ABSTRACT
This essay draws from the evolutionary cosmology of Thomas Berry in a manner that supports the premise that a Berryite understanding of US cultural examples can add an important green dimension, coupling social justice and ecological health, to the literature on American innocence. Conceived in this manner, a Berryite approach denotes a person or a line of thinking that takes a measure of inspiration from Berry’s work as a starting point, without appropriating his whole system in a fundamentalist manner. As employed in this analysis, it activates some of the most cogent aspects of Berry’s thought and explanatory power in order to allow access to a too frequently overlooked, obscured, and systematically harmful socio-ecological dimension to US cultures’ cumulative impact in the world.
