ABSTRACT
Chapter 3, The Bonds of Love, takes up this idea, tracing connections between Berry’s analysis of the necessary relationship between earth, body, mind and spirit for healthy communities, and the work of ecofeminists and materialist feminists who draw similar conclusions. Contrasting this vision to Berry’s critique of modern industrial life, the paper explores what the purposes and definition of education ought to be in order to achieve this vision of healthy communities in a crisis-ridden global context. Berry offers a powerful critique of modern industrial assumptions that naturalize hyper-separated, hierarchized relationships and subjectivities degrading to both body and earth. He offers a metaphysics that is defined by our unavoidable embodiment within a complex living system. Just as microscopic living organisms create the soil in a recursive and generative process of living, reproducing, eating and dying, humans are joined inextricably to the soil as we eat from it to live and reproduce, and return to it in death. For Berry, it is mutuality and affection—love—that joins us together in bonds of protection and care needed to sustain life. Here, Berry’s analysis is read in conversation with feminist critiques of modernist perspectives that exclude the recognition of our embodied existence in favor of a dominating rationalism that encloses life-generating relationships. If a conception of love as connection and care is indeed at the heart of the very possibility of life, then education must be about shaping our relationships and productive capacities toward those ways of being that recognize our embodied dependencies on the well-being and intrinsic intelligence of all creatures.
