Rev. Thomas Berry; called on humanity to save nature
NEW YORK - The Rev. Thomas Berry, a Roman Catholic priest who called himself a "geologian" and whose influential writings were an early call to humanity to save nature in order to save itself, died Monday in his birthplace, Greensboro, N.C. He was 94.
His death was announced by his foundation on its website, www.thomasberry.org.
Father Berry's books and lectures inspired a devoted lineage of academicians and environmentalists to explore the interface of religion, human nature, and ecology.
He left the monastic life for decades of study of global cultural and religious history and then, beginning in the 1980s, wrote a string of books relating cultural and spiritual evolution to the natural history of the planet and the universe.
"Thomas Berry was the earliest and most important voice to describe the profound importance of the disconnection between humans and the natural world, and what that could mean for the future of our species," Richard Louv, an educator and author of "Last Child in the Woods," said Wednesday in an e-mail message.
Father Berry believed that humanity, after generations spent glorying in itself and despoiling the world, was poised to embrace its role as a vital part of the larger, interdependent "communion of subjects" in the cosmos. The result, he wrote, would be a new era, which he called the Ecozoic, following 65 million years of the Cenozoic era.
In this new era, he hoped for concrete changes like population control (he criticized the Catholic Church for not doing more in this regard) and respecting and preserving the habitats of all living things as a fundamental right.
As Father Berry predicted in a 2006 interview with the filmmaker Caroline Webb, "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."
He said the transformation of humanity's priorities would not come easily. It would require what he called "the great work," the title of one of his most popular books, in four realms of endeavor: the political and legal order; the economic and industrial world; education; and religion.
Colleagues and admirers say he left an imprint on fields ranging from childhood education to green architecture, not only through his writing but also through his persona.
"To spend time with him was like getting a soul transfusion," said Louv, chairman of the Children and Nature Network, a nonprofit group whose goal is reconnecting children with nature.
William Nathan Berry, named for his father, was the third of 13 children. He often alluded to how his focus on the spiritual power of nature grew out of "numinous" experiences exploring woods and fields as a child, particularly his stumbling upon a lily-dotted meadow when he was about 11.
He later recalled the insight that shaped a lifetime of thinking: "Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good; what is opposed to this meadow or negates it is not good."
When he was 20, he sought to remove himself from a world that, in a 2001 profile in The National Catholic Reporter, he recalled as "crassly commercial" and entered a monastery of the Passionist Order of the Catholic Church, taking the name Thomas. He was ordained in 1942, but pursued the life of a scholar, receiving a doctorate from the Catholic University of America with a dissertation on the philosophy of history.
He traveled to China in 1948 to teach at Fu Jen Catholic University in Beijing but, with the rise of Mao Zedong, returned to the United States a year later. He studied Chinese language and culture at Seton Hall University and Sanskrit and South Asian culture at Columbia, then served as a US Army chaplain in Germany from 1951 to 1954.
Father Berry then returned to teaching, first at Seton Hall and St. John's University. From 1966 to 1979, he taught at Fordham University, where he started the doctoral program in the history of religions and where some of his students formed a devoted coterie, focused increasingly on religion and ecology. They remained involved with him for the rest of his life.
He is revered by many academicians who spent time at the Riverdale Center for Religious Research in the Bronx, which he founded in 1970 and used as an intellectual base into the 1990s. He organized a series of popular international conferences on provocative themes like "Energy: Its Cosmic-Human Dimensions."
He wrote two books on Asian religion, "Buddhism" in 1966 and "Religions of India" in 1971. But he is best known for his later writing on the human place in the cosmos, beginning with "The Dream of the Earth" in 1988.
Other notable books are "The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Em," which he wrote in 1992 with Brian Swimme, a mathematical cosmologist, and "The Great Work: Our Way Into the Future," published in 1999.
Two books of Father Berry's essays are scheduled for publication in August: "The Sacred Universe" and "The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth," said Mary Evelyn Tucker, a Fordham graduate student of Father Berry's.
