There are so many reason to think of Earth first in this time we are living in, and in so many ways trying to live around and despite. But the Thomas Berry interview from 2002 (embedded below) is a timely gift as it encapsulates much of my intent behind the current GreenTARA Gallery theme EarthFirst. We cannot possibly solve, or as others would say, heal without considering all life. We are not solo players despite our modernist upbringing and mechanistic systems thinking.
While art is both a primordial and a final act, it is dis-valued and made external to ”what matters”. Yet it is thru art that we reach out beyond our own selves and try to touch the Universe. When we breach the space, It is not necessarily the materiality of art that counts, but its transcendence. Art can be beautiful, fearsome, provocative, dangerous — but the ongoing struggle is how to share that emergent connection and bring it into the world.
In this way, the Gallery show moves from the Living Place : Ecological Design Panels which were a result of the 2014 Burlington design competition to Migrations by Sarah Ashe. The connection between the two shows is of course how we live on Earth, from how we think and design for water, food, people , to what we understand about human migrations and peoples desperate search for healthier lives.
To think that we can have a viable human economy
by destroying the Earth economy is absurd
Indigenous people still live in a universe,
but we don’t; we live in an economic system
“Caroline Webb:
As Caduceus is a magazine concerned with healing, transformation and wholeness, I’d like to start with asking how you approach the question of healing – whether for an individual, a community or the planet. What do you see as its essence?
Thomas Berry:
Healing presupposes the integral unity of things. What is the context of healing? Human health is a subsystem of the Earth’s health. You cannot have well humans on a sick planet.
The ecology issue emerges out of the fact that humans have been constructing a government for humans, by humans and with its destiny in developing the human – but that won’t work because if the human is looking for its own benefit rather than the benefit of the larger community, if we become predators on the natural community, then we lose in every way.”