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CHAPTER 1

The Questions

It's all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are between stories. The old story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is no longer effective. Yet we have not learned the new story ... A radical reassessment of the human situation is needed ...

Thomas Berry The Dream of the Earth

Early one winter morning I pulled up the blinds and looked out into the dark. Our house stands high on the hills on the south side of Bath with a panoramic view over the city. From the top floor window I traced the streetlights that spread across the floor of the valley and meandered westward toward Bristol, where they cast an orange glow into the sky. Beyond, on the farther side of the River Severn, another patch of lights — probably the little town Chepstow — shimmered delicately through the dark.

I stood for a few moments gazing at the lights, remembering how our visitors the previous evening had been drawn to the window and looked out at the lights with wonder. "What a fantastic view!" they said. "It's like coming to land in an aeroplane." And it is a spectacular scene: the orange sodium lights follow the lines of the streets, interspersed with bright security lights, occasional intense blue from advertising signs and the flashing lights of pedestrian crossings.

A recent news report came into my mind: photographs of Earth at night taken by a NASA satellite showed something similar but on a grander scale: the blue night-time glow of the atmosphere studded with artificial light. Bright clusters covered much of North America, Europe, and Japan as well as big chunks of India and China. The more isolated cities such as Johannesburg, Rio, Sydney, Lagos stood out from darker patches. The whole of the Nile valley and delta was picked out in a ribbon of light, as was the Indus snaking up through Pakistan. I found it an astounding image: the reflection of a marvellous human accomplishment, in equal parts beautiful and terrible.

When I pull up the blind and see the city lights, when I look at these satellite pictures, I do marvel; yet also have a sinking feeling in my stomach, a rising sense of panic and helplessness. For what I see is the accumulated fossil energy store of the planet leaking into the atmosphere, as if Earth is suffering an internal bleeding. When I link what I see to what I know about carbon emissions and climate change, I wonder to myself, "What are we doing to our planet?"

After I had stood at the window for a few moments I turned away and put on the kettle to make tea. Everyday normalness took over and I got on with my day.

Our house is one of seven that make up a small Georgian crescent on the southern hills above Bath. Now surrounded by 1930s suburbia, when built in the 1790s it was a little way out of the city, designed to be self-sufficient: a shared driveway leading to a courtyard with coach houses that now serve as garages; underground cisterns to collect rainwater; a communal 'pleasure garden' overlooking the City; and a row of seven stone-walled vegetable gardens reaching westward from the end of the crescent itself. We are fortunate to own two of these; one was attached to the house when we bought it, in which my wife Elizabeth has created a flower garden.

The adjoining garden we bought more recently; it had been a flourishing vegetable plot, then was neglected for seven years. We worked hard to clear the overgrown brambles and old man's beard, dig up the self-seeded ash and buddleia trees, and take piles of disintegrating building materials to the recycling centre. We planted fruit trees surrounded by flowering meadow grass. All the trees needed winter pruning. It was easy to give the new ones a light trim. But there were three old Bramley's Seedling cookers that needed serious attention: they had a lot of dead wood and a tangle of overlapping branches, although the biggest problem was that they had been smothered by the overgrowth and in their struggle toward the light had become misshapen.

I had been working on them whenever the winter weather permitted, taking the pruning slowly, learning as I went along. That afternoon I took along my pruning saw and loppers to finish the job. After several hours' work the trees were more nearly the recommended wineglass shape, compact, open in the middle 'so you could throw your hat through' as the old saying goes.

All this work set me thinking again about the relationship between humans and the 'more-than-human' world. For these trees are not at all 'natural': they have been selected, grafted on to an appropriate rootstock, transported to the orchard, planted and tended over the years. Prior to that, in ancient times, apple pips, fruit and trees were transported westward along the traditional routes between the orient and the occident, so that a tree that evolved in Asia is now cultivated worldwide.

Philosopher of science Bruno Latour tells us that our world is a proliferation of 'hybrids', networks that are simultaneously 'real, social and narrated'. In particular, nothing can be seen as either 'nature' or 'culture' but rather forms a seamless fabric of 'nature-culture'. The apple tree is a wonderful example of this. Or rather, I should say, the relationship formed between the apple tree, as a representative of nature; me, as a representative of culture; and the story I tell about it, is such an example. For it is out of this network of relationships, through the interactions of the apple tree's 'heterozygosity' (its ability to produce seeds that may grow into completely new different apple trees), and the learned human culture of selection and grafting, that the hybrid form we call 'Bramley's Seedling' has emerged. But if the grown tree is neglected, as has happened to mine for the past seven years, it grows 'out of shape'. The 'proper' shape for the tree emerges in the interaction of the creative capabilities of the species, cultural choices, the inherent qualities of 'Bramley's Seedling', and my pruning and care. I can influence this, but I cannot radically change it.

Another way of looking at this is through the idea of evolutionary symbiosis. Biologist Lynn Margulis shows us that symbiosis is 'crucial to understanding evolutionary novelty'. Of course there is always struggle for space and nutrients, but competition, 'nature red in tooth and claw', is not the primary driver: Margulis describes how new species continually emerge from symbiotic mergers. Dissimilar individuals come together to make larger and more complex beings: freshwater hydra join with photosynthetic partners called Chlorella to create a symbiont capable of both swimming and producing food; prokaryotes (cells without nuclei) join together to form eukaryotes (complex cells with nuclei). We humans would not survive without the symbiotic relationship with bacteria in our gut that help digest food.

We cannot separate ourselves from the natural world, nor can we see that world as separate from us. We are all part of each other: linked in a network of hybrids, all symbionts on a symbiotic planet.

I spent maybe an hour pruning the trees while these thoughts ran through my mind, so absorbed in my work and my reflections that I was surprised to see how many branches and twigs now lay on the ground. It took me quite a while to collect them all into piles of kindling. It would soon be time for another bonfire. I noticed that some of the twigs showed little red dots, flower buds just emerging from their protective winter covering. I selected three from the pile of cuttings and put them in water in the warmth of the house. I wondered whether they would flower.

I watched carefully over two weeks. Slowly, the red dots fattened, added a hint of green and grew into little round balls, tightly folded in their sepals. One morning the sepals were cracked open, revealing creamy petals, still overlapping snugly. After a long wait, they unfolded to show first a hint, then a deeper flush of pink. As the flowers opened fully, the pink disappeared leaving each petal crisply white, spoon-shaped, its surface faintly granular. A minute black speck crawled along the edge of one petal, emphasizing its sharp fragility. And in the middle of each flower, a cluster of yellow stamens reached out to make contact with the world.

The sparse arrangement of dark brown twigs and contrasting white flowers looked fine in a tall glass vase, rather like a Japanese Zen arrangement, both natural and arranged. Outside the March fog held on into the afternoon, filling the valley. The chestnut trees outside my window showed only as black skeletons. I guessed that in the garden buds on the apple trees were still showing only that little hint of red.

We humans may be part of a hybrid, symbiotic network, but we certainly don't behave as if we are. Modern humans have enclosed themselves in an apparently self-sufficient culture with little attention to the consequences of their actions. The Biblical book of Ecclesiastes tells us, 'What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun'. But it seems that this ancient book is now proved wrong: what has been is no longer; an unprecedented instability threatens complex life on Earth. The human destruction of the ecology that supports us is taking place at an alarming new scale.

The crisis we face is not just another challenge within the human story, like poverty, war and famine, but a challenge to the continuation of the story itself. Human civilization arose over the past thousands of years in a benign environmental context, a period of stability that our own actions may be bringing to an end. Climate change is just the most dramatic of a nexus of issues that include the loss of soil, the acidification of oceans, the overuse of water, the disruption of ecosystems and the extinction of other life forms on the planet. The list is endless, depressing, terrifying, all brought about by needs — and rampaging overconsumption — of vast numbers of human beings. We live in times of astonishing loss.

My own life has been overshadowed by this gathering crisis. I have a childhood memory, strangely both clear and hazy, that was an intimation of things to come. As a small boy in the 1950s I am sitting at the kitchen table turning the pages of a weekly magazine — possibly Life or Picture Post. I come on a double-page spread featuring a dramatic black and white photo of a filthy smokestack, illustrating an article pointing toward a future environmental crisis. I ask my mother about it, and her reply brushes my concerns aside as if forbidding even the thought behind the question, "You don't want to think about that, dear." But clearly the notion that life on Earth was precarious lodged in my mind. Through my adult life this early intimation was reinforced: in 1962 by Rachel Carson's Silent Spring; in 1968 by Buckminster Fuller's challenging proposal that we live on 'spaceship Earth'; in 1972 by the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth report pointing to overshoot and collapse; and in the 1990s by Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth; in the new century by the series of increasingly alarming reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; and now daily in reports of rapidly melting of icecaps, record temperatures, violent storms, the bleaching of coral reefs, all indicating that the crisis is on us even faster than even the pessimists thought.

I remember conversations with activist colleagues in the 1990s, agreeing, "We have another ten years to address this, then it will be too late." Yet here we are now, halfway through the second decade of the new millennium, with so little that has really changed. Is it still nearly too late, or has the moment, if indeed it existed, actually slipped from our collective grasp? Developments in our ecological understanding, the sustainable technologies that these bring with them and the nascent sense of a global community suggest that so much is possible. There are many proposals, conservative, moderate and radical, about how we might change our politics and economics so as to live more sustainably. Yet so very little has been achieved.

I look in the face of an environmental catastrophe that should overwhelm all other concerns. What does a responsible citizen do in the face of this approaching calamity? How, I ask myself, am I to live in these times in a way that makes some contribution to healing, however small that may be? These questions take me beyond the realm of everyday, practical or political responses to the need for a new account of human life on Earth.

I recall the conversation I had with Thomas Berry, the priest who called himself a geologian or Earth scholar. 'It's all a question of story', he wrote in The Dream of the Earth. 'We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story ... of how the world came to be and how we fit into it'. When I met him I asked him, "When there are so many good ideas around about new forms of economics, radically efficient methods of production, renewable energy and so forth, why do we need a new story?" And I remember how he looked me straight in the eye and replied, "Because, Peter, if we don't have a different vision of who we are in relation to the Earth, we won't have the psychic and spiritual energy needed to make the profound changes needed." In addition to practical action, significant change toward sustainability requires a new account of human identity, a fundamental shift in our sense of who we are in relation to the planet that sustains us.

If it all begins with story, the story we are offered in modern times is inadequate. Once upon a time, in the European world, humans understood themselves as placed on Earth in the image of their God. Life may have been brutish and short for many, but they had a secure identity in the scheme of things, in a stable hierarchy, above the animals and below the angels. In the Renaissance a new story emerged of man as the measure of all things, a story captured beautifully in Leonardo's drawing of Vitruvian Man. But when Copernicus showed that the Earth circled the Sun along with the other planets he began a movement that displaced human from the centre of things. Copernicus was followed by Descartes and Newton, who envisaged a world of objective matter and blind cause and effect. Two centuries later Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace showed that humans evolved along with other life on Earth; Nietzsche declared that God is dead. In the late twentieth century modern cosmological science portrays Earth as a tiny planet orbiting an unexceptional star in a medium-sized galaxy in a cosmos that contains more galaxies than there are grains of sand on Earth. All these new understandings have undermined the stories that told us who we came to be and what is our place in the scheme of things: are we still the measure of all things or a chance speck in an uncaring universe?

There is a new story of human identity emerging among ecological thinkers like Thomas Berry and his colleagues Brian Swimme and Mary Evelyn Tucker that tells of the human, along with all other beings, as emerging as part of an evolving planet within an evolving universe. This story tells of the visible universe flaring forth in what is commonly known as the Big Bang and developing over eons of time in ever-greater diversity and complexity. The lighter elements hydrogen and helium emerged early on; the heavier elements necessary for life were created in the explosions of early stars. As second- and third-generation stars were formed, conditions where life might be possible emerged in the planets that circulated on them. One of those stars we call Sun, and one of those planets is Earth, where we know that life began its evolution some 2–3 billion years ago.

It is possible to see this story as one of human insignificance: we are the outcome of random physical processes on a small rocky planet circling a minor star in an insignificant galaxy. That is to continue the story of alienation that Copernicus' work set in train. Or we can see that human emergence, with reflective consciousness and intellectual, emotional, aesthetic capabilities are an outcome of an evolutionary, self-generating universe. We are part of the community of life on Earth, an aspect of the universe aware of itself, reflecting on itself, and celebrating itself. In this view, the human presence brings both enormous creative opportunities and alongside these substantial threats to the well-being of life on Earth.

Part of the problem is that our reflective consciousness is so thoroughly self-absorbed: our interest and attention is focussed almost exclusively on ourselves and those close to us. At our best, we may feel part of a fellowship of humanity or a human family. While our understanding of evolution and ecology tells us that we are also part of the community of life on Earth, we rarely feel that in our bones or our hearts. However much we may assert that we are all part of the same universe, that we are part of the evolution of life on Earth, we rarely feel that in our bones or our hearts. However much we may assert that we are all part of the same universe, that we are part of the evolution of life on Earth, we still find it difficult to overcome a sense of estrangement, of otherness. As philosopher David Cooper puts it, 'Shouting about humankind being part of nature may mask a fear that it is nothing of the sort'.

(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "In Search of Grace"
by .
Copyright © 2017 Peter Reason.
Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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