Narrow Ridge Earth Literacy Center
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What is Earth Literacy? |
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MOVEMENT - Earth Literacy
is one of a growing number of movements in which people attempt to respond,
both in their personal and professional lives to what they see as a "turning
point" in the story of life on Earth. The "turning point,"
they believe, represents a crisis in the way humans perceive reality. For
humans to solve the twin problems of preserving a livable environment and
of restructuring self-destructive political and economic global relationships
will require a radical shift in perception. The shift may be as extensive
as moving from an image of a flat Earth located at the center of an unchanging
universe to that of a round Earth located in one of a billion galaxies in
an expanding universe. The crisis represents a choice for the human species
between the possibility of ultimate catastrophe or moving into a time of
unparalleled fulfillment. To live at the time of such a once-in-a-lifetime-of-a-species
choice is an incredible gift and an opportunity. To be unaware of such a
gift and opportunity, to sleep through the "turning point" in
life's story, would be, for an individual, a colossal human tragedy.
A NETWORK - Earth Literacy, since the early 1980's has become a network of educational centers around the United States and in Argentina and New Zealand. The network evolved out of a two-year "communion" agreement in which individuals from four institutions came together periodically to struggle with the implications of waking up to the choice we are making as a species. The communers were from:
At present, communion coordination is handled by the Narrow Ridge Earth Literacy Center in Washburn, Tennessee, with support from the Environmental Ethics Institute, Wolfson Campus, Miami-Dade Community College. The term "communion" was chosen to signify one of three principles guiding the unfolding process of the universe, according to Thomas Berry's vision of the new cosmology. The principle of communion describes the primordial force which binds all elements of the universe together in a single community. A CURRICULUM - Earth Literacy encompasses a cluster of central themes and resource materials that might roughly be described as a budding curriculum. Its themes parallel in some ways those of other movements such as deep ecology, creation-centered theology, Native American spirituality, eco-feminism, etc. As a curriculum, Earth Literacy is more concerned with process and story than content and categories. It is interdisciplinary and experiential. If Earth Literacy were a tree, it could be said to draw its theoretical sustenance from four major root systems.
MISSION - The Earth Literacy Network spans a diverse array of participants with varying levels of involvement and individual agendas. Centers function at three levels:
A common mission of all centers is to invite others to consider and commune over the implications of waking up to the momentous choice humankind is now making. Many of the resources introduce Thomas Berry's new cosmology and the radical shift in thinking we must make in order to create a civilization that makes sense -- human sense, Earth sense, universe sense. What we need to understand . . . What is an Earth Literacy Center? Keeping an Eye on Things There is nothing else to do with those mute materials we do not need. All we can do with the whole inhuman array is watch it. We can stage our own act on the planet - built our cities on its plains, dam its rivers, plant its topsoils - but our meaningful activity scarcely covers the terrain. We do not use the songbirds, for instance. We do not eat many of them; we cannot befriend them; we cannot persuade them to eat more mosquitoes or plant fewer weed seeds. We can only witness them - whoever they are. If we were not here, they would be songbirds falling in the forest. If we were not here, material events like the passage of seasons would lack even the meager meanings we are able to muster for them The show would play to an empty house, as do all those falling stars which fall in the daytime. That is why I take walks: to keep an eye on things. - Annie Dillard, from Teaching a Stone to Talk
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Miriam T. MacGillis, Brian Swimme, Mathew Fox, etc.
This is the COSMIC ROOT which weaves together insights from ancient
mystics and modern physics. A central notion is Berry's description of
the primary task we face: "We must redefine the human to
re-inhabit the Earth."
sis. A central
notion comes from the work of the scholar Gil Bailie in which he
decodes the psychic and social dilemmas of today's crisis using
insights from Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Melville, T.S. Elliot,
Flannery O'Connor, Arthur Miller, etc. as well as the writers and
actors in the Old and New Testament of the Bible.