in
The succeeding generation.
So that the child is fulfilled
In the universe
And the universe is fulfilled
In the child.
While the stars ring out in the heavens!

When we are looking for what to aim at in the future, we should start with the universe and ask: What are the needs of children? What does it mean to be human? To shape a world that responds to these questions is what is needed. A natural world gives us these.
 

John Lane's writing has appeared in American Whitewater, Southern Review, Terra Nova, Fourth Genre and National Geographic. His books include Waist Deep in Black Water and Weed Time. He teaches English at Wofford College in Spartanburg, S.C.
 

Thomas Rain Crowe is the author of several books of original poetry and translation, three anthologies and a memoir, Zoro's Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods. He is the publisher of New Native Press and lives in the Tuckasegee community of Jackson County, N.C.