Art in the Ecozoic EraAuthor(s): Thomas BerrySource: Art Journal, Vol. 51, No. 2, Art and Ecology (Summer, 1992), pp. 46-48Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777393 .

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Art in the Ecozoic Era

THOMAS BERRY

rt both creates and reveals its historical period. This we can see if we glance back over the Paleolithic

paintings in the caves of Lascaux, the Egyptian pyramids, the Greek Parthenon, the Roman Colosseum and Pantheon. So it is in the medieval period, with its cathedrals, its stained glass, its sculpture, paintings, and music. So too in the Baroque period; and so on, through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with their beaux-arts and Bauhaus ar- chitecture, and the great variety in this period of painting and musical forms of expression.

What is happening now throughout the entire range of human activities is something more than any of the changes that we have known in the past. We are involved in a transfor- mation not simply of some cultural phase of the human, as in the transition from classical to medieval culture, or the transition from the medieval to the modern; we are, for the first time, involved in a transformation of the entire planetary process, its geological structure and biological forms, as well as its human modes of expression. This is a transformation not simply of human culture but of the very context in which all cultural development takes place.

The planet Earth as it has been known by artists, craftspeople, farmers, religious personalities, rulers, and merchants has come into being through some 65 million

years of life development, a period generally known as the Cenozoic era. While its origins reach further back in time, the Earth as we know it, the Earth with its trees and flowers and birds and all the various animals of the land and sea, the Earth that we see with our eyes and hear with our ears and feel with our hands, the Earth with its autumn decline and

springtime renewal, the Earth that is the basis of economic and artistic life and that has provided our mythology over the centuries, the Earth that has given us our symbols of intel- lectual understanding and aesthetic delight, the Earth that awakened in us our sense of the sacred-this Earth is being devastated. It is already in a state of ruin, its capacity to ex- cite our imagination and inspire our actions greatly reduced.

In biological terms the planet Earth is at the end of the Cenozoic period, a period that is now being terminated by the

industrial economy that humans have imposed on the planet during these past two centuries. In this context the major systems of the planet, air, water, and soil, are severely diminished in their life-giving capacities.

To reestablish the Earth in a viable situation requires a transition from the terminal Cenozoic era to what might be called the Ecozoic era. To do this there is no need to trace the details of the entire human story. But it is important that we establish some sense of historical time and the order of

magnitude of the transition that is at present taking place. Because this transition is not understood adequately, we are

failing in every phase of our lives, culturally as well as

politically and economically. The arts are beginning to experience this change. New

forms of art are emerging. Of the many art exhibits that have dealt with the subject of the artist in relation to the Earth, I would like to mention one of exceptional import, "Revered Earth," that has been shown in several American cities, most

recently, in summer 1992, at the Center for Contemporary Arts of Santa Fe, New Mexico. The art included in this show

presents a radical experience of the Earth in its physical reality, its symbolic meaning, and as it exists in the dream- time of the indigenous Australian peoples. The very sounds of the Earth can be heard in these works, the feel of the soil, the rivers in their flow-all in the celebratory mode that is the

meaning of existence itself. Yet these works also speak with the pathos that is appropriate to our present situation. Be-

yond the pathos is the promise of the emerging Ecozoic era before us.

I speak of the "Ecozoic," rather than the "ecological." Although the term ecology designates an activist movement, it refers primarily to logos, the understanding of the life

systems of the planet and their integral relations with one

another, rather than to what is immediate in its biological reality. The term Ecozoic, on the other hand, both has biolog- ical implications and conveys a feeling of historical realism. It fits into the sequence of life periods of the Earth: the Paleozoic (600 million to 225 million years B.C.E.), the Mesozoic (225 million to 65 million years B.C.E.) and the

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Cenozoic (65 million years B.C.E. to recent centuries). The Cenozoic is now definitely terminated. This period, in which the surge of ever-renewing life forms flowed over the Earth, has come to a tragic ending in the wanton industrial pro- cesses of these past few centuries.

When I try to indicate just what has happened, I gener- ally say that my generation, the older generation at the end of the twentieth century, has been autistic in relation to the natural world. My generation has been locked into itself, unable to establish any emotional rapport with the natural world. My generation never heard the thousandfold voices of the surrounding world, the voices of the mountains, the

rivers, the clouds, the stars; the voices of the trees and flowers and birds and animals. Not hearing these voices, my generation considered that all these wonderful beings existed

simply as resources for human exploitation. As a conse-

quence, my generation has extinguished many of the most

gorgeous forms of Earth's expression. Yet without experienc- ing the fragrance of flowers, without witnessing the soaring of great birds, without the expansive sky and sea, without

breathing the freshness of morning air, without sunlight and

starlight, without the soft crimson of the dawn-without all

this, our minds and emotions and sensitivities are empty. We become autistic.

Often enough, we witness autism in children-children who are intelligent enough and with the physical ability to hear, speak, and share in the larger life association with others, but who, through some psychic experience, are closed off to the outside world. The autistic child cannot get out and no one else can get in. The child cannot speak, cannot

respond emotionally. The larger self is stifled; only the iso- lated self is permitted to be. I consider this the basic meta-

phor for understanding the cultural pathology of our times, which has permitted us to invade the natural world, with such

devastating consequences. To recover from this situation

requires a profound reorientation of the entire culture. This brings us to the possibilities for the present and the

future. Since we are at the terminal phase of the Cenozoic

period and in the emerging phase of the Ecozoic, we stand at the moment in which humans may learn to be present to the Earth in a mutually enhancing manner. The Earth is the only known living planet in a universe that is itself, throughout its vast extent in space and throughout its long sequence of transformations in time, a single, multiform, celebratory event. To enter into this celebration is the primary role of the human in any modality of its functioning.

Yet human fulfillment has come to be associated with a certain withdrawal from-and even triumph over-the natu- ral world, both physically and spiritually, rather than with an

integration within it. We like to hear and to use the human

voice, to make our own human statement, although we seldom

identify our individual human selves with that larger self achieved when we center our personal being within the universe. The human voice that has lost its identity with the

voices of the surrounding world is terribly diminished in its

capacity for creative expression. We have many selves: the individual self, the family

self, the community self, the Earth self, the universe self. Yet all these are dimensions of the single self and none is com-

plete without the others. For the individual to exist in all its

unique aspects is infinitely significant, but no individual exists in isolation and nothing can be accomplished apart from the larger universe into which the individual is woven from the first moment of its existence. There is no such thing as an isolated being. But while literal withdrawal is not

possible for any being, withdrawal as a state of consciousness and a mode of behavior is possible for humans. This is what has happened to the planet Earth. Its human component has withdrawn from its proper role within the larger Earth com-

munity, has sought to exploit the Earth community for its own

advantage, and has thereby disturbed the entire planetary process in a manner never before known in the 4 billion years of Earth history.

Some basic conditions are necessary if we are suc-

cessfully to negotiate the transition from the terminal Cenozoic to the emerging Ecozoic. The artist has a special task in helping to bring this about. First, we must understand that the universe is a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects. Every being has a unique voice and its spiritual mode is integral with the physical mode of its being. This

capacity for spiritual presence in things is what makes possi- ble our own perception of other beings and our communion with them. Every being has a special capacity for mutual

presence with the human. This presence and its connection to the surrounding universe are necessary for any authentic

phase of the human, but are needed in a special manner by the artist. While every artist must discover this presence and

accomplish this connection in some manner, the best artists are those who carry us deepest into this experience of communion.

For American artists, this relationship of communion with the Earth has some precedents in the earlier generation of artists of the Hudson River School. But in the future, this

sensitivity to and integration with the natural world will be of a different order from that experienced by Asher Durand, Thomas Cole, Frederick Edwin Church, Albert Bierstadt, and Winslow Homer. In portraying the various regions of the North American continent these painters experienced a land-

scape still largely intact in its natural form. They looked out over great vistas and saw a world of shimmering sunlight that could be expressed romantically. This romanticized world is no longer available to us. Instead we find a devastated world, which we now seek to restore to something of its original splendor.

Even in those phases of artistic expression that have focused on the human form, we experience a larger meaning, beyond the human; for the mystique of the universe is re- vealed in the human form. The human articulates a dimen-

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sion of the universe. Nothing is itself without everything else. To reveal the uniqueness of an individual is indeed a great achievement, yet each fragment of the real must in some man- ner reveal the larger dimension of things. Thus, the soiled boots of a workingman may be painted in such a manner as to reveal the deep mystery of the human connection to the Earth.

This brings us to the second principle of the Ecozoic

period: that the Earth is primary and the human derivative. This must be thoroughly understood for the integrative func-

tioning of the human in any activity whether it be economics, law, medicine, religion, morality, education, or art. Here

again, humans have become not only deficient but deeply pathological in their exaggerated anthropocentrism.

The first concern in every field of human endeavor must be the integration with the Earth community. If this commu-

nity is diminished in its well-being, then every particular being within the Earth community is so diminished. Yet we

try to be healthy on a sick planet, through medical technolo-

gies. We try to advance the gross national product in eco- nomics, while diminishing the gross Earth product. Absurd. The first law of economics must be to preserve the integral functioning of the Earth economy.

This principle applies equally in the broad field of artistic endeavor. If art becomes limited to human processes, or to human imagination, lacking an intimate relationship with the larger natural world, the art field will lose much of its

vigor and purpose. We are becoming aware that the ex- tinction of species, the destruction of the rain forests, the dev- astation of marine life, the isolation of humanity in an Epcot Planet is leading us toward a disaster of untold dimension, both as individual artists and as citizens of the universe.

We have some sense of what is happening if we look at

Margaret Mee's paintings of flowers of the Amazon, which

display an unimaginable beauty of design and color. Once these flowers are gone they will be beyond recovery-lost not

simply as biological species, but, even more significantly, lost emotionally, aesthetically, lost as a mystical experience that finds expression in the human. The entire universe is thus diminished, not only in its physical reality but in its

mystical meaning. As in art, so too in language and literature we are

moving into a new Ecozoic context. Webster's dictionary is no longer adequate to our needs and none of the traditional

scriptures is functionally effective in these times. A new

mentality is taking shape. Something more than our Cenozoic

scriptures or our Cenozoic languages is needed. This new sense of reality and value will be based on a sense of the universe attained through our empirical sciences, although we will now recognize that the universe has, from its begin- ning, had a psychic, aesthetic, and spiritual aspect as well as a physical and material one.

We are having a new, revelatory experience, an Ecozoic revelation. We are moving from a spatial mode of conscious-

ness to a temporal, developmental mode of consciousness. We now know the universe throughout its vast extent in space and throughout its sequence of transformations in time as a sin- gle, multiform, celebratory event. The sacred celebrations of the future should include ceremonies not merely of the cycle of death and rebirth in the seasonal sequence of time, but also ceremonies in remembrance of the great transforma- tional moments in developmental time. These are great spirit moments, as well as great moments of physical, biological transformation.

This story of the universe constitutes our new sacred

story. Civilizations generally base their sense of reality and value on some form of a creation narrative, some account of how things came to be in the beginning, how they came to be as they are, and how humans fit into this context. We now have a new story of the universe. We have moved from our prior, spatial mode of consciousness to a temporal and devel-

opmental mode of consciousness that sees the universe not as an eternally renewing sequence of seasonal cycles, but as an irreversible sequence of transformations whereby the uni- verse and the planet Earth have come into being.

This is perhaps the most important change in con- sciousness that humans have ever experienced. We now know that we live in a world that is vulnerable in some absolute sense. The universe as known to artists in prior times was

governed by indestructible archetypal forms forever avail- able to us through their physical manifestations. Now we can

perceive the universe as irreversible process and recognize that wanton species extinction is a permanent wound in the

biological order. Lost species will never return. New species do emerge, but this is over long periods of time that we cannot calculate within our mental framework. Artists become vul- nerable in the range and magic of their work to the extent that the natural world itself has become vulnerable. The endow- ment that we have inherited becomes infinitely precious to the artist, as to every component of the universe community. The artist is integral to this larger process.

Just how this realization will affect the artist in the future is a question to consider. We must feel, however, that the intimacy of the artist with the entire range of earthly affairs must awaken forebodings about the future, and that these very forebodings will inevitably appear in the visual,

literary, and performing arts. In the exhibition "Revered Earth," O'Nile, a piece by

Ana Mendieta, presents us with an identifiably feminine form of the human, shaped with earth materials, placed within a shallow cavity within the Earth itself. Here we have the basic

archetypal image that we need to achieve that mutually

enhancing relationship of the human to the Earth which is the

identifying feature of the Ecozoic era.

THOMAS BERRY, author of The Dream of the Earth, is a historian of cultures with a special concern for the relation of human cultures to the natural world.

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