In this edited interview with cosmologist and evolutionary thinker Thomas Berry, recorded in 2006 by Caroline Webb, he speaks about the human-Earth relationship and the need for humans to learn their true position in relation to all other living beings and to all ecosystem functioning. If we can recognize the integral character of our daily existence with the larger systems of Earth and the Universe, and understand that we do not live in a bubble divorced from nature, we will become a species which enhances the planet rather than one which harms it. To that end, Thomas Berry argues that other living beings, and the ecosystems on which they depend, should benefit from legal rights. ‘Rights’ come out of existence itself he says.

For more information about Thomas Berry's foundational thought, visit www.thomasberry.org and www.journeyoftheuniverse.org. To contact Caroline: lifewebb@gmail.com

PARTIAL TRANSCRIPTION © Caroline Webb 2006
"Well, the first thing to recognize in human-Earth relationships is the Earth is primary and humans are derivative. Humans are for the perfection of the Earth rather than the Earth is here for the perfection of humans.

Because the Earth project, reading people like Aristotle, some of the great classics, and particularly Aquinas at an earlier period in Western history, mentions that the planet Earth, or the universe, is the ultimate and noblest perfection in things and everything in the universe is ultimately for the perfection of the universe. So, humans give to the universe a consciousness of itself.

In fact, in a certain sense, humans are the way in which the universe creates itself, because the human can be defined as that being in whom the universe reflects on and celebrates itself in a special mode of conscious self-awareness.

So, in this manner, the first thing to recognize is that humans must become integral with the Earth. This is a very new approach to the Western world who have been so transfixed with the glory of the human and with the rights of humans that they have missed the point as regards humans and their relationship with the Earth.

We might summarize our present human situation by the simple statement: that in the 20th century, the glory of the human has become the desolation of the Earth and now the desolation of the Earth is becoming the destiny of the human.

From here on, the primary judgment of all human institutions, professions, programs and activities will be determined by the extent to which they inhibit, ignore, or foster a mutually-enhancing, human–Earth relationship.

When we inquire just how this will work out with the various aspects of our human existence, we might select four major areas that have authority over the human project: the political-social order, the educational order, the economic order and the religious order. Now these four projects are all directly involved in this determination of the future.

Religion has an awful lot to do with it – if they would simply begin to be more aware of the revelatory significance of the natural world.

The Education is such that children need to have contact with the natural life systems. Someone has written a book about the children and their need - just simply for their emotional and mental development - to have contact with the mountains, the air, the sea, the dawn, the sunset, trees, the birds, the song of the birds. Children that don’t have these experiences have no real idea of the world they live in. They live in a house, in a school, in a city that’s all manufactured. And they began to be progressively isolated from the basic dynamics of what human life is all about.

So that is a very clear situation. It has been suggested that this lack of contact leads to ‘Nature Deficit Disorder’ for children. So, in this manner, the future of the children depends very directly on some more functional balance between the human presence and the functioning of the natural world.

Economics: We need to return to some sense of the natural life systems and realize that our disturbance of the Earth and our pollution processes are having a profound contact on the economy [ecology] of our world.

Then we have also the Political order. The most absurd thing in modern times is the idea that only humans have rights. That’s the most absurd and self-destructive thing imaginable – because every being has rights.

Rights come from existence. Rights is simply the giving to every being its due. That’s a brief definition of rights. And every being – to exist – has rights, has three rights: the right to be, the right to habitat and the right to fulfill its role in the great community of existence....[cut]

‘Rights’ is an analogous term. It is alike and different. Like a person says – “A tree has rights” – the tree doesn’t have human rights because human rights would be no good for a tree. A tree needs tree rights. Birds need bird rights. Plants need plant rights.