An interview given by Thomas Berry, author and teacher, in 1995, taken from an issue of Food and Water Journal.

There is a time when things come to their critical moment of transformation, and now is one of them. Sometimes I call these moments 'moments of grace.' What's important about the great changes today is that they are irreversible. Up until now we thought nothing was irreversible, there was nothing that couldn't be remedied.

There are times when we can no longer trust our cultural establishments; they are inadequate across the board. The government, the universities, the religious and the economic establishments are all ineffective for one simple reason: they establish a radical discontinuity between the other-than-human and the human, with all rights given to the human. The corporations own the planet; they own the governments; they own the educational establishments; they own the media. They are simply the major power. Our laws and judicial system all suggest the plundering of the non-human by the human, and so the radical need of the present is to establish a new human mode of being within the larger Earth community.

The problems of the present require a common task to which people will devote themselves as a community. People need to feel a common task. We need to reinvent ourselves at the species level. I use the word reinvent because humans invent themselves more than other biological forms. Humans are genetically determined to think, but what we think and how we think is what we create ourselves. We're genetically determined to form societies, but how we fashion societies is something that we invent.

In a sense we have to hop out of the system as far as possible and begin re-thinking the whole thing. We need to transform the professions. We need to look for a number of people in the establishments of government, education, religion and economics who can begin to think in a more integral manner.

We are in a period of grace now, a period when new possibilities can come into being. We need a four-fold wisdom: the wisdom of indigenous people and their rapport with the Earth, the wisdom of women who have helped us understand patriarchy, the wisdom of the classical religious traditions, and the wisdom of science which provides the contemporary scientific story of the universe as a process that is constantly evolving and expanding into new forms of creativity.

The main thing is to set up a pull of attention and a fascination with the excitement of what I call 'the Great Work.' Everybody's needed. Every segment of human life is needed. We need all the professions. We need everybody to be about 'the Great Work' of our time.

Each one of us can participate in 'the Great Work' in many ways. One of them is by simply asking the question,

and then take action.

The Center for Food Safety and the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), joined by 50 other groups, have filed a legal petition with the Food and Drug Administration to take all genetically engineered (GE) foods and crops off the market and subject them to rigorous safety-testing. The Organic Consumers Association calls for a moratorium on all genetically engineered foods and crops until they can be proven safe for human health and the environment.

Participate in 'the Great Work' by voicing your concern. Take Action. Send a letter or postcard to the Food and Drug Administration regarding genetically engineered foods TODAY!