arth and the cosmos to a holistic culture and heal the western split between fact and value, theory and practice, private and social. She claims humans must realize the interrelation of all things and balance their reproduction, production, and consumption with the ecosphere. Further, more humans should see nature as a system of cooperation in food chains and life and death cycles. Reuther blames the "[c]ultural avoidance of death" (p. 53) for the pollution crisis, and emphasizes the need for diversity, and a balance of interdependency to sustain ecosystems. The new ideology must combine science with the unreal realm; and transform the mechanistic language illustrating male bias "Westernized consciousness must heal itself of its split-off divisions that have separated knowledge from wonder, reverence, and love" (p.58). Biologists such as James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis adopted the term Gaia, the Greek earth goddess, in reference to their thesis that the entire planet is a living system behaving as a unified organism. In chapter three, Reuther explores the development of scenarios of world destruction from its ancient Near Eastern prototypes to its contemporary uses. Their origin are the ancient experiences of real destruction from nature (floods and droughts) and other humans (wars and colonialization). The Sumerian narrative of the Tigris-Euphrates Valley flood is the paragon of the Hebrew flood story. The dying god narratives of Inanna's and Persephone's descent into the underworld were part of the yearly cycle of death and rebirth of nature that ended the drought with the rains. Jews took over the story illustrating the passage of nature from death to life, the renewal of the powers of fertility and turn it into a punishment story. A divine punishment for disobeying the laws of one god who controls nature and history from above. The narrative is a warning and a threat of punishment for the wicked but ultimately it is a promise of sa...
