Environmentalism is a Humanism

2020 ◽  
pp. 193-216
Author(s):  
Jonathan F. Krell
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Biological Community ◽  
Christian Humanism ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Thomas Berry ◽  
Spaceship Earth ◽  
French Intellectuals ◽  
Western Humanism

Ecocritics have long been at odds against humanism. What is needed is an “ecological” or “inclusive” humanism, which includes humans and nonhumans, rather than regarding humans as the crown of creation. Several contemporary French intellectuals affirm that one cannot be an ecologist without being a humanist. Claude Lévi-Strauss disparages traditional Western humanism, which denies dignity not only to nonhumans, but to non-Western humans. Pierre Rabhi calls for a “universal” and “true” humanism that respects the earth. Edgar Morin writes that “spaceship Earth” has no pilot: humans must be “ecologized” in order to save the planet. Michel Maffesoli’s “ecosophy” is a plea for Dionysian “progressivism” to replace Promethean “progressism.” His humanism—etymologically linked to “humus” and “humility”—entails a deep respect for the earth. Finally, the American Thomas Berry rejects traditional Christian humanism in favor of an ecological humanism that embraces an “interdependent biological community of the human with the natural world.”

The Jurisprudence of Thomas Berry

2011 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Burdon
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Legal System ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
The United States ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Human Society ◽  
Great Work ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Thomas Berry ◽  
Education Science

AbstractOn June 1 2009 Fr Thomas Berry passed away at his home in Greensboro N.C. In his final book before passing, Berry challenged human society to a carry out a transition from a period of human devastation of the Earth to a period when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually beneficial manner. This 'Great Work' encompassed religion, education, science and law. In this paper I will address Berry's argument that our current legal system supports the destruction of the environment and outline two ideas he put forward for evolving law. The first idea recognises that human law operates within and should be bound by the overarching laws of the natural world. From this perspective, the laws of nature are primary and human law would receive its legal quality and authority from its conformity with this law. The second proposal was to recognise that the earth consists of subjects, not objects and that all subjects are capable of holding rights. I will consider this argument in the context of two recent enactments of 'rights for nature' legislation in municipalities in the United States and in the constitution of Ecuador.

The Great Conversation

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Belden C. Lane
Keyword(s):  
Natural World ◽  
Hildegard Of Bingen ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Stephen Jay Gould ◽  
Thomas Berry ◽  
Inner World ◽  
Human Use ◽  
Great Conversation

Thomas Berry lamented that humans have dropped out of the Great Conversation with the rest of the natural world. We’ve objectified a world of things—imagining they exist solely for human use. If nature speaks, we are no longer listening. Yet the saints of the great spiritual traditions have long perceived trees, islands, rivers, and canyons as teachers, mirroring the inner world of the soul. Hildegard of Bingen attended to the greening power of trees. Ignatius Loyola was shaped by a cave experience. The Baal Shem Tov spoke the languages of birds, plants, and clouds. Focusing on a cottonwood tree as his own principal tutor, Belden Lane asks how the masters incorporated these earthy mentors into their spiritual lives. He backpacks into wild terrain to experience the power these nature archetypes had for them. Hiking through a recently burned Wyoming forest, for example, he understands Catherine of Siena’s fascination with fire as an image of the Divine. The book asks how spiritual guides in nature can serve us at various stages of our lives: As the child longs to fly like a bird; the adolescent seeks to flame out like a star; the adult needs the river’s flow; the elder ascends the mountain. All of these demand intensive soul work. Reconnecting with nature is the great ecological and spiritual necessity of our times. The earth and our souls depend upon it. As Stephen Jay Gould affirms, “We won’t fight to save what we haven’t learned to love.”

Tending this Fragile Earth, Our Island Home: The Pope's Encyclical in Dialogue with Ecomimesis, a Design Model for Conservation Stewardship

2018 ◽  
Vol 100 (4) ◽  
pp. 745-766
Author(s):  
Lillian C. Woo
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Water Pollution ◽  
Anthropogenic Impact ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Design Solution ◽  
World Population ◽  
Natural Ecosystem ◽  
Natural Ecosystems ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World

In the last fifty years, empirical evidence has shown that climate change and environmental degradation are largely the results of increased world population, economic development, and changes in cultural and social norms. Thus far we have been unable to slow or reverse the practices that continue to produce more air and water pollution, soil and ocean degradation, and ecosystem decline. This paper analyzes the negative anthropogenic impact on the ecosystem and proposes a new design solution: ecomimesis, which uses the natural ecosystem as its template to conserve, restore, and improve existing ecosystems. Through its nonintrusive strategies and designs, and its goal of preserving natural ecosystems and the earth, ecomimesis can become an integral part of stabilizing and rehabilitating our natural world at the same time that it addresses the needs of growing economies and populations around the world.

Squaring the Circle

2020 ◽  
pp. 51-82
Author(s):  
Ciaran McMorran
Keyword(s):  
James Joyce ◽  
Euclidean Geometry ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Curved Surfaces ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
Natural Phenomena ◽  
Visual Objects ◽  
Squaring The Circle ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Geometric Objects

This chapter highlights the practical and metaphysical issues which James Joyce associates with the application of Euclidean geometry as a geo-meter (a measure of the Earth) in “Ithaca.” It demonstrates how the “mathematical catechism” of “Ithaca” geometrizes the visible world, translating natural phenomena into their ideal Euclidean equivalents. In a topographical context, it illustrates how variably curved surfaces undergo a process of rectification as they are mediated by the catechetical narrative, and how this leads to a confusion between maps and their territories. In light of the narrative’s conceptualization of Molly Bloom as both a human and a heavenly body, this chapter also examines the mythical notions which originate from the mathematical catechism’s conflation of geometric objects and the visible world. By evoking an incongruity between visual objects and their meters, it argues, Joyce explores the possible limits of squaring the circle, both topographically (in terms of projecting a curved natural surface onto a two-dimensional map, as in Mercator’s projection) and figuratively (in the sense that the irregularly curved features of the natural world are rectified as they are represented textually on a rectilinear page).

Mutual Custodianship in the Landscapes of Guðlac A

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Courtney Catherine Barajas
Keyword(s):  
Old English ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Environmental Stewardship ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The Face

Guðlac A details the eponymous saint’s relationships with the holy landscape surrounding his hermitage and its other-than-human inhabitants. The poem suggests that the work of Guðlac’s sainthood is sustained devotion to the Earth community. As an exemplum of Old English ecotheological living, Guðlac’s legend offers a challenge to the concept of environmental “stewardship” of the Earth community in favor of a model of mutual custodianship calls for sustained and deliberate devotion to the created world for its own sake and as a manifestation of the Creator’s love and glory. It also suggests that sustained engagement with the natural world even in the face of environmental crisis or collapse will be rewarded, in this life or the next.

Economy, Environment and Environmental History: Case Notes from Agriculture

Rural History ◽  
1997 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 125-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Turner
Keyword(s):  
International Symposium ◽  
Environmental History ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Great Work ◽  
Conservation Movement ◽  
Natural Agents ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Man And Nature ◽  
The Face

In 1956 in an international symposium at Princeton on the theme Man's role in changing the face of the Earth, one of the principal contributors, Carl Sauer, reflected that as much as anything it was a festival of remembrance to George Perkins Marsh. Marsh was perhaps the inspiration for viewing man within his natural world, within his ecological setting, but a setting which had evolved as much as anything by the actions of his own hand as it had been by natural agents. Marsh's great work Man and Nature, has been dubbed ‘the fountainhead of the conservation movement.’ Thus Sauer suggests that this study is based on man's:

scholarly journals “A Fourfold Vision: Nature Religion and the Wages of Scientism in Ursula K. Le Guin’s ‘Newton’s Sleep’”

Religions ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 9 (9) ◽  
pp. 279
Author(s):  
Catherine Newell
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Short Story ◽  
Space Station ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Left Behind ◽  
Religious Intolerance ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
Nature Religion ◽  
Near Future

Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1991 short story ‘Newton’s Sleep’ begins in a utopic society that escaped the environmental and social calamity of a near-future Earth and created an enlightened culture on a space station. The group, led by a scientific elite, pride themselves on eradicating the irrational prejudices and unempirical mentality that hamstringed Earth; but chaos blossoms as the society struggles with the reappearance of religious intolerance, and becomes confused by an outbreak of mass hallucinations of the Earth they left behind. This narrative trope of the necessity of nature for the survival of humanity—physically, mentally, and spiritually—represents a new and relatively common allegory in contemporary science fiction in an era distinguished by separation from the natural world.

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