Greenpeace!!

We need to stand back from the present crisis and assess why things are so amiss. What are the underlying reasons for today’s threatening situation? The answer, of course, is the human species. We are what has thrown the natural world into such imbalance. But is the human species intrinsically the problem? Are we a mistake of nature, inevitably drawn to behaviors which are destructive to the planet as a whole? A closer look suggests that the underlying problem is not the human species as such, but the human species of the past 200 years–and more precisely, the human species in the Western hemisphere and north of the equator during the past 200 years. It is modern Eurocentered humanity that has plundered nature and wrought such destruction to the planet.

Thomas Berry suggests that the underlying problem is twofold: otherworldly religion and controlling science–religion that denigrates the natural world and sees it as at best neutral and at worst our spiritual enemy; and science as conquest which seeks to conquer and subjugate the world of nature. Transcending nature through religion and overcoming nature through science–these prevailing attitudes combine to create a human species which devastates the natural world, perceiving itself as separate from, and even alien to, nature. Clearly, it is our understanding and perception that must change.