Which I did. But my trips to the mountains are always simultaneously joyful and mournful. The story I want to tell is about seeing the effects up close of the North American pine beetle outbreak. It’s devastating the Rocky Mountain forests in the U.S. and Canada and growing exponentially each year. The epidemic is occurring because our winters have not been cold enough to stop the beetles from multiplying. Bark beetles are good for the ecosystem, but not in this amount. The fall colors in our evergreen forests are telling us that global warming is no longer something our kids will face; it’s happening now. And it will accelerate if our forests disappear.

But as I mourned, I heard the voice of a man named Fr. Thomas Berry. No one explains our present environmental situation better (and plainer) than this:

The great work of our time, I would say, is moving the human community from its present situation as a destructive presence on the planet to a benign or a mutually enhancing presence. It’s that simple.

From the film Thomas Berry Speaks:

It is that simple. It’s not a political issue. It’s not about saving trees. It’s about our fragile interconnected relationship with other living things, including human beings in vulnerable communities around the world. We know what we need to do, and it comes down to making the decision to be a mutually enhancing presence rather than a destructive one.

The Great Work was published at the dawn of the 21st century. In it, Berry, who uses the title of geologian, eloquently tells the story of the planet’s 3.4 billion year history, describing all of the ‘moments of grace’, when life flourished and unfolded. He passionately encourages us all to find our own time as another moment of grace when the Cenozoic era ends and we enter into what he hopes will be an ‘Ecozoic’ era, rediscovering a mutually beneficial relationship with nature. His words will continue to inspire us to search for a new cosmology – one in which humans are the consciousness of the universe and exist for the perfection of the universe rather than the other way around.

Berry’s thinking has influenced me quite a bit, obviously. Probably the most apparent way is that I never use the word ‘stewardship’ when talking about our relationship with creation. I prefer words like ‘kinship’ and ‘partnership’ because in these terms, a mutually beneficial relationship and intrinsic worth is implied. As Berry puts it, ‘the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.’

So I encourage you to check out some of Berry’s writings or revisit them; they will prod you to want to participate in the great work of planning for a new universal community. His writings are a huge reason why I don’t do things that normal 27-year-olds do; instead I saunter off into the wilderness for 5 months at a time and sit around and dream about how to create communities that will improve our relationship with Creation.

I’m grateful for Tom’s great work, a work that continues.