Thomas Berry Award

Presenter Name

Mary Evelyn Tucker PhD, Yale University
John Grim PhD, Yale University
Carl Anthony
Paloma Pavel PhD

Presenter Bio

2021 Thomas Berry Award Recipients

Carl Anthony and M. Paloma Pavel

Carl Anthony, architect, author and urban / suburban / regional design strategist, is co-founder of the Breakthrough Communities Project. He has served as Acting Director of the Community and Resource Development Unit at the Ford Foundation, responsible for the Foundation’s world-wide programs in fields of Environment and Development, and Community Development. He directed the Foundation’s Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative and the Regional Equity Demonstration in the United States. Carl funded the national Conversation on Regional Equity (CORE), a dialogue of national policy analysts and advocates for new metropolitan racial justice strategies. He was Founder and, for 12 years Executive Director, of the Urban Habitat Program in the San Francisco Bay Area. With his colleague Luke Cole at the California Rural Legal Assistance Foundation, he founded and published the Race, Poverty and the Environment Journal, the only environmental justice periodical in the United States. He has a professional degree in architecture from Columbia University. In 1996, he was appointed Fellow at the Institute of Politics, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. He is the author of The Earth, the City, and the Hidden Narrative of Race (New Village Press, 2017). 

M. Paloma Pavel, PhD, is an eco-psychologist working at the intersection of the transformation of consciousness and environmental/climate justice. She is the President of Earth House Center. With Carl Anthony, Pavel co-founded the Breakthrough Communities Project and served as Director of Strategic Communications for the Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Initiative at the Ford Foundation. Pavel’s academic background includes graduate study at the London School of Economics (LSE) and Harvard University. Her dissertation (Organizational Culture and Leadership Development) was part of a five-year study by the Carnegie Foundation on the workplace in America, which culminated in the publication Good Work. Dr. Pavel has taught at many Bay Area institutions, including the California Institute of Integral Studies. Her 30 years teaching in Japan included a Fulbright at Tokyo Institute of Technology where she taught in the Global Leadership Academy and worked with community leaders in Fukushima responding to the Triple disaster. At MIT Press, she co-edits the Sustainable Metropolitan Communities Books series with Robert Gottlieb. Dr. Pavel is editor of the nationally recognized Breakthrough Communities: Sustainability and Justice in the Next American Metropolis (MIT Press, 2009). She is the author of Climate Justice: Groundbreaking Stories from Frontline Communities in California and co-author of Random Kindness and Senseless Acts of Beauty.

Presentation Description

Mission and History

The mission of the Thomas Berry Foundation is to carry out the Great Work of Thomas in enhancing the flourishing of the Earth community. The Berry Foundation is dedicated to supporting the Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology and the Journey of the Universe project.

Created in 1998 by Thomas Berry, Mary Evelyn Tucker, John Grim, Martin Kaplan, and Thomas' sister, Margaret Berry, the Foundation has promoted Thomas’ ideas through publishing his essays and overseeing translations, initiating an archive at Harvard, and organizing the Thomas Berry Award and Lecture.

Thomas Berry Award

This Award was inaugurated in 1999 in Washington DC when the Center for Respect of Life and Environment (CRLE) at the Humane Society of the United States created the award to honor Berry’s legacy. Since then it has been presented to selected individuals who have modeled the “great work” in their teaching, writing, or public service. The Yale Forum on Religion and Ecology partnered with CRLE in presenting the Award from its early stages and now sponsors the Award.

Link to Website(s)

Thomas Berry Award