Father Thomas Berry, a Passionist priest, is considered by many the foremost Catholic theological thinker on ecology. Author of the

best-selling The Dream of the Earth (Sierra Club Books, 1988) and numerous articles, and co-author with Brian Swimme of The Universe Story (Harper, 1992), Berry, a native of North Carolina, has been called "one of the most provocative figures of modern times" and "a prophet in the wilderness." At his home in Riverdale, N.Y.,

overlooking the Hudson River, he spoke with Maryknoll Associate Editor Lawrence Rich.

MARYKNOLL: What do you mean by the "Dream of the Earth"?

BERRY: The earth and all its life forms are fantastically beautiful. You can almost say they are more a creation of imagination than intelligence. Imagination in the human order expresses itself most freely in our dreamworld. So I say that in the beginning the earth had to be dreamed. It is an expression of the Divine Imagination.

MARYKNOLL: The "Dream of the Earth" is dedicated to an oak tree. Why?

BERRY: The tree carries all the meaning of the universe: it is an ecosystem, an expression of the deepest mystery of our existence, the unity and interrelation of all things. From the soil it grew in, to the birds and squirrels that dwell in it, to me living here underneath its branches.

MARYKNOLL: When did you begin to develop your vision of the universe?

BERRY: I was born in 1914, at the very end of the Reconstruction period, when the South began to industrialize. I could see how industrialization disturbed the water systems, trees and fields. However, I also saw a fierce feeling for industrialization that absorbs rural people who want to have the advantages of industrialization, who don't want to feel as if they are not participating in it.

MARYKNOLL: You say we have reached a point where we can ask if the human is going to be viable on this planet.

BERRY: That's right. We are severely damaging the whole biosystem of the planet on an unprecedented scale. There are only two other similar moments in the earth's history: 220 million years ago when 90 percent of living species became extinct, and 65 million years ago when the dinosaurs disappeared. The transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance is trivial by comparison to what is happening now.

MARYKNOLL: Can we right things?

BERRY: To think that recycling and reduced energy use will permit us to continue is absurd. When I was born, there were fewer than 2 billion people on the planet and the automobile had just come into use. Young people today will see a population of 8 billion to 10 billion. The oceans of petroleum we have depended on for fertilizers, clothing, transportation and energy will be gone by the next generation. We are losing 4 million to 6 million tons of topsoil a year. In a few more decades we won't be able to feed ourselves. We do not have the slightest idea how to dispose of the accumulation of radioactive waste, which future generations will have to live with.

MARYKNOLL: You paint a very bleak picture for our children.

BERRY: They are going to live amid the ruins of the industrial world and the natural world itself. Young people will not only have to face drugs, aids and poverty, but also a depleted planet. My generation has done in terms of destruction what no former generation could do because it did not have the power, and what no future generation will do because life will not be so abundant. The present generation has to offer a new direction.

MARYKNOLL: How have Christians responded to this situation?

BERRY: It is the greatest failure in their history that Christians seem not to have any sense of what is happening on planet Earth. Our tradition has placed great emphasis on divine-human relations and interhuman relations, but has little concern for relation to the natural world. We don't understand how the inner life of the soul depends on the outer world of nature. St. Paul says in Romans that in the things that are made we come to a knowledge of the Maker. So if we have a distorted sense of the natural world, we will have a distorted sense of the divine. If we disintegrate the world, we not only ruin the sources of physical nourishment but we also lose spiritual nourishment.

MARYKNOLL: We don't tend to think we have a relationship to trees or streams.

BERRY: We are autistic in relationship to the natural world, but the natural world and the human will go into the future as a single, sacred community or experience disaster on the way. St. Thomas Aquinas says that the whole universe together participates in and manifests the divine more than any single being. The human makes no sense outside the universe, and the universe reflects upon itself in us.

MARYKNOLL: That sounds like Teilhard de Chardin, the French theologian who saw God's hand in evolution and spoke of Christ as the Omega point of the universe.

BERRY: He saw the spiritual and physical dimension of the universe and identified the human story with the story of the universe. He moved the focus of religion from redemption to creation. However, he did not understand non-Western, non-Christian cultures, and he was totally human-centered, looking for science and technology to heal all our difficulties.

MARYKNOLL: Have you ever been warned about the orthodoxy of your thought?

BERRY: Actually, I consider myself to be a rather conservative Christian. I get an overwhelming number of invitations to Catholic

groups. I just received an award for scholarship from the Catholic University (in Washington, D.C.). So my thinking has begun to be

accepted, but there is a lack of direction from Church authorities on this issue. It is regrettable that there has not been a single encyclical on ecology. Continued failing in this line will reduce

the Church to irrelevance. We are on a sinking boat, but we refuse to deal with that.

MARYKNOL: We say we take care of people, but what sense does that make if the boat is sinking?

BERRY: Both have to be done.I am amazed at how Catholic publications have not gotten into this. Tagging the future of the ecosystem onto peace and justice questions is inadequate, because the starting point is not the interhuman, though that is important, but care for the planet.

MARYKNOLL: What does this mean for missioners working among other peoples?

BERRY: The only future for the peoples of the world is in their land and water. Mission can no longer be directed only to people. You cannot help people except in the context of the natural world they live in, especially the land. Indigenous peoples live in a bigger world than we do. We say, "I live in New York City or Poughkeepsie," and have some sense that there is a river or valley or universe out there. But for indigenous people it is the first thought. They may have little shelter and only food for the day, but they live in a magnificent universe and are very sensitive to it, expressed in their art and song.

MARYKNOLL: Where do we find hope?

BERRY: Religious people are beginning to realize what is at stake. The industrial age is at an end. The planet is in irreversible recession. Great corporations are more powerful than most countries. We have to overcome their ability to exploit everything in sight.The Rio Conference shows that nations have begun to see what is to be done. (At the 1992 U.N. Conference on Environment and Development, in Rio de Janeiro, world leaders and churchpeople agreed that the state of our planet is a concern that must be addressed.) In Washington, D.C., finally, ecologists are in on every issue that comes up NAFTA, GATT, health care. There is now an international society for ecological economics.There is a new political alignment, not of conservatives versus liberals, but of those who look to how the human fits into the ecosystems of the world and those who look for ways human economic systems can exploit the world.

MARYKNOLL: What can we do to promote this re-understanding of the world?

BERRY: It is not easy to outline a program; it will be different in different places. But we need to teach responsibility to planet Earth, in our schools and seminaries; religious orders should bededicated to this. It has to be a total effort.

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