Customer Reviews

Liberation of Life: From the Cell to the Community

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Birch and Cobb's The Liberation of Life is a curious cross disciplinary text which reflects the disparate academic backgrounds of its authors. Charles Birch is a biologist while John B Cobb is a theologian (of the "process" variety).

This book had a profound impact on me when I was a student, and I continue to feel its impact years later. In a few (fairly obvious) ways it is an almost inevitable successor to A N Whitehead's Process and Reality (1929), but it benefits greatly from a firm grounding in empirical biological science.

Where this book departs from hard science is in trying to develop a social ethic, albeit a rationally-based one, through an emphasis on cultural inheritance (as well as genetic inheritance). It also places humankind and human behavior firmly within the context of nature's ecology as a whole, and through identifying humans as now having agency in their own evolutionary trajectory.

The authors are concerned for human "aliveness", and they see this as correlated with two specific phenomena: "how rich is the world to which one is attuned and how fresh is the response of feeling, thought and action to that world." The issue, then, is how best human beings can live in the world.

No doubt many positivists will be alarmed by the continual references to biblically-based traditions of "being and living," while some of a more religious persuasion may equally be concerned by the reframing of the ultimate creative force as "Life" (rather than as a more conventionally religious god concept). Moreover, it is stated that God's own life (in a consequent sense) "depends on there being some world to include."

Since this book was first published in 1981, some of the issues it addresses have become more pressing, and the chapter on A Just and Sustainable World makes very difficult (and possibly unpalatable) reading, given the ecological realities with which, most of us now accept, our world is faced. Indeed, Birch and Cobb anticipate an almost inescapable ecocatastrophe resulting from their observation that the "human race has joined forces with entropy against life." The only way to avoid this looming catastrophe, they argue, is to cooperate with our environment to enable a "smooth transition" to a new way of living which is just and sustainable.

This is an extremely thought-provoking book, and while it may be open to challenge from a variety of perspectives, it is one that would greatly benefit many students, whether they are involved in the natural sciences, the social sciences or the arts and humanities.