Do we care?

High-rise buildings displace lakes. Malls spread like a virus across the landscape. Forests give way to resorts, farm land and residential layouts. Smog obscures blue skies and we lose touch with our essence… an essence tied to nature. To environment.

What better a way to honour environment day than to pay homage to Thomas Berry, a cultural historian by training and an ecological visionary, who recently passed away. He believed his generation had been "autistic" when it comes to the natural world. ‘Our progress as a civilization has been in direct proportion to our diminishment of the planet's lifesystems.’

We reproduce a few of Berry's thoughts here.

The ideal is to take the greatest possible amount of natural resources, process these resources, put them through the consumer economy as quickly as possible, then on to the waste heap. This we consider as progress—even though the immense accumulation of junk is overwhelming the landscape, saturating the skies, and filling the oceans.

In the process, Berry felt our inner world was affected too. Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of the clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human.

For the first time in history, the human is in the driver's seat, not only of cultural, but also of geological evolution. From biogenetic engineering through massive species extinction, ozone depletion, and climate change, humans are proving their reckless prowess over the unfolding of the planet.

Our ethics have not kept pace with our power. While we have codes and penalties concerning suicide, homicide, and genocide, we have no proscriptions against geocide.

For Berry, authentic progress rests in what he terms "the Great Work," through which we as a species move from being the planet's plunderers to its benefactors. The great work is ultimately the reinvention of the human.

This task will require a major reorientation of the four basic pillars of society—government, religion, the university, and corporations—which must embrace the earth and the universe as their primary educators. Or else we will become more soul-less than we are today.

Can we? Do we care?