Thomas Berry’s book, The Dream of the Earth, begins its ninth chapter with a one paragraph summary of the economic and ecological history of the United States. He quite impressively states “After some four centuries of the American experience, we have before us a still beautiful and abundant land, but a land of roads and automobiles and grimy cities, a land of acid rainfall, polluted rivers and endangered species, a land extensively plundered of its forests and its mineral resources, a land with its human inhabitants somewhat bewildered and rebellious against their role as the great consumer people of earth.”(Berry, 109) It cannot be said any more plainly that Americans have had an everlasting and in some ways devastating impact on the earth. The issues and topics that Berry’s writings address are the same of those in Ishmael. As human beings we are given a pretext for our actions and the way we live our lives through our religion or spirituality. For many though, this is an excuse to live our lives without question under strict guidelines, without taking a moment to think about the consequences of our actions.
Berry talks about the three types of spirituality: traditional Christian spirituality, the American spirituality, and the emerging spirituality and how they function within society. He claims that the most devastating of all is the public spirituality. It reigns unchecked, telling humans they need more, more, more. This spirituality has shaped the world into what it is today, but when looking at the grander scale, that is from the evolutionary time line, humans are such a small blip. How is it then that we have had such an impact on the planet? Berry believes it is because we as humans, do not have a functional cosmology to guide us. He states “Yet with such a magical world as we have made, or discovered, we have no functional cosmology to guide and discipline our human use of all this knowledge and skill and all these energy resources.”(Berry, 112) Which translates to mean that though we have the tools, brain power, and will, we do not understand the meaning of what we are given.
I believe that in many ways this is reiterating the story of the Takers. Takers have the tools and the “toys” and because we have them we use them or play with them. As Takers we test what we can do, simply to see the results. The problem with this is that often times, it is not until years later that we see the true results. If we drop a bomb to obliterate those who would do us harm, immediately we see that we stopped them from hurting us. It is not until years later that we see the cancer, illness, and environmental destruction our actions have caused. Stand outside in the sun as a child and burn your skin until it is perfectly tanned. Thirty years later find the melanoma residing within your body. This is the Taker story as Berry is describing it. We have the means and yet have no meaning.