Our Earthly Cousins #4

If in 1980 you visited the areas marked on this map in green in Spain or Portugal ...

... you may have been lucky enough to spot this animal:

The Iberian lynx is the world's most threatened species of cat, and it is the most threatened carnivore in Europe. By 2003, its range was down to:

This lynx was distributed over the entire Iberian Peninsula as recently as the mid nineteenth century. Six years ago, in March 2005, it was estimated that the number of surviving Iberian lynx was as few as 100, down from about 400 in 2000 and from 4,000 in 1960.

In addition to falling prey to feral dogs, to human poaching and poisoning, and to collisions with our automobiles, the Iberian lynx has lost out to to infrastructure improvement and urban and resort development. It wants habitats with a diversity of trees, so tree monocultivation, which serves to break the lynx's distribution area, has harmed it. It eats rabbits, which diseases such as myxomatosis and hemorrhagic pneumonia have ravaged.

As a result, the Iberian lynx is critically endangered. It and its habitat are fully protected, and it is no longer legally hunted.

SOS Lynx is a conservation charity based in Portugal, working to prevent the extinction of the Iberian Lynx. Its aim is to stop the declining of the Iberian Lynx and other lynx species.

Texas Drought of 2011

The past nine months have been the driest in Texas since record-keeping began in 1895, with 75 percent of the state classified as having "exceptional drought," the worst possible level.

The Texas drought extends through much of the south central Unites States:

(This map comes from the Current U.S. Drought Monitor
at http://droughtmonitor.unl.edu/. Click on the map to
enlarge it.)

Images from the drought:

Dead catfish on the dry bed of
O.C. Fisher Lake in San Angelo, Tex.

Farmer Michael Schaefer of St. Hedwig, Texas, says
small ears on his yellow field corn
show the effect of drought.

Cow skull.

In my opinion, the abnormal drought in Texas results from "global weirding," a byproduct of global warming. Global weirding was also responsible for the "100-year" flooding of the Mississippi River this year, 2011. Tornado and hurricane activity, too, change due to global weirding.

Chincoteague Pony Swim

For 86 years now, there has been an annual drive of ponies from Assateague Island in Maryland to Chincoteague Island in Virginia so that some of the herd can be auctioned off at the annual Chincoteague Volunteer Fireman’s Carnival to benefit the firemen.

Assateague in green, Chincoteague
to its left (click to enlarge)

The wild pony herd is asked to swim across from one island to the other:

"Saltwater cowboys," most of them from the fire department, do the herding:

Onlookers watch from the sidelines:

It helps put people back in touch with nature.

See this slide presentation at washingtonpost.com for more.

The Northern Virginia Bat Lady

According to this recent article in The Washington Post, 50-year-old Leslie Sturgis ...

... has gone batty. Leslie has a setup in the laundry room of her home in Washington D.C.'s Northern Virginia suburbs to care for and rehabilitate orphaned and injured bats:

During early summertime pup season, she’s up every three hours overnight for feedings. Other volunteers help with caregiving, but Leslie rarely goes on vacation, even for a weekend. The bats need her.

Why do this?

Leslie loves underdog animals, the ones the public perceives as ugly or scary. A single recovery does not save a population, but bats’ troubles often have to do with the way humans live on the planet. 

“So I kinda feel like we owe them,” she says. 

Mammal helping mammal. Human nature as reciprocal, not reptilian. At least at Leslie’s house.  

After the feeding in the fly cage, she pauses just outside its door and looks up at the midnight sky. She removes her headlamp, shakes out her hair, arches her neck, takes it all in. She loves to glimpse the dart of a wild bat, silhouetted against the universe.

God bless you, Leslie!

Dead Zone in Our Chesapeake Bay

We here in Maryland have a natural treasure living right nearby. It is the Chesapeake Bay:

Water that streams into the Chesapeake comes from a watershed that includes areas within six states and the District of Columbia:

New York, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Delaware,
Virginia, West Virginia, and the District of Columbia
form the Chesapeake Bay's Watershed Community

For many years the watershed area has streamed water into the bay that is heavily polluted by nitrogen and phosphorus, elements contained in lawn fertilizers and in manure generated on farms such as the chicken farms on Maryland's Eastern Shore. Storm water runoff takes those elements with it, and those so-called "nutrients" wind up creating huge "dead zones" in Chesapeake Bay where fish, crabs, clams, and oysters will die.

The dead zones occur because the nitrogen and phosphorus feed large "blooms" of algae growth in the bay. After completing its life cycle, the now-dead algae form a black glop that robs the water below of oxygen. The creatures living in that water either relocate or die. Many, such as oysters, cannot relocate. Others try and fail. The result is a widespread natural tragedy that happens like clockwork every summer.

Here is a map showing in red the dead zone in the Chesapeake Bay in 2003:

In this year of 2011 the dead zone is especially large, says this recent article from The Washington Post:

This year’s Chesapeake Bay dead zone covers a third of the bay, stretching from the Baltimore Harbor to the bay’s mid-channel region in the Potomac River, about 83 miles, when it was last measured in late June. It has since expanded beyond the Potomac into Virginia, officials said.

Especially heavy flows of tainted water from the Susquehanna River brought as much nutrient pollution into the bay by May as normally comes in an entire average year, a Maryland Department of Natural Resources researcher said. As a result, “in Maryland we saw the worst June” ever for nutrient pollution, said Bruce Michael, director of the DNR’s resource assessment service.

This is not just a local problem:

A similar phenomenon is taking shape in the Mississippi River Valley, where tons of chemical fertilizer run off huge industrial farms, the Nature Conservancy announced recently. Findings by researchers at Texas A&M University support predictions that remarkably heavy rains and snow melt in the valley will create the largest-ever dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico.

Dead zones run the length of the Atlantic Coast. Environmentalists say they are a testament to reports that pollution loads from ever-expanding cities and suburbs are growing and, in some cases, creating a monster.

Heavy snowmelt and rains make for great quantities of heavily polluted runoff ... and, of course, they cause "100-year" floods such as we saw on the Mississippi River earlier this year. This is all part of "global weirding," a byproduct of global warming. The fishermen, crabbers, and oystermen on the Chesapeake Bay will have an even smaller catch than usual this year as a result of it.

The Post article goes on:

In December, the Environmental Protection Agency finalized a “pollution diet” to dramatically reduce the levels of nitrogen, phosphorus and sediment that states can allow in the bay from municipalities and farms.

The plan is more aggressive than its predecessors in past years that were criticized as ineffective. Under the plan, Chesapeake Bay watershed states — Virginia, Maryland, New York, West Virginia and Pennsylvania — and the District were required to draft and submit strategies to the EPA for reducing nutrient pollution.

The final plans will cost billions to improve municipal water treatment plants that contributed to nitrogen runoff, and to improve conservation efforts by farmers, particularly large animal-feed organizations where phosphorus runs into the bay when rain washes away manure.

You can read about Katharine Antos ...

... the 31-year-old employee in the Environmental Protection Agency's Chesapeake Bay Program Office who got the various states to agree to their new "pollution diets," in this recent Post story. Antos worked to assemble the plans agreed to by the states just in time to meet a court-imposed deadline for 15-year plans to dramatically reduce Chesapeake Bay pollution.

But the overall "roadmap" that was agreed to has been challenged, says the first article ...

... by two powerful lobbies and other groups that are seeking a court order to block it. The American Farm Bureau Federation argued that costly conservation requirements could drive farmers in the Chesapeake Bay watershed out of business, and that states — not the EPA — should determine pollution limits.

The group’s lawsuit in a federal district court in Harrisburg, Pa., asks a judge to stop the plan from going forward. The National Association of Home Builders recently joined the suit.

At stake here for the plaintiffs is not just what gets done to curb pollution in the Chesapeake Bay, but also the extent to which the Chesapeake plan might be ...

... a harbinger for far-reaching requirements in the Mississippi River basin, where industrial farms are responsible for chemical runoff that lead to huge dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico.

The National Association of Home Builders joined the suit because:

... Housing developments with paved driveways, streets and roofs without greenery are another source of nitrogen runoff because they send more rain across lawns than can be absorbed, washing lawn fertilizer into the watershed. Environmentalists say builders have resisted calls to create greener communities with permeable stone and grassy areas that soak up rain.

The forces that oppose the Chesapeake Bay cleanup plan are powerful and rich, says the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. The CBF is ...

... part of a coalition that sued the EPA in 2009 after decades of weaker anti-pollution measures failed to clean the bay, lambasted the farm bureau’s suit to stop the EPA’s plan.

“Farmers, the chicken council, fertilizer institute, hog people, turkey people . . . these are big Washington lobbying associations,” said Will Baker, the foundation’s president. “They’re not mom-and-pop farmers. If you look at the amount of money they’ve given to candidates and lobbying, it’s in the hundreds of millions.”

Sadly, this controversy is playing out pretty much beneath the radar screen in these days when news coverage is dominated by the federal debt crisis. Yet how the suit is eventually decided could spell the demise of the agreed-to roadmap for the Chesapeake Bay's cleanup. It could also keep cleanup efforts for the Mississippi River from coming to full fruition. That dire outcome could deal a death blow to two of our treasured natural waterways in America, the Chesapeake Bay and the Mississippi River.

Yet the plaintiffs in the suit clearly have a lot at stake, too. They make or grow such things as new houses for us to live in and chickens for us to eat at Popeye's.  True, they are not mom-and-pop outfits. They are big corporations, and they have outsized legal and political power.

Still, if the suit is decided in favor of the EPA, the plaintiffs will have to pay for much of the bay and river cleanup. Not necessarily directly, but in terms of having the states impose on them more costly regulations that would force them to clean up their act. For example, homebuilders would have to build greener developments, which would reduce the number of houses per development and make the developments more expensive to build. Some of those added costs would be passed on to homebuyers, and some the developers would have to eat. The costs passed on to homebuyers would make the homes more expensive.

Meanwhile, fewer homes built would mean fewer jobs for carpenters and plumbers and electricians. And fewer building materials purchased from suppliers. There would be a ripple effect that would be felt widely in the local and even the national economy. Fewer people would be able to afford all that many chicken meals at Popeye's then ... and the prices of those meals would be going up as well.

It would cost us a lot more than we may think to clean up our waterways.

Still and all, what about those Chesapeake Bay watermen ...

... whose numbers have been dwindling for decades as the bay has gotten too little attention from state and local governments in the watershed area?

At the end of the day, I personally think it will be very unlikely that the tug of war between competing, admittedly legitimate interests will succeed in restoring the Chesapeake or the Mississippi, unless and until we come to feel a spiritual, sacramental connection to the earth we live on. That and that alone would tip the balance in favor of Mother Nature.

Our Earthly Cousins #3

My good friend who likes to take photos of our critter cousins has come through with a real gem:

Harpy Eagle, in "Rehab"
in Panama

The harpy eagle is the national bird of Panama and is depicted on its coat of arms. In its natural range ...

Range of Harpy Eagle

... there is a mostly rainforest habitat that the expansion of logging, cattle ranching, agriculture and prospecting has threatened to eliminate. In large parts of its range the bird has become a transient sight only; in Brazil, it has been all but totally wiped out from the Atlantic rainforest and is only found in numbers in the most remote parts of the Amazon Basin.

The clearing of the rainforest contributes mightily to carbon buildup in the atmosphere, which causes global warming. The harpy eagle has the honor of being a "poster child" in the fight against global warming and climate change. A harpy eagle named Hope, raised in captivity, was released into the Rio Bravo Conservation and Management Area in Belize. It was the fifteenth such eagle to be reintroduced into the Central American wild in hopes of reestablishing the species there. The timing of Hope's release was set to tie in with the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen in 2009.

The Dream of the Earth, Part 9

C. G. Jung
(1875 - 1961)

In previous installments in my series about Thomas Berry's book The Dream of the Earth, I've told of the late Passionist priest-monk's vision of a new kind of human progress that does not plunder the riches of nature.

The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung ("YOONG") had a like vision of progress, but for Jung the goal was not so much environmental harmony as the human person's psychological and spiritual growth. Jung put Christianity "on the psychoanalyst's couch" and investigated what ailed the religion. He hoped to cure what he called the church's "one-sidedness."

Berry, for his part, agreed that Western Christianity had deep anti-nature roots: for instance, during the Black Death in the fourteenth century, when Europe's population shrank by one third, the ensuing outburst of pious fervor emphasized a notion of redemption that left behind corrupt, untrustworthy physical nature.

Berry also noted that at the dawn of Europe's Neolithic Age some 5,000 years ago, male-led nomadic tribes — the Indo-Europeans/Aryans — conquered the settled agrarian peoples living in Europe then, who worshipped goddesses over gods. The Aryans' patriarchal, conquest-oriented worldview has, in Berry's view, come down to us today and blinded us to the legitimate claims Mother Nature makes on us, her (seeming) conquerors.

"Good" vs. "Evil"

Jung said the church was "one-sided" because it had long set up the opposition between "good" and "evil" as an absolute split which could under no circumstances be bridged. But, Jung said, much of what was deemed "evil" was actually an expression of inborn aspects of the human psyche. If men do evil, Doctor Jung's prescription was for individuals as well as society-at-large to bring our more unsavory drives out of the "shadow" of unacceptable inclinations that lurk within the unconscious psyche. In that way, the more "wicked" aspects of our nature could be balanced out by our sweeter side.

Jung's Archetypes

Our drives — all of them, bad or good — are associated with archetypes, Jung held. These archetypes are unconscious patterns or templates from which symbolic representations emerge in dreams, poetry, and religious images. For example, we Catholics see Mary, the Blessed Mother of God, as symbolic of purity and of holy acquiescence to God's will. Jung said Mary reflects our inborn archetype for motherhood, that for virginal purity, and that representing the nature of God himself. We couldn't as a community understand Mary if we didn't share archetypes in our collective unconscious that predispose us to that understanding.

But some of our inborn archetypes under certain circumstances dispose us to do what our church and our culture deem unsavory, antisocial things. These, like all archetypes, form so-called "complexes" that usually get hidden in the "shadow" that is hidden in our unconscious depths. From that hidden staging area they can "inflate" into the conscious realm and provoke truly evil behavior. This was Jung's view of how the evils associated with National Socialism in Hitler's Germany came about.

Berry and Jung: Overlapping Ideas

Thomas Berry was environmentally oriented, while C.G. Jung emphasized the human psyche, yet the thought of the two men overlapped. Murray Stein, in Jung's Treatment of Christianity: The Psychotherapy of a Religious Tradition, gives clues as to how and why.

Stein says Jung studied the writings of the earlier Western alchemists. He did so as a way of studying "Christianity's unconscious." In order to gain clues to what in the conscious teaching of the Christian church is incomplete with respect to our full set of unconscious archetypes, Jung held that "the images of alchemy reveal the [unconscious] compensatory reaction toward" —  and thereby limn what is one-sided and incomplete about — the church's "dominant attitude" (p. 144).

Jung and Alchemy

Alchemy was an ancient tradition the primary aim of which was the creation of the mythical "philosopher's stone," said to be capable of turning base metals into gold or silver and also of acting as an elixir of life that would confer youth and immortality upon its user. Alchemical attempts to create the philosopher's stone were precursors to modern experiments in chemistry.

Stein says about Jung's interest in alchemy:

Alchemy developed images, for example, that indicated [to Jung] the reaction of the unconscious, [in the guise of] the "chthonic feminine," to the historical (pre-Christian) cultural shift toward masculine domination. With the constellation of the father-son dominant first in classical [i.e., pagan Greek and Roman] and then in Christian culture, there was a simultaneous repression of the mother-daughter pattern of earlier matriarchal consciousness.

Jung held that ideas and images in the psyche tend to gather around one central idea, forming a complex. The "mother" archetype is typically the nuclear idea of a complex of notions elaborating the various facets of mother symbolism. Likewise, "father," "son," and "daughter" tend to become archetypal focal points. Complexes can have a single archetypal nucleus; otherwise, two (or more) archetypes together, such as "father/son" or "mother/daughter," can serve to tie together numerous ideas and images into one single complex pattern.

The "Chthonic Feminine"

Jung's "chthonic feminine" refers to the fact that symbolically, the fertile material we call "earth" (gardeners know what I'm talking about) is thought of as feminine. In particular, the "interior" of the soil (which is referred to as "chthonic," a word which is pronounced THON-ic but with an optional hard-K sound at the beginning, based on an etymological root from the ancient Greek) is thought of as female. Cults in ancient Greece made living sacrifices to the deities of the earth that were associated with its renewable fertility.

So Jung echoes Thomas Berry in nodding toward what Murray Stein calls "the historical (pre-Christian) cultural shift toward masculine domination." Both Jung and Berry felt that our ostensibly male God stems from such a pre-Christian cultural shift away from matricentric, mother-centered emphases.

I would add that there was a like shift in the fertile crescent, in the land where monotheism was born, but the bringers of patriarchal attitudes to that region of the Middle East were not Aryans from the north and east but Semites from the Arabian Peninsula. A common emphasis on patriarchy, though, is (so I am guessing) why the Judaic religion of the ancient Hebrews, inflected through Christianity, could be successfully transplanted to once-Aryan Europe at the outset of the Middle Ages.

The "Mother-Son" Constellation

Reading further in Stein's discussion, one finds hope that the "dominant attitude of Christian consciousness" which extols the male "father-son" image alone can indeed be bridged to the alchemists' cherished "mother-son" image. These two images, "never joined in a single myth or symbol," have been constellated dually in human culture, Stein writes. ("Constellated" means that the unconscious archetype or complex has manifested itself in a particular way in the outer world.) The "father-son" constellation appeared in official church doctrine, the "mother-son" constellation in alchemical treatises.

The second "son," the one that is part of the alchemists' "mother-son" image, has been called the filius philosophorum, "the philosophers' child." His mother is called the prima materia, the "primordial mother." In the alchemical view, this second son bestows redemption on the world as a whole, including physical matter. He is the filius macrocosmi, the "macrocosmic son." The first son, Jesus Christ, is the filius microcosmi, the son who redeems just "man the microcosm" but not the rest of the material world — just the spiritual aspect of man is saved, according to Christian belief.

In other words, the second or "lower" son completes the work of the first or "upper" son in redeeming the entire world.

The "Dual Constellation" of the First and Second Sons

This analysis by Jung is hopeful indeed. Jung's earlier analysis of Trinitarian symbology held that the symbol of the second son was originally represented as the Devil(!), i.e., Christ's archenemy, the Antichrist. Now, Stein says, we encounter two sons whose ...

... dual constellation, the one from the father's world reaching downward in the incarnation [of Jesus Christ], the other from the mother's world reaching upward in the symbolism and work of alchemy, represent an attempt to bridge the gulf [between the two sons] that had deepened during earlier millennia.

Unlike the Devil, the second son, extolled by the alchemists, "was not intransigently hostile to the upper son of God." Though "clearly the son of the rejected primordial mother ... his benign attitude toward the Christian son represents," in Jung's words ...

... a sign that the chthonic underworld, having been rejected by the spirit [as understood by Christianity] and identified with evil, has the tendency to compromise. There is no mistaking the fact that he is a concession to the spiritual and masculine principle, even though he carries in himself the weight of the earth and the whole fabulous nature of primordial animality.

A Hopeful Answer from the "Mother-World"

Jung went on to say that image of the second, or lower, son, as "an answer from the mother-world," "shows that the gulf between it and the father-world is not unbridgeable."

That's good, I think, because only if the gulf can be bridged can Berry's prophecy of an incipient "ecological age" on earth come true.

Our Earthly Cousins #2

More photos from my friend who takes excellent shots of our earthly cousins:

Bald eagle, Skagit Valley, WA

The bald eagle is the national bird and symbol of the United States of America. It nearly disappeared in the U.S. in the mid-20th century due in part to the thinning of egg shells attributed to human use of the pesticide DDT. It was also being illegally hunted. Plus, there was a widespread loss of suitable habitat. The use of DDT was banned in the wake of Rachel Carson's 1962 groundbreaking book Silent Spring, which energized the environmental movement, and the bald eagle was placed on the endangered species list and actively protected by new regulations. Its population has since rebounded. The bald eagle's recovery is testimony to the value of legally protecting threatened species at the federal level.

Common grackle, Anacortes, WA

Common grackles are opportunistic birds that do well amid human populations. Often thought of as pests, they are actually marvelously beautiful birds in their form and plumage, and they are distinctive in that, like mockingbirds, they can mimic the sounds of other birds or even humans. They congregate in large groups, popularly referred to as a "plague."

In the U.S., they live everywhere east of the Rocky Mountains. In fact, they moved west with the pioneers as the primordial American forests were cleared to make land for farming. Grackles' natural predators are hawks or similar large birds of prey ... such as the bald eagle. To the extent that our activities have reduced concentrations of raptors, we are responsible for the large number of common grackles who turn right around and eat our crops.

Baby American robins, Ann Arbor, MI

American robins are beloved of Americans to roughly the same extent that common grackles are disliked. Robins are songbirds of the thrush family and, as migratory birds, are popularly called the "first sign of spring." Emily Dickinson wrote a poem, "I Dreaded That First Robin So," but most of us look forward to seeing robins return in the springtime — though, truth to be told, their annual southern migration for the winter removes them only from New England and the extreme north of the country. These baby robins hatched from distinctive eggs that give the name "robin's egg blue" to a particular color in the spectrum.

Baby woodchucks, Ann Arbor, MI

Woodchucks are also called groundhogs, whistle pigs, and land beavers. Their closest rodent relatives are the group of ground squirrels known as marmots. Groundhogs can be found everywhere in the eastern half of the U.S. except for the deep south, and all through Canada.

The groundhog prefers open country and the edges of woodland. Since the clearing of forests by the pioneers provided it with much suitable habitat, the groundhog population is probably higher now than it was before the arrival of European settlers in North America. Common predators for groundhogs include wolves, coyotes, foxes, bobcats, bears, large hawks, owls, and dogs. Most of those groups have had their populations diminished by human activity, so the groundhogs have flourished. We humans like to hunt them, but we don't take them in sufficient quantities to constrain their numbers.

White-tailed deer, Ann Arbor, MI

White-tailed deer, Ann Arbor, MI

White-tailed deer, a.k.a. Virginia deer, inhabit virtually all of the continental U.S., along with much of Canada. They are found in Mexico, Central America, and northern South America. In the U.S., the species is the state animal of Arkansas, Illinois, Mississippi, New Hampshire, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and South Carolina as well as the provincial animal of Saskatchewan. They are magnificent creatures, but there are far too many of them today.

A century ago, commercial exploitation, unregulated hunting, and poor land-use practices, including deforestation, severely depressed deer populations in much of their range. By about 1930, the U.S. population was thought to number only about 300,000. After an outcry by hunters and other conservation ecologists, commercial exploitation of deer became illegal and conservation programs along with regulated hunting were introduced. Recent estimates put the deer population in the United States at around 30 million — 100 times their 1930 numbers! Conservation practices have proved so successful that, in parts of their range, white-tailed deer populations currently far exceed their carrying capacity and the animal may be considered a nuisance. They are indeed a nuisance where I live, as they eat everyone's gardens.

Gray wolves, cougars, American alligators, and (in the tropics) jaguars are effective natural predators of adult deer. Bobcats, lynxes, bears, and packs of coyotes prey on deer fawns. Human activities have removed many of the deer's natural predators, and deer populations have grown too large.

Our Earthly Cousins #1

I'm beginning this series on Our Earthly Cousins in order to highlight the family connections we humans have to all living species on earth. Here are two photos taken by a good friend of mine on a recent visit to Acadia National Park in Maine.

Fin Whale

Cedar Waxwing

These two species have an inalienable right to be here — as do we, as do all other species on God's green earth. They are our cousins in that they, like us, are branches on one single tree of life on this evolving planet. We have a right to admire them and share the earth with them, but no right to destroy them or damage their habitat.

The Dream of the Earth, Part 8

Thomas Berry
(1914 - 2009)

This is the eighth installment in my series about Thomas Berry's The Dream of the Earth, a seminal book by the Passionist priest-monk whose 1988 warning about humankind's need to get back in harmony with the natural world or face dire consequences is even more resonant today. As global warming threatens to ruin much of what we and Mother Nature have so patiently built, we need to pay heed.

As I suggested in the last installment, our Catholic religious beliefs will need to evolve if we are all to get back in sync with nature. Why? Because our Catholic beliefs represent the original attitudes of Western Christianity, and Western Christianity has deep anti-nature roots.

The Roots of Our Belief System

Berry talks about these roots over and over in his book, saying there are historically two branches to the spreading root system. One branch concerns a change in Christian piety during the fourteenth century. In the wake of the Black Death, our thoughts became focused on our redemption "out of nature": our eternal life was seen, from that point of view, as transpiring in a celestial heaven beyond the physical sky. This world became but a way station to our promised paradise.

In the other branch of the root system, many of us discerned the (seeming, not actual) possibility of "perfecting" nature by virtue of our own science, engineering, and industry. If we could bring our human powers sufficiently to bear, then at some foundational level we came to think that we ourselves could bring about the millennium, the 1,000-year reign of Christ on earth that is foretold in the book of Revelation, the final book of the Bible.

Overarching those two historical trends, says Berry, is one that began some 5,000 years ago, as invaders conquered settled agrarian people in the Middle East and Europe. This was a spark that set alight the transition from Paleolithic to Neolithic culture in the Old World. The conquering invaders brought with them their religious devotion to gods, rather than goddesses; the conquered agrarian peoples had practiced goddess worship. Patriarchal or male-centered attitudes have been dominant in our culture ever since, and those attitudes — which instinctively seek dominion rather than harmony, conquest rather than unity — have set today's culture up for a constant plundering of nature.

Older "Matricentric" Roots

But, as I said in the last post, there has lingered in our mindset a substratum of ideas that derive from the earlier, matricentric cultures that the Indo-Europeans (a.k.a. Aryans) superimposed their ways on. Berry says we need to resurrect these ideas now.

To do that, I suggested in that post, we need to look to certain archetypes present latently in all human minds. Though these inborn, hidden patterns of the psyche are initially present to us unconsciously, we encounter them indirectly in symbols that crop up repeatedly in our dreams as wells as in religious images the world over.

Jung's Archetypes of Femininity and Wholeness

C. G. Jung (1875 - 1961)

The Swiss psychoanalyst Carl Gustav Jung taught that archetypes power religious beliefs. The doctrine of the Holy Trinity, wrote Jung, was prompted by a universal archetype according to which the number three represents "perfection."

As such, Jung said, it fails today to represent "wholeness." A fourth member would have to be added to that tripartite symbol for it to do that. The Trinity would need to be amplified into a quaternity.

A step in that direction, Jung held, was taken with the promulgation of the doctrine of the bodily assumption of the Virgin Mary into heaven. That was a positive step, because the "fourth member" would necessarily have to be feminine — the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost being masculine.

Ever since the time of Adam and Eve, femininity has been symbolically linked with the earth and the physical world. Eve is blamed for the Fall of Man, and the result is that the entire material world, no longer that original Eden, has been deemed fallen, corrupt, and under the sway of the Devil as "the prince of this world." Though Mary, the Blessed Mother of God, is held to be without the stain of Original Sin, nevertheless her bodily assumption, in Jung's view, represents a symbolic foot in the door for importing all of material reality into the divine scheme.

Welcome to This Sacramental Earth!

With this post I'm rededicating this blog (yet again) to what it's new title, "This Sacramental Earth!", implies. As a Catholic, I believe in sacramentality, and as a budding environmentalist, I believe that the earth itself is a sacrament.

A sacrament is a visible sign of invisible grace, and grace includes every freely made gift of God. God was under no compulsion to make the universe. He made the natural world because it was pleasing to him. We humans evolved in and are part of God's divinely ordained natural order.

Why do we Catholics, as Christians, have such a hard time seeing God in the creation he has made? Is it because we, as humans, have set up a historical pattern of deprecating nature, then plundering it for our own supposed enrichment?

I believe that's so. Now we have to find ways to break our disastrous exploitation which, if left unchecked, will paradoxically turn the planet into a wasteland and leave us impoverished.

I for one can no longer turn a blind eye to the harm we are doing to the earth. It was sort of a "last straw" for me when I read in yesterday's Washington Post an article by Juliet Eilperin, "Whitebark pine tree faces extinction threat, agency says."

The story bespeaks yet another in a long-running series of man-made insults to Mother Nature. The whitebark pine, "a tree found atop mountains across the American West," is facing extinction because:

An invasive disease, white pine blister rust, along with insects such as mountain pine beetle, has infiltrated the historically colder altitudes where whitebark pines thrive. Fish and Wildlife Service biologist Amy Nicholas said these factors, along with fire patterns and global warming more broadly, are undermining the tree’s viability.

As a result:

The Canadian government has already declared whitebark pine to be endangered throughout its entire range; a recent study found that 80 percent of whitebark pine forests in the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem are dead or dying ... The Fish and Wildlife Service estimates that the whitebark pine could disappear within two to three generations — from 120 to 180 years from now.

As I interpret that, the whitebark pine is adapted to regions that once were colder than they are now. They were accordingly not prey to pine blister rust and the mountain pine beetle. But humans have changed the climate, making it warmer. Now the whitebark pine is nearly gone.

To lose the species would be a sacrilege. Eilperin writes:

The tree is a critical part of the West’s high-elevation habitats: It helps to slow the annual melt of snowpack and provides food for animals such as grizzly bears and Clark’s nutcracker, a bird that can cache thousands of pine seeds in different places and remember later where it put them.

We could save the whitebark pine, but to do so would mean putting it on the endangered species list ... where I think it belongs. However:

This month, the House Appropriations Interior Subcommittee voted to eliminate any funds for listing species under the Endangered Species Act as part of the 2012 budget.

So the current brouhaha over the debt ceiling and the budget may kill the whitebark pine.

That's why I'm rededicating this blog. We Catholics are widely known to believe in causes of social justice. Now I'm hoping we can take up the cause of environmental justice as well!

The Dream of the Earth, Part 7

"Earth Dreaming"

In the six installments of this series thus far, I set forth several major themes that Passionist priest-monk Thomas Berry (1914 - 2009) fed into his seminal 1988 book The Dream of the Earth. In the book, Berry prophesies that we must, and will, revive our ability to sense a divine presence in and through nature, rather than encounter God outside and above nature — a God who redeems us away from nature and out of this physical world.

We need to do that mainly because our industrial-technological-commercial activity is destroying huge numbers of life forms and habitats on this planet. When we exert our industrial might, we harm the earth from which we have sprung. We can't go on doing that without violating the basic order of things and harming our own selves in the long run.

We on this planet, Berry says, are the culmination of a cosmic evolutionary process that has produced a unique species, us, who can contemplate that very evolutionary process, and in doing so sense the divine source behind the process. Berry's book can be considered a theological treatise: he sees divinity as the hidden-yet-discernible source behind all cosmic history.

Out-of-This-World Piety

This is not exactly standard Catholic theology. Nor is it standard Christian doctrine, taking into account that of Protestants as well as Catholics. In fact, throughout his book Berry carefully avoids using the word "God" as a synonym for divinity.

He likewise avoids talking about the Catholic-Protestant divide, speaking instead, when necessary, of the "religious troubles of the sixteenth century." His intent is to show that all of Christian doctrine, starting from a time earlier than the Protestant Reformation, had become terribly distorted, causing Western Christendom to lose its one-time ability to see the divine behind, and through, nature.

What distorted the doctrine? The first cause Berry cites was the upshot of the Black Death, a virulent outbreak of deathly plague that vastly shrank the population of Europe over a few short years in the mid-fourteenth century. Many of the plague's survivors developed an out-of-this-world piety that expunged the once-sacred image of the natural world.

If the material world could go so haywire as to breed such inexplicable agony and death, people came to believe, then obviously God's redemption must go first to those who reject Mother Nature, rather than to those who embrace and cherish her.

Patriarchal Indo-European Culture

Yet there is an older, larger cause of the appalling distortion of our relationship with nature, says Berry. As long as 5,000 years ago the settled, agrarian populace of Europe came under attack by warlike nomadic tribes from the north and east. The nomadic attackers were the peoples we know as Indo-Europeans or Aryans:

Indo-European Expansion
between 3000 and 2000 B.C.

The Indo-European invaders lionized male deities, while the settled peoples of Europe worshipped goddesses. The conquerors imposed their patriarchal paradigm and male-dominant worship practices on the Neolithic Age which immediately began in Europe. We today are heirs to the Neolithic Revolution.

Patriarchal Semitic Culture

Though Berry does not mention it, I know from other sources — primarily The Power of Myth, by the late guru of myth Joseph Campbell, in collaboration with journalist Bill Moyers — that similarly patriarchal tribes emerged from the Arabian peninsula at about the same time in history and conquered the settled peoples to their north who were living in what we today refer to as the "fertile crescent":

The Fertile Crescent

This was an area that spawned many of our earliest civilizations. The conquering tribes from the south were the original Semites. One of the tribes, for example, were the Akkadians. Under King Sargon the Great (2334-2279 B.C.) and his successors, the Akkadians extended their empire to include the land of the Sumerians in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, at the eastern end of the fertile crescent. According to Wikipedia, "During the 3rd millennium B.C., there developed a very intimate cultural symbiosis between the Sumerians and the Akkadians, which included widespread bilingualism. Akkadian gradually replaced Sumerian as a spoken language somewhere around the turn of the 3rd and the 2nd millennium B.C. ..."

According to Joseph Campbell, these historical events corresponded with the superimposition of Semitic male deities upon what Thomas Berry would call a "matricentric" culture. (Abraham, the originator of what became today's Judeo-Christian worldview, was of Semitic descent.) So, again, a settled matriarchal culture found superimposed upon it a male-dominant, patriarchal worldview.

It was this male-dominant worldview which produced the many wonders of what we call civilization, but which has at the same time come to despoil the earth.

We as Heirs to Ancient Patriarchies

We today are the heirs of those same ancient patriarchies, a heritage that has come to us down through the times of the ancient empires; then through the world of the ancient Hebrews who first worshipped Yahweh; then through more recent ecclesiastical institutions such as the Catholic Church; through secular nation-states such as the United States and the many nations of Europe and of today's larger world; and finally through the environmental depredations of today's corporate enterprises. All these institutions have been controlled primarily by males of our species.

The net result has been twofold. One, we today worship a deity who originated in the Near East and whom we traditionally identify as male; goddess worship is seen as pagan. Two, we believe our male God exhorts us to subdue and exert dominion over the earth, using it at will for our own God-given purposes. In this worldview, it is perfectly in tune with all that is holy for us to use nature up, if so doing gratifies legitimate human aspirations. If our attitude toward nature redounds to the detriment of the rest of the living world, fine.

Our Own Patriarchal Culture

Our culture is accordingly patricentric and patriarchal. No wonder, Berry says, that we abuse the earth with seeming impunity; patriarchal culture is intrinsically controlling and domineering. What doesn't immediately fall into step with its male-centered prerogatives must be conquered and subdued by force if need be.

Berry says that if we want to stop abusing the earth, we need to move radically away from patriarchal ideas. But how would that be possible?

There are several sources of hope. One of them is the fact that, says Berry, "the heritage of the earlier matricentric phase [of human prehistory] has continued as an undercurrent within Western cultural traditions" as we are heirs to them.

"Matricentric ways of thinking and their associated rituals," Berry continues, "seem to be among the component elements of our submerged cultural traditions. They carry on an earlier wisdom associated with alchemy, astrology, the pagan nature rituals, and the hermetic teachings."

Memes and Our Cultural DNA

An analogy comes from the idea of what I'll call "cultural DNA." We know that real DNA, the stuff of the genes in the cells of our bodies, evolved over millions of years, à la Darwin's theory of evolution. In his book The Selfish Gene, biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term "meme" to represent something similar to the gene, but an intangible thing that establishes and propagates itself not within biological species but within human cultures.

A "meme" is, says Wikipedia, "an idea, behavior or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. While genes transmit biological information, memes ... transmit ideas and belief information."

The idea of a "meme" is
itself a meme.

So we humans possess a "cultural DNA" made up of memes that replicate as they spread from person to person within a culture.

Accordingly, if we indeed have "submerged cultural traditions" that originated thousands of years ago and, being matricentric, once connected us existentially to the living earth, surely they may be capable of becoming real once again to us as living memes.

Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious

There is another source of hope for moving radically away from patriarchal culture and its attendant despoliation of the earth: archetypes that live in our collective unconscious.

We humans are the only species that use symbols. In the unconscious part of our psyche, there are many patterns or templates for the symbols that we make. These are the archetypes, and every human is born with the same set of archetypal templates in the unconscious depths of his or her psyche.

The "Mother" Archetype

Representation
of the "mother"
archetype

When we are born — and throughout our lives — each of us possesses an archetype for "mother." This archetype draws the physical energies of a newborn's body into the baby's psyche, as rudimentary as that psyche still is. The psyche then sees the baby's own physical mother in the light of its inborn template, its archetype for "mother." So Baby just knows to expect nurturance and nutrition from Mother.

In other words, its actual mother "symbolizes" nurturance and nutrition to the baby, by virtue of its possessing an inborn "mother" archetype.

The same "mother" archetype likewise expresses itself in symbolic form when we Catholics revere and pray to the Blessed Virgin Mary. Mary also symbolically represents a separate archetype from that for "mother": that for "virgin," with all its religious associations in our culture and in many other religious cultures of the world.

Archetypes are powerful. Combine "mother" with "virgin" and then add in the archetype for "God," and you have a potent psychological reason why we Catholics so adore the Virgin Mary, the Blessed Mother of God.

Mother Earth as "Good Mother" and "Bad Mother"

Hindu goddess Kali
as "bad mother"

There is, in addition to the nurturing "good mother" archetype, another "mother" archetype that is symbolized as devouring and destroying. This is the "bad mother."

Key to understanding how the notion of archetypes fits so well with the thought of Thomas Berry is the idea that the earth is both the "good mother" who nourishes us and the "bad mother" who will devour and destroy us if we keep on eradicating the other life forms she has given birth to.

"Good" and "bad" are, of course, relative to our prejudices and aspirations. Mother Earth has, after all, slain many of her species-children, often in mass extinctions. The dinosaurs perished 65 million years ago, as tiny mammals who were our lineal ancestors got a toehold on the future. The eventual result was us.

For this reason, the archetype of the "Great Mother" subsumes both the "good mother" and the "bad mother." In his book, Berry makes no bones about the fact that nature is terrible as well as magnificent. "Mother Nature" is accordingly a fit image of the "Great Mother" archetype in all its aspects.

Hope for the Future

Submerged memes that were once associated with earlier, matricentric cultures, taken along with universal human archetypes such as the "Great Mother," offer hope that we can indeed shift gears into a less patriarchal, more ecological age.

However, we need to understand how traditional Catholic perspectives can and must evolve. For example, instead of investing our inborn "mother" archetype exclusively in the "good mother" image offered to us by the Blessed Mother of God, we may need to come to terms with the "bad," death-dealing side of Mother Earth as well. This "Great Mother," in her grand entirety, may need to become the maternal figure we see as our window onto divinity.

The Dream of the Earth, Part 6

Thomas Berry (1914 - 2009)

The late Passionist monk and priest Thomas Berry parts company with some of the traditional teaching of the Catholic Church in his 1988 book The Dream of the Earth. He charges our traditional belief system with being too oriented toward the soul's redemption "out of" — away from — this created world. Now, in view of the several environmental crises which humankind faces, he says we need to be more earth-aware and creation-centric.

This is the sixth installment of my ongoing series about his book. In it, I'll discuss his chapter 12, "Patriarchy: A New Interpretation of History." As you can tell from the title of the chapter, its subject is one that will stick in the craw of many Catholics, as our church is one of the more patriarchal institutions on the face of the earth.

First, a brief recap of my earlier posts. Berry's book is about the need for our society to move from the current industrial-technological-consumerist age into a new "ecological age." We need to do this because we are turning our planet slowly but surely into a toxic trash heap. We are destroying the earth's rainforests and other forested land, exhausting or destroying the topsoil we grow food on, poisoning the water we drink, and polluting the air we breathe. In doing all these things as the supposed means of satisfying human aspirations — most of which are bogus needs created entirely by the ceaseless stimulus of constant advertising — we are killing countless living species along with the complex ecosystems they live in.

In this collection of essays that can stand alone or be read as a group, Berry lays out what he considers the most significant facets in the history of Western Christian thought. The Western view of the world, starting in classical Greek and Roman times, is constituted mainly by the history of Christian belief and, in more recent centuries, by secularist-humanist derivatives of medieval church teaching. Thought patterns born long ago in the West, Berry contends, underlie our current worldwide age of industrial, scientific, technological striving. It is that striving that is now destroying the earth.

"Patriarchal" vs. "Matricentric"

Chapter 12, "Patriarchy: A New Interpretation of History," is an indictment of a particularly virulent thought pattern that began in Old Europe some 5,000 years ago. Today that thought pattern has been labeled "patriarchy."

The word "patriarchy," according to The Merriam-Webster Dictionary, refers to "social organization marked by the supremacy of the father in the clan or family, the legal dependence of wives and children, and the reckoning of descent and inheritance in the male line; broadly: control by men of a disproportionately large share of power."

I'm admittedly guessing about some of this, but apparently Berry is placing the start of the patriarchal period in Europe at roughly the beginning of the Later Neolithic age ... if not slightly before. In this essay, he gives not one but two dates for the onset of patriarchal culture in Europe: 3500 B.C. and 4500 B.C. According to Wikipedia's article on the Neolithic Age, that age ended in Europe in about 3000 B.C. Specifically, the Later Neolithic period in Europe ran from 3500 to 3000 B.C.

The arrival of patriarchal culture in Europe coincided, Berry says, with the arrival of conquering tribes that imposed control over Europe's settled agrarian cultures. The conquerors' society was nomadic and patriarchal. On the other hand, the settled agricultural denizens of Old Europe — the folk whom the invading tribes conquered, that is — had a matriarchal social organization. We know this because archaeologists find that their primary deities were female. They were goddesses, not gods. Accordingly, we can confidently call the pre-patriarchy age in the numerous agrarian locales of Europe "matriarchal" or "matricentric."

Berry says patriarchy was long associated with cities/civilizations such as Rome, while matriarchy was found mainly in rural areas.

Matricentric Culture

The matricentric cultures of Old Neolithic Europe were egalitarian, democratic, and peaceful. According to Judy Chicago, a feminist archaeologist whom Berry cites, the "female-oriented agricultural societies gradually gave way to a male-dominated political state in which occupational specialization, commerce, social stratification, and militarism developed" (p. 143).

Sound familiar? Our society today extols three of those four values — the exception being social stratification, as we are ostensibly more egalitarian and democratic. (Yet in terms of income stratification and wealth stratification, it seems we may have little to brag about.)

Patriarchy and Dominion

Not only were occupational specialization, commerce, social stratification, and militarism four of the primary motifs associated with early patricentric cultures. At a more basic level, the male drive toward conquest and dominion was (and remains) deeply characteristic of patriarchy.

The ecofeminist rap against our patriarchal culture is (in part) that patricentric conquest and dominion of the earth has left us playing out a currently unsustainable pattern of behavior. In the name of exercising control over Mother Nature, we are turning the abundance of natural resources of our planet into an overabundance of trash, waste, and toxicity.

Matricentric Attitudes Yet Endure

Berry's position on such matters is that we need to move from our present "patricentric" view to a new, "omnicentric" one that will put neither gender above the other. Our new ecological age will, however, draw much inspiration from the matricentric attitudes of Old Europe. These matricentric attitudes, it turns out, have been preserved right through the last five patriarchal millennia by virtue of an ineradicable substratum of belief and practice. Berry writes:

Even in this period of patriarchal dominance the heritage of the earlier matricentric phase has continued as an undercurrent within Western cultural traditions. Matricentric ways of thinking and their associated rituals seem to be among the component elements of our submerged cultural traditions. They carry on an earlier wisdom associated with alchemy, astrology, the pagan nature rituals, and the hermetic teachings [the teachings of a magical and religious movement stemming from the philosophy of Hermes Trismegistus]. These hidden traditions, considered destructive and unacceptable within the religious-humanist traditions of [today's] Western society, need reconsideration for the contributions they make to our understanding of the universe, its deeper modes of functioning, and the proper role of the human. The carry some of the most creative aspects of our civilization. In their symbolic modes of expression, especially, they enable us to go beyond the rational processes derivative from the classical philosophers and [also from] our later theologies. Through these traditions we have [for instance] recovered our understanding of the archetypal world of the unconscious. (p. 145)

Archetypes of the Unconscious

The "archetypal world of the unconscious"? What is that?

Unconscious archetypes, according to the early-twentieth-century psychologist Carl Gustav Jung (pronounced "YOONG"), generate universal symbols that are used in myths and heroic narratives across all cultures. We each natively carry all of these universal archetypes in our bodies and brains, though they remain unconscious until they are brought up to conscious awareness.

The process of bringing archetypal wisdom up to the level of conscious awareness can lead to "self-realization" — which in a male of the species involves actualizing the universal archetype of the feminine(!) that lurks buried within every man's psyche.

Ecofeminism Depicted

Archetypes, if they have not yet been lifted to the level of consciousness, typically express themselves as (often cryptic) symbols in dreams, myths, and works of art.

The image at left is not all that cryptic. It unites the deep archetypal idea of the feminine with the deep archetypal idea of the natural world.

It accordingly makes a fine icon for Ecofeminism.

What is Ecofeminism?

Endorsed by Berry in his book, Ecofeminism is a movement that sees ...

* * *

Whoa!

After starting that last sentence, I got called away and never finished it. Then commenced a string of problems that cropped up and kept me from getting back to writing this post for several days.

When I resumed, I ran into another problem: I could not find a short, pithy quote from Berry's "Patriarchy" chapter that would complete the sentence for me. Berry manages to convey what Ecofeminism is obliquely, by hinting at what life in the settled agricultural communities of Old Europe may have been like, before the conquest by the patriarchal peoples who brought with them their male deities. Ecofeminism is accordingly a movement that would unite the goals of today's ordinary feminism with those of the ecology movement by hearkening back to the values cherished in the matricentric days of over 5,000 years ago.

The Later History of Patriarchy

Admittedly, Berry's "Patriarchy" chapter frightened me. In it, Berry shows how a male-centered, patriarchal outlook has typified our culture since the days of the earliest true cities in Egypt and Sumeria. Those quasi-empires were succeeded by the true civilizations of Mesopotamia, Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome ... all of which had rulers that were either male deities themselves or the anointed agents of the chief male gods.

As such, their authority was written in the stars. The whole cosmic order that undergirded natural phenomena bespoke their unrivaled status. One thinks of the sign of the Messiah's birth given by the Star of Bethlehem, or that by which the Once and Future King, Arthur, was identified, when only he could pull the sword Excalibur from the stone imprisoning it.

That much I could swallow. I could also handle it when I read how, according to Berry, patriarchy instilled its values into our ecclesiastical establishment from its earliest days on, and in our nation-states when they came into existence in more recent centuries.

Patriarchy and the Modern Corporation

When Berry starts talking of how those same masculine tendencies towards rapacity and conquest characterize our modern corporations, which he says are the primary agents responsible for plundering our environment today, I start to squirm. It's not that I don't see his point. Rather, it's that I do see his point, and I don't like it very much.

I would have to be stupid or blind not to see that my whole lifestyle depends on our major corporations. I would not be typing this blog post into my computer, for instance, were it not for the providence of Apple, Inc. I look out my window at my car, parked in front of my house, and see a product of the British Mini Cooper company, a corporation that is owned by BMW in Germany. My breakfast cereal was made by General Mills, or Post, or Nabisco. The list goes on and on.

If corporations are rapacious (and they are) and if their rapacity is a reflection of the patriarchal outlook that began 5,000 years ago (which it is), then my whole worldview is wrong, wrong, wrong. The entire pattern of my life is pathologically skewed. That's scary.

A Bitter Pill To Swallow

Berry goes on to state:

What is needed is a profound alteration of the pattern, not some modification of the pattern. To achieve this the basic principle of every significant revolution needs to be asserted: rejection of partial solutions. The tension of the existing situation must even be deliberately intensified so that the root cause of the destructive situation may become evident, for only when the cause becomes painfully clear will decisive change take place. The pain to be endured from the change must be experienced as a lesser pain to that of continuing the present course.

These four patriarchal establishments [empire, church, nation-state, corporation] have made a world that carries with it a certain pathos. Assuredly there is grandeur in many of its achievements. Enormous energies have been expended in what has been thought to be beneficial to the larger human process. To realize suddenly that so much of this has been misdirected, alienating, and destructive beyond anything previously known in human history is a bitter moment indeed. ... 

None of the other revolutionary movements in Western civilization has prepared us for what we must now confront. ... It is possibly the most complete reversal of values that has taken place since the Neolithic period (pp. 158 - 159)

Oh, woe and dread. Then Berry goes on:

The revelatory experience and the classical humanism on which our civilization has been founded — these are under challenge. Presently they are being severely criticized as manifestations of a biased mentality and as the context, if not the cause, of the universal devastation of the earth that is now taking place. (p. 159)

Need for a New Dream Vision

In his later chapter "The Dream of the Earth: Our Way into the Future," Berry identifies all the major thrusts of human cultural development with "dream visions" and "revelatory experiences" of the type associated in tribal societies with shamans. The biggest things we humans generate come out of intuitive, extra-rational visions, not out of reason or philosophy. No matter what our reason tells us after the fact, we are ever in the grip of an original myth.

That in itself is not bad, for our myths and revelatory visions derive from our "genetic coding." Our genes create the archetypes which express themselves as symbols in our sleeping or waking dreams. Those dreams power our changing, evolving "transgenetic cultural coding" (p. 200), each historical version of which provides "the functioning norm of a human community."

All we make, first we dream.

And our genes are the product of the earth itself, in its never-ending evolutionary capacities ... which in turn are expressions of the evolutionary capacities of the entire universe in which we arise.

Revelatory Experiences as Pathological

That would seem to me to suggest that the "revelatory experiences" that power our civilizations would be reliably beneficial, not pathological. However, according to Berry our civilization has been founded on one that has paradoxically turned into the context or cause of "the universal devastation of the earth that is now taking place."

How that could happen is a mystery Berry does not truly address. I personally feel it has something to do with what the literary critic and biblical scholar Northrop Frye, in his books The Great Code and Words with Power, called "demonic parody." A demonic parody, according to Frye, is an expression of what Berry would call a true "revelatory experience," but one which twists the original mythic motif in such a way that it becomes ugly and harmful rather than helpful and beautiful.

Prophecy and Dread

Yet that is but an intellectualization I use to avert my eyes from the dread which Berry's dire prophecy stirs in me. I simply don't want to confront the order of magnitude Berry says our revolutionary confrontation of patriarchal environmental atrocities must take on.

Which is surely why, after I wrote the beginning of my earlier unfinished sentence about the definition of Ecofeminism, I abruptly developed a lower back malady which prevented me for several days from sitting at my computer and trying to finish that sentence in an unthreatening, antiseptic way that I now see couldn't be done in the first place.

The material human body, in Berry's view, is wiser than the reasoning mind. The body imposes its own true nature on our plans and intentions. My body was telling me, "Stop! You are heading into dangerous territory. You are being called on to believe things that deep down you already realize are true ... but that you don't want to admit are true. You need to respond to that crisis of belief in a constructive, creative way that mere intellectualizations are designed to bypass. Think (and dream) some more before you try to finish that sentence!"