Restored to Earth: Christianity, Environmental Ethics, and Ecological Restoration

CHAPTER 6: Re-Storying Earth, Re-Storied to Earth

170 ChaPter six l Re-Storying Earth, Re-Storied to Earth It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in 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. —Thomas Berry, The Dream of the Earth I n his classic book, The Dream of the Earth, Thomas Berry proposed that we are entering a new phase in human history: the ecological age. This age, different from previous historical eras such as sixteenth-century scientific discovery or eighteenth-century industrial expansion, would be marked by a “vision of a planet integral with itself throughout its spatial extent and its evolutionary sequence.”1 Beyond simply reducing fuel use,modifying economic controls,or slightly reforming our education, the realization of this vision would require human psychological and cultural transformation on a planetary scale. It is not simply a matter of reducing our fuel use,modifying economic controls,or slightly reforming our education system, wrote Berry.“Our challenge is to create a new language, even a new sense of what it is to be human.”2 What we need is a new story, Berry proposed, a new narrative and deepened understanding of our relationship with the community of life on earth. Many secular and religious environmentalists have, over the past twenty-five years, heeded Berry’s call to develop new stories about the relationship between humans and the earth. Authors have proposed plural versions of this new, ecological story, including, for instance, re-storied narratives about what it means fundamentally to be human, as well as narratives about the place and role of the divine in relation to earth.3 This book too has suggested implicitly that a new story, or new stories, about nature, humanity, and the sacred are needed for contemporary society, particularly as the stories relate to concrete actions to heal earth’s natural 171 Re-Storying Earth, Re-Storied to Earth systems and communities. In this final chapter I want to make this claim more concretely, arguing further that human society is, in fact, presently entering a new era—namely, an era of restoration. Beyond entering an ecological age in general, I propose that society is entering one particularly marked by the deliberate creative and systematic attempts of humans to restore connections with the natural world. As I stated in this book’s preface, the time has come for environmental ethics and society to move toward more positive, forward-leaning approaches and solutions to environmental issues. This is not only because a crisis-oriented approach has not finally worked in creating more cooperative relationships between people and land but also because emphasizing such an approach overlooks the myriad of examples, and stories, of ecological healing and restorative action that are emerging. Ecological restoration and its practices such as I have discussed throughout previous chapters is not the only form of healing activities that are already giving shape to a restoration age: for example, the restorative environmental building, urban farming, and children and nature movements too are contributing. In support of this proposal it is necessary to explore the new story, or multiple, though overlapping stories, that are integral to the broader project of restoration that is unfolding in contemporary society. For it is not that ecological restoration, or other restorative types of activities, need a new story per se, rather that further developing, integrating, and telling these stories that already exist is important to further develop modern humanity’s relationship to the natural world. Emphasizing the notion of re-storying the relationship between people and nature, I begin by examining the distinctive functions of story and narrative in bringing about a new ecological consciousness and culture. Next I look specifically at the role of religious ethical narratives in the re-storying of the relationship between people and land. I then propose an agenda with six themes that are arguably critical for the development of a broader cultural story of restoration. In conclusion, I consider the overall thesis of this project and a final note on the emergent and dynamic character of land-based narratives. story and enVironmental ChanGe Although other environmental writers have proposed that a new story about the relation of humans to earth is needed in order for significant cultural and therefore also environmental change to occur, it is important...