Spring 2008

From the Editor...

Speaking for the Earth

The Role of Elders in Caring for the Planet

This Earth Day 2008 issue of Itineraries is dedicated to Fr. Thomas Berry, a historian of cultures and a prophetic voice whose work and life personify the role of the elder as “Spokesperson for the Earth.” Fr. Berry — who turned 93 last November — is the proponent of a new “Universe Story.” His daring and visionary cosmology unites science and the humanities in a celebration of an unfolding — and beneficent — universe and the human role as its consciousness.

	The quotations from Thomas Berry are taken from the essay, “The Creative Role of Elders in the Human Community,” which was published as a Second Journey Reprint in June of 2001. Click here to download it (in PDF format).

Berry believes we stand at a defining moment in history: “A new way of seeing the world, human life and the future is emerging... The clockworld of Newton; the manipulative, exploitative world of high-energy technologies; the quantitative value system” — this now-bankrupt view of the world is being superceded by an emerging “awareness of the inter-dependence of all the living and non-living forces of the planet.”

The need to act is urgent: “The changes wrought in the past century are not simply changes in cultural adaptation, in economic institutions, or in political regime. [They ]are changes of a geological and biological magnitude... Many living species have disappeared forever. Tens of thousands of species could disappear before the end of the century.” Elders living in such time have, according to Berry, a special responsibility, namely, “the historic task of sustaining the human vision at such a moment of transition.”

The articles in this issue include a personal memoir by Ted Purcell of the mentoring role which Thomas Berry played in his own life and how, in turn, that has shaped his own work with university students. The remaining article explore different facets of our role in creating a sustainable futures for the generations that follow.

“Is That Your Father?”

Thomas Berry as Mentor: A Personal Memoir

The students hear Thomas describe his boyhood experience of a beautiful meadow... and they marvel at how this became, for him, “the basic determinant of my sense of reality and values. Whatever fosters this meadow is good. What does harm to this meadow is not good. A good economic, or political, or educational system is one that would preserve that meadow, and a good religion would reveal the deeper experience of that meadow and how it came into being... ”
 

 
Ted Purcell, M.Div., D.Min., is a campus minister at Duke University with a long time interest in the place where spirituality and care for the earth intersect.

A common lament these days has to do with Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth.” It goes something like this: “I’m convinced that global warming is a fact, there’s simply no denying it. But, besides changing my light bulbs and lobbying my representatives to pass more eco-friendly legislation, what can I do?” Enter the Earth Corps Council...
 

 
Eric Utne is a publisher, educator, and social entrepreneur who founded the Utne Reader in 1984.

Until we launch an unwavering Mission to Planet Earth, we’ll keep postponing the homecoming until there’s not much left to come home to. In that rainforest, I saw and felt complexity-in-balance, and realized how far out of balance our industrial complexity is — infantile and clunky by comparison, with only thousands of years of experience as opposed to billions...
 

 
Dave Wann is the author of Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic and Simple Prosperity: Finding Real Wealth in a Sustainable Lifestyle.

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Returning to the scale the village offers (and what is a neighborhood other than the urban adaptation of the village which is a traditional model the world over?) makes other choices easier. One can live a simpler life (less stuff, less debt, less waste), minimize your ecological impact, and maximize human well-being...

 
Françoise Ducroz works internationally in the fields of environmental sustainability and personal development.

I continue to discover that many practices that I considered sacrosanct are now of questionable value. It is particularly challenging to be faced with your past errors of judgment, but also freeing to be able to accept what has happened and take action to correct and/or change those practices. As Earth Elders, we can help others do the same....
 

 
Septuagenarian Fred Lanphear lives at Songaia, a cohousing community in Bothell, WA, which he helped co-found.

Elders and the Earth: Return to the Future

Sufficiency rests on the declaration that we have all we need in ourselves and those who companion us — all we need to live a life of quality right here and right now. This loosens the grip of “more” in the sense of accumulation. We shift to living more fully, coming to life more fully. We shift from quantity of consumption to quality of living...

 Author-philosopher John G. Sullivan is a member of the Second Journey Board of Directors and author of Living Large: Transformative Work at the Intersection of Ethics and Spirituality.