This is the third of three parts of Victoria’s interview with Sister Jeanne Clark of the Homecoming project and Sophia Garden. Read part one and part two.

VG: When did you decide to become a nun?

SJ: In 1958 at the age of twenty-one, I entered the convent. Before that I worked as a secretary in an advertising agency for three years.

VG: And you grew up on Long Island? Is that why you were saying you wanted to come home?

SJ: When I speak about “Coming Home” I’m really talking about coming home to Earth and the Universe. Actually when I first came into the understanding of myself as coming out of Earth and being so connected with Earth, I wanted to help others see this connection.

I wanted to do the work that I am doing now on the West Coast where I had spent five years. It was so beautiful there right near Seattle and in the midst of the Cascade and Olympic Mountains. I thought of the people there as much more progressive. And to me at the time Long Island seemed like a wasteland of consumerism. I didn’t want to stay here.

But my congregation of Dominican Sisters wanted me to stay as did my friends and the people with whom I had been meeting and envisioning living life sustainably on Long Island.

Also Sister Miriam MacGillis who I had studied with at Genesis Farm reminded me that Long Island was my bioregion and needed my voice. And so I stayed. I have never regretted that decision. You can see the Long Island of the shopping centers and asphalt parkways where people speed about; but there is another Long Island—the Long Island of beautiful rivers, of the Pine Barrens, of the red-winged blackbird and Osprey. When you go to the places on Long Island where the human voice is muted, you can feel the soul of Long Island. I discovered that the land on Long Island was a community to which I belonged. These reflections make me think of something Thomas Berry said which I quote often: “There is no such thing as the human community. There is only the community of life of which the human is a part.”

VG: It is beautiful land and extremely fertile too. A friend of mine in my exercise class was sharing that she gardens around her cooperative. She lives in Oceanside, and noticed that everything easily grows. I told her that Long island has some of the richest soils in the country. The land is dotted with houses, but the soil is still rich. Do other religious individuals like you see the stewardship of the land as part of their calling?

SJ: Yes, there is an increasing number of religious who see Earth and human life as one sacred whole. But I would not use the term stewardship…

VG: O.K.

SJ: Because stewardship denotes…

VG: That separation.

SJ: Yes. Matter of fact in the Dominican order alone, there are many centers where this is happening. Genesis farm is one in New Jersey, Crystal Spring in M.A.; and the Sisters of Blauvelt have a farm in Goshen, N.Y., as well as the Dominican Sisters of Sparkill who have a mile of land along the Hudson. Many religious are aware that ecology and religion are all coming together.

VG: You also said that the nuns and Dominican Village residents have been affected.

SJ: Yes, now we have many retired sisters on the 3rd and 4th floors. They’re looking out their windows all the time telling me about the farm, and how beautiful it is, because this land was a farm long ago. So we’re going back to the history of this place also. And that’s another big piece of coming home to place. It’s another thing that I didn’t talk about that’s very strong in me, which is the whole understanding of coming home to your place. Wendell Berry the Kentucky farmer, is very strong on this because we have no sense of place.

VG: True.

SJ: We live in these virtual worlds. We have to come home to our place. When we located the garden here, we began to explore more of the history of this place. Our sisters came here in 1876, so we’ve been here since then on this land.

VG: That’s a long time.

SJ: And it was a farm. The land was leased to us because of our work with orphans. This part right around here (present 1.5 acre Sophia Garden where we are sitting under a tree) was the Stattel farm which we bought in 1953. So we’re now part of joining our history to the history of Long Island, where now the farmland is disappearing and we’re trying to say, “It’s valuable!” This probably is the most open space in the town of Babylon. I know that the Town of Babylon is about 95% developed. So this is a big open space within the town.

VG: We have all these new words now that are in our consciousness. We’ve got local, locavore, 100 mile dieters, and people are really getting into it. They’re canning, they bring their own bags. So people are embracing it on a superficial level, but I think that for many people, it’s more than superficial. Because they keep doing it and getting more involved. There’s more blogs, books, etc. So I think it is sticking but I wonder about Long Island. I mean, now the cost of transported food has increased and the cost of local food is actually on par or is less.

SJ: We have waiting lists for membership.

VG: So my underlying question is, how do you envision Long Island looking in say 10 or 15 years?

SJ: Well I think it’s a choice. You see Thomas Berry says it’s a choice and we’re at the crossroads of choice. He calls it the Technozoic Age or the Ecozoic Age. The Ecozoic Age naturally being the one where the human and the natural would go into the future as one single community. We’re ending the Cenozoic Age. This is historically correct. The Cenozoic Age has gone on for the last 65 million years and because of our technology, we are actually ending that age.

There’s a movie called, The Awakening Universe. There’s one particular scene of the dinosaurs, where the narrator states that the dinosaurs ended because of an asteroid, and then the scene changes to cars stuck in traffic on a highway, the narrator continues, saying things are ending now because of an “usteroid”. So we are in fact ending this era. The choice lies in where will we go? There’s nothing for sure. If our consciousness keeps going in the direction of the Ecozoic, we will create a mutually enhanced relationship with Earth.

VG: In terms of one issue, in terms of feeding ourselves, I think there’s plenty of space we can do that on, if we do it intensively, if we do it in our backyards and on public lands.

SJ: If we go into the Ecozoic, which I’m hoping for and working towards, then the lawns on Long island will be changed into vegetable gardens. Why have lawns when you need food?

VG: [Laughing] Right! A friend of mine has an idea to build curbside gardens, where children could pick fresh vegetables that are easily accessible.

SJ: Already the builders are trying to build self-sufficient villages, because we know we are going to run out of oil. Have you seen the movie, The End of Suburbia? It is a challenging film. The movie reveals the historical context of suburbia; it was built during a time when we had so much fuel and could drive anywhere, but now we know better and need to design villages where jobs and shopping are within walking distance.

VG: So we can embrace what we learned from the past.

SJ: Sure, because organic farming is not new. That’s the way people farmed before the chemical industry. After the Second World War was when the chemical industry blossomed.

VG: But hasn’t technology taught us a lot in the last 25-30 years?

SJ: Oh, well we wouldn’t have the new story without technology. We wouldn’t have the story of the universe. That’s what I teach children. I’m not against science. “Sr. Jeanne loves science”, I tell them. And I say that scientists are searching for the truth and they bring the truth to us. Science and technology brought us the photo of Earth. Just imagine, astronauts had to leave Earth to take this picture, so all of us could see our home.

And that has changed our consciousness. So technology is not bad. It’s the consciousness with which we use the technology.

VG: I did a search on Thomas Berry and he writes about his meadow experience.

SJ: Oh, yes when he was 11 years old. He learned an important truth taught to him by a meadow near his home in North Carolina.

VG: Yes, I read a bit on his website.

SJ: Sr. Joyce and I visited some schools in Brooklyn. We did some teaching there once a month. And when we taught the 9 & 10 year olds, we told them the story of the meadow. During his encounter with the meadow, he realized that, “Whatever preserves and enhances this meadow in the natural cycles of its transformation is good…Whatever opposes this meadow or negates it is not good.”

He wrote about that experience in his book, The Great Work. We told them that we all need to be involved in something bigger than ourselves, to be together in this work. We’re all involved in this Great Work, helping to save the planet and to make this world safe for all species. Just think, [we tell the students] Thomas Berry learned from the meadow when he was around the same age as all of you. Do you have that book?

VG: I don’t, but I may get a copy. His writing is very interesting.

SJ: I can loan it to you. I have a couple of copies.

VG: I’d love to read it.