Thomas Berry: The New Cosmology and The Earth Community
The following is an excerpt from Thomas Berry: Selected Writings on the Earth Community. Berry was a primary creator of what we call the New Story or the New Cosmology. This story is the frame for Big History, which places human history within the larger story of the evolution of our universe. This starts with the Big Bang some 13.7 billion years ago and continues through the development of the incredible diversity of life on earth and the appearance of human consciousness. This new cosmology focuses on the great web of beings we call the Earth Community. We experience this as a sacred and interconnected whole apart from which individual members cannot survive. Therefore the good of the Earth Community becomes the greatest good. The image of the truth quest above represents a way of constructing and visualizing this new cosmology.
“ ‘The New Story’ is a culmination of a lifetime of Berry’s reflections on the growing ecological crisis and what new paradigm would be essential to counteract the devastating power of extractive industries and consumer economies…”
To do this he felt we needed a coherent story that would draw together evolutionary science and religion in an integrated manner…In other words, the revolutions in science of the last three centuries, like that in astronomy with Copernicus, gravitation with Newton, genetics with Mendel, biology with Darwin, and physics with Einstein, could be threaded together in an epic story of evolution which would frame and illuminate the human drama. However, the more recent discoveries regarding the unfolding of the early universe needed to be told in a way that was comprehensible to the non-scientist and comprehensive. Moreover, the new understanding of the formation of stars and galaxies, planets and the emergence of life on Earth could be narrated so that the viewer could recognize in their own lives, the evolutionary processes of the universe as dynamic, differentiating, and self-organizing…[paraphrased]
“All of this is to say that humans have emerged out of these processes and are not an addendum to them. Rather they are the self-reflective consciousness of Earth itself. We are related to all other species, sharing their genetic coding. Moreover, we see the stars, too, as our ancestors for out of their explosions have come the elements necessary for life…”
“One of Berry’s central convictions was that as we began to see the universe as an unfolding symphony and Earth as a living planet, we would be able to find our role as participants in these dynamic processes. As we appreciate the immense diversity of the Earth community, we would come more fully into communion with Earth’s ecosystems and life forms. Thus, learning to work with nature’s creativity would become our ‘Great Work’ in the newly emerging ecological age that Berry called the Ecozoic era.”
Mary Evelyn Tucker; John Grim. Thomas Berry: Selected Writings on the Earth Community (Modern Spiritual Masters) (p. 12). Orbis Books. Kindle Edition.
