ABSTRACT
Thomas Berry, Catholic priest and self-proclaimed ‘Earth scholar’ who died in 2010, famously wrote that ‘The universe is a communion of subjects not a collection of objects’ (Berry 2009). Man in this view is one subject among many in the natural world, and all subjects are interdependent. We are not the unique subject acting on a range of disconnected objects around us. If you start from there, Berry believed, you could not go far wrong, regardless of the specifics of your theology. This adds what I think is a crucial extra dimension to Michael Rustin’s central point, that we are part of nature.
