Reviews for The dream of the earth

The average rating for The dream of the earth based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2017-04-15 00:00:00 Stan Dungca It took me forever to get through this relatively short book, due to both the dry, academic prose and the sheer number of interesting ideas per page. Although it is a challenging read--and, in some ways, a bit dated--it is definitely worth the attention of anyone with a serious interest in environmental philosophy. The core of the message is simple: We absolutely have to find a new way of relating to the earth, or we will destroy it, and thus destroy ourselves. All of our current modes of being--in economics, religion, science, politics--are not only insufficient, but contributing to the problem. Or as Barry puts it: "Our secular, rational, industrial society, with its amazing scientific insight and technological skills, has established the first radically anthropocentric society and has thereby broken the primary law of the universe, the law that every component member of the universe should be integral with every other member of the universe and that the primary norm of reality and of value is the universe community itself in its various forms of expression, especially as realized on the planet Earth." I enjoyed how he broke down his argument into different segments, such as how science and commerce and our own historical world view (the latter going back to the Middle Ages in the beginnings of this pathology, which provided a new and interesting perspective for me), but the most convincing argument was, for me, the spiritual one: "We should be clear about what happens when we destroy the living forms of this planet. The first consequence is that we destroy modes of divine presence. If we have a wonderful sense of the divine, it is because we live amid such awesome magnificence." Yes, this!!! A million times over! I did find it interesting that, although the author was a Catholic priest of the Passionist order, his religious views are quite nonconformist and would probably upset many main stream Christians. He believes that the emphasis on personal salvation and the insistence that we live in a fallen world detract from the experience of our connection with natural world--the sort of nature mysticism of traditional Native American religions, for example. He shows how this view helped to lead to the industrial plundering of the earth (sorry about all the quotes in this review, but Berry just says things so much better): "Just as the doctrine of divine transcendence took away the pervasive divine presence to the natural world, so the millennial vision of a blessed future left all present modes of existence in a degraded status. All things were in an unholy condition. Everything needed to be transformed. This meant that anything unused was to be used if the very purpose of its existence was to be realized. Nothing in its natural state was acceptable." And: "The Christian world is the world of the city. Its concerns are primarily supernatural. The rural world is the world of the pagan. The natural world is to be kept at a distance as a seductive mode of being." Actually, I would be extremely interested to read a thoughtful, ecologically aware Christian response to these arguments, as my gut instinct says that Berry's view would be considered heretical, and yet I know that many Christians are concerned about the environment. I would hate for the Ann Coulters and Sarah Palins of this world to drown them out. And yet Coulter and Palin are obviously building upon a dynamic--and extremely destructive--cultural foundation when they so vociferously insist that the earth exists only for our consumption. I wonder what Berry would say about them if he were still alive today. I copied down pages upon pages of quotes from this book--the author's insights were just that amazing. It's tempting to keep sharing more of them, but instead I'll recommend that everyone who loves the earth read this book. My one quibble with it (besides the stilted prose) was that I found it to be a complete downer (probably one of the reasons I could only read it in small doses). Writing in 1988, Berry seems to believe that we were on the cusp of a new ecological paradigm. If anything, the opposite is true. Every day I am bombarded with depressing news about more and more drilling, mining, fracking, and logging carried out on public lands. Entire mountain tops are being blown sky-high in Appalachia for coal production. The keystone XL pipeline has just been approved by one of the most aggressively exploitative presidents in history. Native rights are being trampled at Standing Rock and elsewhere. It is enough to make one weep, and I sometimes do. Unfortunately, some thirty years later, Berry's Dream of the Earth seems just that, a lovely dream that never came true.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-07-27 00:00:00 Rhonda Pfaff Required reading for everyone on the planet.