Tribute to Berry explores human relation to environment

“The great work of our time … is moving the human community from its present situation as a destructive presence on the planet to a benign or mutually enhancing presence. It’s that simple,” said Thomas Berry, a cultural historian and scholar of evolutionary history who co-founded the Asian Thought and Religion Seminar at Columbia. He passed away on June 1 in Greensboro, N.C., at the age of 94. 

As a tribute to Berry’s intellectual contributions, the Thomas Berry Foundation will be hosting a Thomas Berry Award ceremony at 2 p.m. and a memorial service at 4 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 26, at the Cathedral of Saint John the Divine. These events are free and open to the public. 

This year’s Thomas Berry Award will be presented to Martin S. Kaplan, who was instrumental in setting up the Thomas Berry Foundation and is assisting the environmental programs at Columbia, MIT, Yale, and Harvard. In a phone interview, Kaplan shared his positive experiences from participating in Berry’s seminars at Harvard, and dwelled upon the effects of climate change and our responsibility, as humans living in this “sacred universe,” to prevent such changes. 

“The Sacred Universe” is the title of Berry’s new book, which came out this month—a collection of his most erudite essays published between 1972 and 2001. According to professor Mary Evelyn Tucker, a senior research scholar at Yale who edited and wrote the foreword, the book is named after one of Berry’s essays to reflect his belief that “we are destroying nature because we no longer see it as sacred.”

These essays draw on Berry’s extensive readings and his experiences living and teaching in China, Europe, and later back in the U.S. Therefore it is no surprise that the book is extraordinary in its scope, ranging from the population’s spiritual alienation from nature to the role religion will play in restoring the world. Through his writing, Berry expressed not only the urgency in the safeguarding of a sustainable future for all species, but also his optimism toward human beings’ “deepening awareness of a presence that holds all things together.”

When asked to describe Berry to someone who is not familiar with him or his work, Tucker portrayed him as “a renaissance man: a person of great learning both of West cultural history and of Asian religions and culture … who brought that kind of learning about world culture and civilization to bear in regards to our current environmental crisis.” 

Berry was highly regarded by his friends for not only his intellectual strength, but also his distinguished character. William Theodore de Bary, a professor of East Asian studies at Columbia, had been a close friend of Thomas Berry for 60 years. “We were kindred souls … we enjoyed each other’s company and learned from each other,” de Bary said. “He was a very warm human being. He could be approached and related to very easily just as a human being.” 

Professor John Grim of Yale, who did his dissertation with Berry, expressed a similar view. “Thomas was an original thinker who was also very empathetic …. He was the kind of person who took other people seriously. He didn’t treat people lightly and he listened to people and tried to draw out of them their own understandings, not just impose his own ideas.” 

Perhaps the best way to appreciate Berry’s intellectual and personal magnetism is not through the views of others, but through his own words: “Once we accept that we exist as an integral member of this larger community of existence, we can begin to act in a more appropriate human way. We might even enter once again into that great celebration, the universe itself.”