THE SCHOOL OF FOREST MEDICINE

After many years of intensive work with plants in various contexts to untangle my lifelong reactions to the sexual abuse I experienced as a child, I now have the capacity and welcome opportunities to directly experience feelings such as these.

I now understand that in its wake, resistance to feelings leaves nothing but gaping trenches of hopelessly helpless experiential and perceptual narrowing and that adopting postures such as these, however necessary in the moment, completely precludes any possibility of effective response to harm.

Is it any wonder that the ecological catastrophes occurring now across the globe evoke in me the same reactions and equal feelings of terror?

Thomas Berry’s final book is even more relevant today than when it was published at the turn of the century. Throughout this ecological manifesto Berry calls for radical changes to the way humans relate to the Earth and to all of her inhabitants. In the initial paragraph of the introduction he makes the book’s intention clear: “We need to understand where we are and how we got here. Once we are clear on these issues we can move forward with our historical destiny, to create a mutually enhancing mode of human dwelling on the planet Earth.”