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Excerpts from Thomas Berry's "Educating for the Twenty-first Century."


The following words were spoken by Father Thomas Berry in Prescott, Arizona on the evening of May 10, 1996 during the first student directed national ecopsychology conference, “Sacred Earth, Sacred Self ™.” Those of us present were honored by witnessing the wisdom as well as faith of a true and noble elder.


“Between the human and the non-human modes of being we envisage a radical discontinuity. All the inherent values and all the rights belong to the human. No inherent values and no inherent rights are recognized in the nonhuman, except for use by the human. This establishes an extreme alienation between the human and all other members of the planetary community. This alienation is found in all four of those establishments that govern our lives--the political-legal establishment of the government; the economic establishment of the corporation; the intellectual establishment of the university; the religious establishment of the church.

None of these four has shown any serious concern for the integral well-being of the planet. All four exploit the planet for human benefit, with little regard for that multitude of magnificent creatures surrounding us. Since the education establishment prepares students to participate in these other establishments, the education establishment must teach its students not how to enter the Ecozoic Era, when humans would be present to the planet in a mutually enhancing way, but how to survive participation in the devastation wrought and supported by these other institutions.
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Until we change the very basic structure of all four of these establishments, we will not succeed in effectively, and in an abiding way, bringing a remedy for the difficulties that we’re dealing with.

When speaking with faculties and administrations about these subjects I generally say that ecology, the coherence of the life systems of the planet, is not a course, it is not a program. It is the foundation of all courses, all programs, and all professions because ecology is a function of cosmology, and the cosmos or the universe is the ultimate term of reference to human intelligence.
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One of the difficulties is that we have this department, that department and the other department and no common referent. As regard to university what I suggest is the universe is the primary university. We go to school to the universe. We go to school to the planet Earth. We go to school to the trees. Actually, we do, in that no matter what we do, science has to take a part of the universe to tell them. The atom has to tell them that it is an atom. A particle has to tell them that it is a particle, that it is a bacterium, etc., and so they listen and they make their equation and that's that.

In all these instances we observe that the human venture has an integral relation to the cosmological order. The universe is the only context I know of for providing a truly effective remedy for the discontinuity that we have established between the human and the other-than-human modes of being. Here we learn that every being in the universe emerges in relation to all the other components of the universe: each living being is cousin to every other living being. Yet every being, both living and non-living, is needed if we are to be who we are. From this it should be quite clear that every living being on Earth has the same basic rights as humans.

There are three basic rights:

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What needs to be elucidated now is the manner in which the full array of educational disciplines and all the professions can move from their terminal Cenozoic phase into their emerging Ecozoic phase.

But first there are three basic principles governing the new Ecozoic phase of Earth development. The first principle is that the Earth is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. The universe is composed of subjects to be communed with primarily, not objects to be exploited.
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The second principle is that the human in its every aspect is a sub-system of the Earth system. The base system and the sub-systems will prosper or decline together. There’s no way in which the Earth system can be devastated while the human sub-system can be advanced.....If the planet is failing every being on the planet will suffer.

The third principle, and this is the difficult one, and this is what makes education a real challenge. The third principle is that the planet Earth will never again function in the future as it has functioned in the past. The twentieth century, my generation, is a decisive generation. We have put the human into everything. Even natural selection is no longer functioning. It’s cultural selection from here on.
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Although there are severe limits on what we can do directly for the benefit of the Earth, we cannot now withdraw completely and leave the planet to its own devices. We need to assist in purifying the waters of Earth. We need to assist in recovery of the forests. We need to assist in sustaining the ozone layer, in restoring native plants. All this will take a sensitive wisdom and extensive effort on our part. We cannot make a blade of grass but there’s liable not to be a blade of grass if we do not accept, protect and defend it.

From these observations you might get some idea of how the various learning disciplines would be affected in an educational program governed by the orientation that I am suggesting. Human economics would be taught in its relation to the integral economy of the Earth. There is only one economy. There are not two economies; a human economy, an Earth economy. They are distinctive phases of one economy.

When we study sociology you cannot study human sociology. There is no such thing as a human sociology. There is only a sociology of the integral community of living beings; integral community of the planet Earth. The planet Earth is the community; that is the subject of sociology. Within that, a person studies the human community. We are trying to establish a viable human community disregarding that deeper community.

Same as health; there are not two health systems, there’s only one health system. It has a human phase, it has a tree phase, it has a fish phase, a flower phase and all of that, but there’s one integral health -- and this, you see, is a problem. This would transform every department; It would transform government. There are not two governments on this continent.

It’s foolish for humans to come here and write laws guaranteeing humans rights to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness and leave out the rights of everything else; and assert our rights at the expense of the non-human world. So with medicine. The first law of medicine is to preserve the integral health of the planet because it becomes absurd to do otherwise.

Finally the great purpose of education would be to instruct and prepare humans to understand and participate in the great celebration that is the universe itself. Just as in religion, medicine, law, psychology, architecture, energy systems. Just as in all of these the transformation is not in progress, so too in education profound movements are in process. This pattern of education is still not well understood, yet it will inevitably be the central core of what will gradually emerge as educational leaders reflect on what they’re doing.

That’s substantially what I have to say about education but there’s something I want to say before we end. Its a kind of an invocation or a kind of a reflection and its something I did a while ago but I think it's appropriate.

Today we begin to relieve an ancient wrong. Today we think especially of our historic mission to restore to this continent its ancient joy. For while much of what we have done is beyond healing, there is a resilience throughout the land that only awaits its opportunity to flourish once again with something of its ancient grandeur. So far as we are able, we wish to evoke these powers to their full expression so that the primordial liturgy of divine praise that arose from this continent might once again burst forth in its native brilliance of expression.

We are concerned for the children. The children of every living being on this continent. The children of the trees and grasses, the children of the wolf and the bear and the cougar, the children of the bluebird and the thrush and the great raptors that soar through the sky, the children of the salmon that begin their life in the upper reaches of the great western rivers. The children of human parents. For all the children were born together in a single sacred community. It is increasingly clear that no living being on this continent or throughout the entire planet has any integral future except in alliance with every other being that lives there.

Tonight we come here as pilgrims to this continent and to this planet to beg a blessing from the mountains and valleys, from all their inhabitants. We a beg a blessing that will heal us of our responsibility for what we have done. A blessing that will give us the guidance and the healing and the energy that we need. For we will never bring a healing to this continent until we are first blessed and first healed by this continent.

To make ourselves worthy of this blessing is the task to which we dedicate ourselves in these closing years of the twentieth century with the hope that all the children of the Earth in the twenty first century will walk serenely into the future as a single sacred community.”

Revised 1999 February 10