Green Paradise Lost, by Elizabeth Dodson Gray

GREEN PARADISE LOST

Elizabeth Dodson Gray explores in Green Paradise Lost the mythic and psycho-sexual roots of our Western imaging of Nature. Part I. is about our ''fall'' into the Illusion of human dominion -- and its results in terms of what Walter Lippmann called "the pictures in our minds of the world beyond our reach."

Such word pictures as "Mother Nature," "virgin resources," "man created in the image of God," and "the rape of the earth" are instantly recognizable as part of the imagery of our Western heritage. Elizabeth Dodson Gray analyzes the role that such religious and sexual imagery plays in both provoking and perpetuating our ecological and limits-to-growth crises.

In Part II. Elizabeth Dodson Gray explores what happens when dominion and mastery are no longer the major inner drives shaping what we seek to do with our world. Our living -- birth, growing, aging, dying -- take on a different character of "at-homeness" within the covenant given within Creation Itself. "The erotic connection" is proposed as a principal element in reformulating our place in Creation.

This "re-mything of Genesis" involves a new vision of reality. It gives us a new sense of our human identity, and also a new sense of what it means to be alive amid the limits and mixed blessings of this life.

ELIZABETH DODSON GRAY combines in her work several intellectual traditions.

She is an environmentalist and futurist. As co-director of The Bolton Institute for a Sustainable Future, and also mother of two children, she is passionately concerned about the future of our planet earth. She writes and lectures frequently about related topics, and is co-author with her husband and another MIT colleague of Growth and Its Implications for the Future (1975), a book originally prepared as staff work for Congressional hearings.
Elizabeth Dodson Gray is both heir and critic of the Judeo-Christian heritage. She has her graduate professional degree in theology from Yale University and is currently coordinator of the Theological Opportunities Program at Harvard Divinity School.
In her critique of our religious and cultural traditions Elizabeth Dodson Gray writes as a feminist theologian. She weaves her environmental and futurist concerns together with the insights of Christian ethics and theology, using her own feminist adaptation of insights drawn from the sociology of knowledge.

"Superb! A unique feminine cosmology!"
-- HAZEL HENDERSON, Independent Futurist

"A vivid, readable expression of the feminist/ecological concern now flowering at the live edge of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition,"
-- DOROTHY DINNERSTEIN, author of The Mermaid and the Minotaur

"A beautiful, moving, sensitive, and insightful book,"
-- JOHN COBB, Professor of Theology, School of Theology at Claremont (California)

"Margaret Mead worried that phrases like 'soft energy' would arouse anxieties in the middle-aged white males who run the world: 'hard energy' would seem more reassuring.

Now Elizabeth Dodson Gray's evocative fusion of ecological, spiritual and feminist values shows why. She helps us all to liberate ourselves from projecting sexual dominance onto other people and onto the natural world of which we are a part."
-- AMORY B. LOVINS, Friends of the Earth

A vision of human life -- from the cell to the household to the whole human society -- caught up in a symbiotic dance of cosmic energy and sensual beauty, throbbed by a rhythm that is greater than our own, which births us into being and decays us into dying, yet whose gifts of life are incredibly good though mortal and fleeting.

Perhaps the limits of our finite planet are like the biblical angel with the flaming sword, ready to cast into outer darkness those unable to perceive and live within: the mixed blessing of the creation.

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