06/02/2026
In the 1992 volume The Universe Story, written with the cosmologist Brian Swimme, Thomas Berry articulates one of his clearest economic claims directly related to our environmental challenges:
"Our human economy is derivative from the Earth economy. To glory in a rising Gross Domestic Product with an irreversibly declining Earth Product is an economic absurdity."
— Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, The Universe Story: From the Primordial Flaring Forth to the Ecozoic Era — A Celebration of the Unfolding of the Cosmos (HarperSanFrancisco, 1992)
The line is precise and uncompromising. The economy the human community runs is a subset of the larger economy the Earth has been running for four billion years — the cycling of carbon, nitrogen, water, soil, energy, and biological diversity that makes every human transaction possible. To celebrate human economic growth while the Earth economy is collapsing is, in Berry's framing, not a tradeoff. It is incoherent. The numbers do not add up because they are measuring different things on different scales.
The Great Work, in this dimension, includes the slow re-grounding of human economic thinking inside ecological reality. Mutually beneficial relations cannot be built on accounting that pretends the Earth is an externality.
What is one place in your own life where the human economy and the Earth economy have stopped speaking to each other?
Carry the Great Work forward at thomasberry.org
