Thomas Berry and the Reshaping of Catholic Environmentalism: From Human Well-Being to Biodiversity

This article criticizes the so-called “stewardship paradigm,” which forms the theological basis for Catholic environmentalism, and argues that Thomas Berry’s cosmology provides a more theologically palatable platform for developing Catholic environmentalism. The substantive ethical shift emerging from Berry’s cosmology is the displacement of human well-being as the proximate norm for human behavior in favor of promoting biodiversity on planet Earth. In other words, biodiversity is the primary ethical good, and human well-being is secondary.