RESPONSIBLE PLANETARY CITIZENSHIP

Thomas Berry: Our education should be based on the basic story of the universe that is given to us by science. It’s given to us, unfortunately, simply in its physical form. There’s no mystique to it, there’s no meaning, there’s no numinous quality. But the planet from the beginning has been a numinous reality. Is has a psychic dimension, a sacred dimension, and for a child to be taught something about the earth and the life forms without being taught the reverence and the mystery and the awesomeness of this, is to deprive the child of an integral mode of being humanized.

So education, religion, politics is doing something, but because the citizenry is enough present to the political instrument that it can force them to do something. The commercial people, the commercial establishment, is resisting all the way. It’s refuses generally to do anything that is not forced to do. And then there is the communications establishment, which is not doing anything like what it should do. The news magazines, the newspapers like the Times, should have a whole section on this in every issue. They’ve got the section on the movies, they got the section on arts, you’ve got the section on economics. But this is the supreme issue.

The first thing is that the planet is a community of self-emergent, self-educating, self-nourishing, self-governing, self-healing, self-fulfilling community, and every being on the planet has to see itself in a community relationship with the planet and particularly for the human in western society, there’s been a great difficulty because we have tried to identify the human over against the planet or over against the other living forms and in that way we have developed a certain isolation over against the planet and also oppressive, an oppressive relationship with the planet. And this is just enormous destruction and catastrophic disasters that are now damaging the planet to a degree that is almost beyond imagination.

(Thomas responds to the question: What can people do?) They can support what is being done by the larger groups and by the more active peoples, they can educate their children to think more integrally as regards to the earth, they can begin to disengage from the consumer economy. They can begin to insist wherever they are on integral relationships with the earth. And they can begin growing their own food. They can begin survival practices. And that’s one of the things that’s needed at the present time is survival tactics. From here on, food is going to be out of reach of people if—they’ve got to learn gardening. Everybody has to take their destiny into their own hands, individually and as communities. People can go to the doctor and say cure me. We have to take control of our health. We have to take control of our nutrition. We’ve got to take control of our energy system. The sun gives us a lot of energy. We have to learn to interact with it.