and develop stories and ceremonies that celebrate their observations strikes me as shortsighted to say the least.
Scientific cosmology proved several decades ago that the human feeling that we come from the stars is based on fact. In 1980, astronomer and physicist Carl Sagan reported what is now common knowledge in the field of astrophysics:
The nitrogen in our DNA, the calcium in our teeth, the iron in our blood, the carbon in our apple pies were made in the interiors of collapsing stars. We are made of starstuff. (Sagan 1980, 233)
Contemporary astronomy provides an explanation for how those elements got from a collapsing star to us. Around 4.6 billion years ago, our sun was born from a supernova—the gigantic cosmic explosion that occurs when a star collapses. This ancient star began as a ball of light gases, mostly hydrogen and helium. As the star grew, its gravitational pressure increased, and the star’s core became a foundry for synthesizing heavier elements: oxygen, nitrogen, carbon, silicon, and more. When the star became so dense, it collapsed under its own gravity, and its implosion released the energy of four billion stars, all at once. Our entire periodic table of elements was flung into space to later coalesce into new stars and solar systems, including our sun.
Swimme and Berry’s (1992) narrative in The Universe Story goes on to chronicle the formation of Earth with our sun, moon, oceans, landforms, the appearance of the first living cells and their replication, and the gradual evolution of plants and animals. They go on to recount the emergence of our human species, the creation of neolithic villages and later cities, scientific and technological discoveries, and, finally, mechanized industry. They describe the degradation of the environment in ancient and modern times, including the destructive activities undertaken in the name of technological progress.
Now, Swimme and Berry (1992) argue, humanity has reached a critical moment as a species. Our continued survival depends on forming a new, ecological consciousness. We have learned a lot about our power to affect change in and on our environment, but we have lost our ancient sense of awe and wonder at the world. We have lost our impulse to honor and respect our environment. Our great contemporary challenge is thus to regain a sense of awe, to form a sense of connection and belonging in Earth’s living ecosystem, and to learn how to live in a way that benefits the whole ecosystem.
To think about how great and sudden an impact we humans are having on planet Earth, imagine that today is midnight on New Year’s Eve and the 3.5-billion-year history of life on this planet has been compressed into the past year. The first ancestors of Homo sapiens to shape stones into rough tools, such as choppers and awls, appeared about six and a half hours ago. The first humans on Earth to cook their food using fire, wear animal skins for clothing, and manufacture hand axes appeared about eighteen minutes ago, and the first to live in villages, domesticate animals, and practice agriculture only appeared between ninety and forty-five seconds ago. People made things out of metal for the first time a little more than a minute ago, and the first pyramid was built in Egypt forty seconds ago. Jesus lived eighteen seconds ago, and Columbus and Cortés sailed across the Atlantic and set about pillaging the peoples and habitats they encountered less than five seconds ago. Most of the transatlantic slave trade has taken place between four seconds and a second and a half ago.5
In the past second, humans have invented the personal automobile, the airplane, the jet, the rocket, the nuclear bomb, and the computer. We’ve sent a few of us to the moon, we’ve peered into the far reaches of the universe from a giant telescope mounted in space, and we’ve sequenced the human genome. Yet, our style of living on Earth in the last five seconds is having a devastating effect on the living ecosystem of this planet. There are few signs as yet that we will change our behavior in time to avert a catastrophe of a scale encountered only once or twice in the history of life on Earth.
Thomas Berry (1999) asks us to take up what he calls the “Great Work of a people”: to help repair the damage humans have caused and build relationships of care and respect with all forms of life. Our cities are embedded in and dependent on Earth’s living systems—bioregions, ecosystems, watersheds, climate, and atmosphere. Many ecological writers herald such a shift in our relationship with the planet—from seeing it as an endless trove of resources to be exploited and manipulated to experiencing it as our companion on a journey through time. I was inspired by the idea that our cities could be redesigned from this new perspective, but the new paradigm of the city as a living system will elude our grasp if our vision is not truly inclusive. All our human communities with their diverse histories and cultures and their inherent worth need to be represented in this great shift. Without leadership representing all segments of society, we will end up reinstalling the separations and inequities that defined the preceding centuries, and new unsustainable cities will result.
The universe story could be big enough to contain this kind of inclusive reimagining of our relationship with the planet. The old story about how society evolved until we reached the pinnacle of industrial capitalism is disintegrating. The new story is that we are the end product of a process of 13.7 billion years in which the human journey is a small portion at the end. The new story includes the birth of our universe, the formation of Earth, the emergence of the first cell and human evolution, the rise of humanity in Africa, and the great migrations of all Earth’s peoples around the globe. The new story must be truthful about our origins, our history, and the forces shaping our lives today. In it, there is room for the rich, diverse experiences of all ethnic groups.
I WAS BORN AT HOME in 1939 in the “Black Bottom,” one of West Philadelphia’s most run-down neighborhoods. Black Bottom, or simply the “Bottom,” was a predominantly poor and black neighborhood built on a drained swamp. In contrast, the neighborhood where the white people lived was called the “Top.” My parents, my brother Lewie, and I lived in a cold-water flat above a storefront on Cuthbert Street for the first five years of my life.
Many years later, I spoke with Anne Whiston Spirn, landscape architecture professor at the University of Pennsylvania and author of The Language of Landscape. She told me that in cities across the country, the poorest people—primarily blacks and immigrants—had no choice but to live in such undesirable low-lying locations. These “bottom” areas produced conditions for both criminality and the creative expression that gave birth to jazz and blues.
Mother was born Mildred Cokine.1 Her forebears were longtime residents of South Carolina, and among her ancestors were early European settlers, rice-growing West Africans (probably Wolofs), and American Indians. Her great-uncle William Jervay (likely an anglicized form of the French name Gervais) had escaped from a plantation to join the Union army and later became a South Carolina legislator.2 At some point, Mother’s family moved north to South Philadelphia. Mother was born in 1898 in the Seventh Ward, a neighborhood that the great black intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, then a promising young sociologist, studied and wrote about in The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study. The Seventh Ward was a neighborhood beset with poverty, illness, and crime primarily due to lack of economic opportunity. So, as soon as they could, Mother’s family moved to a neighborhood where the “better” class of black people lived; and this is where Mother grew up. Mother learned the art of dressmaking at her mother’s knee: Granny took in clients at home, and Mother would help her. Granny raised her son and four daughters on her
