Today’s Life-Line is:

The survival of the planet Earth in its integral reality is, it seems to me, the basic issue that confronts us here. In some basic sense, the human project and the Earth project are a single project. There is no way in which the human project can succeed if the Earth project fails. That this conclusion is not understood by the guiding forces of the human community is the challenge that is before us.

That the Earth project is failing just now seems obvious, both to ordinary observation and to more scientific understanding. We are at the terminal phase of the Cenozoic period. Referring to species extinction taking place in our time, biologists tell us that nothing of this order of magnitude has happened on the geo-biological sequence of life on Earth since the beginning of the Cenozoic age some 65 million years ago. Warning reports have also come from the world’s foremost nature organizations concerning the status of plant species. One in every eight of these throughout the world is imperiled. In America almost one in three is endangered. Obviously, then, the larger destiny, not only of the human but even of more extensive realms of existence is being determined. . .

To preserve this sacred world of our origins from destruction, our great need is for renewal of the entire Western religious-spiritual tradition in relation to the integral functioning of the biosystems of planet Earth. We need to move from a spirituality of alienation from the natural world to a spirituality of intimacy with it, from a spirituality of the divine as revealed in verbal revelation to a spirituality of the divine as revealed in the visible world about us, from a spirituality concerned with justice simply to humans to a justice that includes the larger Earth community. The destiny of Christianity will be determined to a large extent by its capacity to fulfill these three commitments.

~ Thomas Berry, from “Christianity and Ecology” in The Christian Future and the Fate of Earth, 1997