We see quite clearly that what happens to the nonhuman happens to the human.
What happens to the outer world happens to the inner world.
If the outer world is diminished in its grandeur then the emotional, imaginative, intellectual, and spiritual life of the human is diminished or extinguished.
Without the soaring birds, the great forests, the sounds and coloration of the insects, the free-flowing streams, the flowering fields, the sight of the clouds by day and the stars at night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human.
~ Fr. Thomas Berry, C.P.
(November 9, 1914 – June 1, 2009)
A Catholic priest of the Passionist order, cultural historian and ecotheologian
(although cosmologist and geologian — or “Earth scholar” — were his preferred descriptors).
