Institutions Role in Global Warming.

Don’s recent post on Global Warming and Trevor’s recent series The Quality of Our Institutions are good leads to an essay on Global Warming from Thomas Berry’s latest book “Evening Thoughts – Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community.”

In Greenleaf’s essay The Institution as Servant, three areas jumped out at me that are related to the global warming issue.

In the section titled “The Large Business as Servant” he writes about three pressures that will force businesses to focus more on the service aspect role. One of these is, “pollution and the protection of the environment have become major issues and are a costly problem for some businesses.”

From “The Growing Edge Church” section, Greenleaf writes “Conscious religious concern is part of the gear of civilization – a means to heal humanities alienation, which our ‘civilized’ state has brought about. The word religion, at is root, means ‘to rebind’, to rebind humans to the cosmos. Primitive people may have suffered much from their environment, but they were not alienated. […]. Their total society was bound to the cosmos, and a church, a separate institution specializing in rebinding was not needed. But we are estranged (from the cosmos and environment) […].

And from the section titled “Trust and Growth: The Value of Understanding” he writes, “Someone in the church must paint the dream. For anything great to happen there must be a dream.”

Thomas Berry is someone from within the church who has painted such a dream. Berry, a Catholic priest who likes to be referred to as a “geologian” or earth scholar, continues his vision that he first laid out in his book “The Dream of the Earth” in his latest book “Evening Thoughts – Reflecting on Earth as Sacred Community”.

Berry’s book addresses some of the primary reasons that Global Warming and other environmental crises are occurring and what will be needed for the human race to takes steps to address them.

Berry’s premise is that the problems that we face in the world today are in large part a result of the worldview that the western world clings to. This worldview separates humanity from the rest of creation. Some of Berry’s answers to the question “how and why did our present devastation of the Earth happen?” include:

We have lost the primary manifestation of the divine in its cosmological manifestation. […] A transcendent, personal, monotheistic creative deity […] has led us to treat the phenomenal world with something less than the reverence paid it by those cultures in which there is a sacred dimension to trees, to rivers, to the whole of creation. We have lost the primary manifestation of the divine in its cosmological manifestation.

The natural world is material; we are spiritual. As spiritual beings we become detached from the visible world.

The primacy in our belief in redemption. This belief tells us that we are not for this world.

Berry points out that the “emerging climate-change crisis arises from the simple question of whether economic profit or the integral functioning of the planet will be the normative value in guiding the human community into the future. Will the human economy be accepted as a subsystem of the Earth economy, or will the Earth economy be considered to be a subsystem of the human economy?”

In his earlier book The Dream of the Earth, Berry writes about his hope for humanity, “Presently we are returning to the primordial community of the universe, the earth and all living beings. Each has its own voice, its role, its power over the whole. But, most important, each has its own special symbolism. The excitement of life is in the numinous experience wherein we are given to each other in that larger celebration of existence in which all things attain their highest expression, for the universe, by definition, is a single gorgeous celebratory event.”

I believe that Berry’s dream of the earth is one that fits well with Greenleaf’s own dream of servant leadership as a way of transforming the world.

My ramblings for the day.