Heather Wodehouse

Occupy Wall Street is like no protest before it. As it spreads like wildfire across cities around the world, it protests the power that profit-driven and amoral corporations have over the world, including our governments. Occupy Wall Street champions the interests of the people. It voices the powerlessness the 99% feel over the way the 1% is running the world. It asks for the return of true, uncorrupted democracy and the redistribution of wealth and power among people. It wants change: deep, radical and lasting change.

This type of world-shaking change is exactly what Thomas Berry’s book, The Great Work, demands. He argues that today, humanity’s Great Work is to figure out how to live in a mutually beneficial and supportive relationship with the rest of the universe. He makes it very clear that environmental concerns are not to be relegated to one department of the government, of the university, of the corporation, of our lives. The very opposite is true: we humans are only one tiny part of the universe. Living by values that tell us otherwise will surely end our part in the earth’s history.

The incredible support Occupy Wall Street has received worldwide shows people’s discontent with the status quo, but is this just a symptom of a greedy and materialistic culture? Is the 99% just asking to have what the 1% has? Is Occupy a sign of the Great Work in progress, or a symptom of the lack of one?

While the main thrust of Occupy is not particularly environment-related, there are important parallels between the two movements. The first official statement from Occupy Wall Street accuses the corporations of ruthlesslyrobbing us ofour rights,our houses, our education, our freedom from debt and from torture, our privacy and more. Have we not done the very same to the earth? Are we humans not acting as the powerful 1%—or less—living off the misery of the 99%? The Great Work of Occupy Wall Street is to realize the hypocrisy of its demands. Equality is certainly important for a human society, but no more than is respect for the surrounding universe. Thomas Berry accurately points out that our travels into space have mislead us to think we can survive on our own ingenuity alone. But our spaceships are all little pieces of earth, with its water, food, air, all of which we depend on completely. Just as the corporations depend on us for survival, we depend on the earth; in fact, we are no more than an expression of the earth’s life-generating abilities.

By refusing to limit itself to specific policy demands, Occupy hopes to act as an outlet for people’s discontent which will encourage questioning and criticism and creativity. If people do indeed wake up and don’t stop their reexamination of society at the question of equalization of power and wealth among humans, but if they begin to reevaluate the culture that brought about the inequalities in the first place, Occupy Wall Street may be one small step towards a reinvention of human life.

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Heather Wodehouse is a student of Environmental Studies in Canada. heather.wodehouse@mail.mcgill.ca