[Oe List ...] Are you an Ecozoic Reader II

[Herman Greene]

I found out that the listserv does not accept attachments, so here is the
text of what I sent earlier. This piece will appear in the Chapel Hill News
on Sunday.

Herman
ARE YOU AN ECOZOIC READER?



By Herman F. Greene



            I have the privilege of being the President of one of those
extra-bedroom nonprofits in Chapel Hill that somehow, in our case, has
influence as far as China. If we have a genius, it is that we listen to
Thomas Berry and try to apply what he teaches in our projects, the greatest
of which is publishing The Ecozoic Reader.



            Thomas Berry grew up in Greensboro when it was a town of 15,000
people and now, at age 89, lives there in his retirement. The best way for
me to tell you about him is to tell a story—one he tells about himself:



I was . . . eleven years old. My family was moving . . . to the edge of town
where [our] new house was being built. The house, not yet finished, was
situated on a slight incline. Down below was a small creek and there across
the creek was a meadow. It was an early afternoon in late May when I first
wandered down the incline, crossed, the creek, and looked out over the
scene.



The field was covered with white lilies rising above the thick grass. A
magic moment, this experience gave to my life something that seems to
explain my thinking at a more profound level than almost any other
experience I can remember. It was not only the lilies. It was the singing of
the crickets and the woodlands in the distance and the clouds in a clear sky
. . . .



This early experience, it seems, has become normative for me throughout the
entire range of my thinking. Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in
the natural cycles of its transformation is good; whatever opposes this
meadow or negates it is not . . . . (Thomas Berry, The Great Work, pp.
12-13.)



            I have heard it said that even the greatest thinkers have only
two or three main ideas to contribute. With that in mind, I would say that
Thomas Berry’s three main ideas are: (i) the fundamental flaw in
civilization is the radical discontinuity between the human and the natural
world; (ii) human culture needs to be grounded in a new cosmology—that of a
time-developmental, creative, integral universe (a new story of the
universe, available only since the 20th century, which Berry believes is the
Copernican revolution of our time); and (iii) ecology is a functional
cosmology for our life on Earth and thus we need an ecologically based
society. Putting all of this together, he concludes “The historical mission
of our times is to reinvent the human—at the species level, with critical
reflection, within the community of life-systems, in a time-developmental
context, by means of story and shared dream experience.”



            And that’s where The Ecozoic Reader comes in. The tagline of
this quarterly publication is “Critical Reflection, Story and Shared Dream
Experience of an Ecological Age.” We offer a place for ordinary
people—frequently unpublished authors—to share their thoughts, stories and
dream experiences about what we as humans could be if we lived in a coherent
relationship with the natural world. Our contributors share their poems,
their art, their essays, their songs and always what is in their hearts.



            “Ecozoic” may sound like a strange word. I have had people tell
me it sounds too technical and scientific. Maybe I have been thinking about
it and saying it too long, because it sounds like pure poetry to me. “Eco”
comes from the Greek word for life. “Zoic” comes from the Greek word for
living beings. Putting these two together, ecozoic means “house of life,” .
. .  just as economics means, or should mean, the norms or rules of the
house, and ecology means the logic of the house. In each case, the house is
our home, Earth.



            The term ecozoic was adopted by Berry because of the way
geologic eras are named. Our current geologic period is called the Cenozoic
Era and has lasted 65 million years. Now humans are changing the fundamental
dynamics of nature and may be precipitating the sixth great mass extinction
in the history of Earth. If so, we may be entering a new geologic era
characterized by human intervention in nature. The Nobel prize winner, Paul
J. Crutzen, has argued this is so and has suggested we are in the
“anthropocene” epoch. That there is widespread human intervention in nature
is descriptive. Ecozoic is normative, it points to a new mode of conscious
and affective relations of humans with nature—to a time of mutually
enhancing relationships of humans and the larger community of life and life
systems.



            Are you an ecozoic reader? Would you like to be? Contact us at
the Center for Ecozoic Studies, 2516 Winningham Road, Chapel Hill, NC 27516,
or visit us online at www.ecozoicstudies.org. We’d love to have you
subscribe to our Ecozoic Reader, or you could send us one of your critical
reflections, stories or dreams experiences of an ecological age to share
with others.