Earth Democracy - How to shift paradigms and crawl out of our industrial box

[Dover]

http://www.thegreatstory.org/Berry-Webb.pdf

Excerpt from The Mystique of the Earth
Thomas Berry's vision for an Earth Democracy
recognizes the unity between humans and the planet.
He is interviewed by Caroline Webb
Caduceus, Spring 2003, Issue 59


...We have all grown up with the indoctrination of industrial processes and we don't know anything else; we are captured by this pathology. We present our whole industrial process as benign, as a benefit, as the only way to go, when it is obviously so inhuman. It distorts education, political life, economics and all aspects of the community's existence.


What I am proposing is the development of an integral human order within the order of the planet Earth: that we begin to think of an integral relationship of every aspect of existence with all other aspects, because in the design of Nature things are inherently supportive of other things.


It's a question of developing a qualitative relationship instead of a quantitative one. We are so quantitatively oriented that we see the planet Earth as a natural resource to be used. That's the basic distortion of modern times that comes from Descartes who said there is only `mind' and `matter' -- with humans being the only ones with `mind'. So the idea arose that there is no living principle in living organisms: it's just a mechanistic process that biologists would say is an `emergent property' of matter. And if there is nothing `there' then obviously it is something to be used. But as soon as the person begins to think of living beings as ensouled beings and thinks of the planet as a qualitative presence, to be communed with primarily, not simply as a natural resource to be used, then we can restore the key element in human-earth relationships that has been distorted in the West ever since the 16th and 17th centuries.

cont'd

http://www.thegreatstory.org/Berry-Webb.pdf

[Odin2005]

1. Looks like New Age woo woo disguised as enviromentalism.

:hide:

[Dover]

2. Not sure how you are defining 'woo-woo' so why don't you explain which part

of that article you find offensive or difficult to fathom (woo-woo)? It makes a whole lot of sense to me:

The human has been trying to
establish a human governance out of its
own needs, or its own functioning, but
in reality human governance is a function
of the universe, particularly of
planet Earth, so planet Earth is the unit
of governance. The ecology issue
emerges out of the fact that humans
have been constructing a government
for humans, by humans and with its
destiny in developing the human – but
that won’t work because if the human is
looking for its own benefit rather than
the benefit of the larger community, if
we become predators on the natural
community, then we lose in every way.
The American constitution is a disaster
for everything that is not human.

It may be wonderful for humans to have
all these rights, including rights of property
without restriction on the part of
government as to what they own or
what they do with it, but if there are no
rights and no protections for anything
that is not human, then we establish a
predator relationship. And so humans in
this country are just devouring everything
– because that’s what this constitution
stands for – for humans to devour,
to manipulate, to use. So the whole idea
of humans being human is gone. We’ve
been caught up in a mechanistic world,
because what we make, makes us. We
make the automobile, the automobile
makes us. We make an industrial economy,
the industrial economy makes us.
We are now in a weird dream world of
industrial technological imagination.