'Earthstory'

Never has Thomas Berry been more brilliant in his writing than in The Hudson River Valley: A Bioregional Story (The Dream of the Earth, Sierra Club Books, 1988). Here is his concept of a healing, biocentric ‘story’ taken to a full, though incomplete – for what story can ever be complete? – expression. Woven elements of birds and river, rock face, beavers and humans combine in an inner image of the natural world he depicts. As I sit gazing through the words of the text I am transported into Berry’s vision.

How powerful then, is his warning about human naiveté with respect to our civilization’s impact on the Earth when the story is told through the local lens of the Hudson River Valley. In 1609, the entrance of the tall-masted ship sailing across Sandy Hook, through the Narrows and into the channel, heralded an impact that was then unknown, yet with huge consequences that can now be seen in retrospect. Berry wondered if the Earth ‘shuddered’ at the sight, though I think it is more likely that she squirmed uncomfortably. This is far too alienating a term to be thrown at one’s kin, for humans are Earth’s children just as much as everything else.

And so we are given a story, a microcosm of an Earth story, localized in Berry’s Hudson River Valley. Perhaps we should coin a new term for this type of story, such as ‘earthstory’, for our former term ‘history’ was built on an anthropocentric world view. As Wikipedia reminds us, the term came from “historia, meaning ‘inquiry, knowledge acquired by investigation... the study of the human past.’” And, as we are beginning to wake up to the fact, it is far more than humans that are the story.

The ancient Greeks well understood that a human virtue, when taken to excess, becomes a vulnerability: a flaw from which tragedy will necessarily unfold. One human virtue is the ability to form and communicate ideas, in the development of concepts upon which more and greater ideas can be built. This virtue, when seen in light of the story of the Earth, becomes also our undoing if it is to continue to express itself beyond the Earth’s balance. Thus our words, and the concepts within them, become the foundations upon which our ‘given’ story was built, yet around which the unfolding, truer story vainly circles.

Though a new story of the Earth brings healing and hope, it also brings deep-seated change, and this is difficult. Moving past a ‘history’ into an ‘earthstory’ means a deep incision into our very conceptual foundations, glimpsed through the words used to express them. Stepping beyond a naïve human-centric orientation to an earth-centric one necessitates an uncomfortable recalibration of our language itself, which simultaneously provides a fresh foundation upon which healing recovery can be built.

We have stepped into a human role as both subject and object, as the part of the whole Earth that can reflect back on itself. As we set out to articulate the story of the Earth, we must not fail to look carefully at the language that we use, for in this language rest the fallacies of previous generations. The story of the Earth is ‘earthstory’: it can be no other.