Earth spirituality: …a complex weaving of reciprocities
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Posted on February 27, 2007
Filed Under Deep ecology, Ecological hope, Earth spirituality, Inspiration and reflection
Fostering Ecological Hope
Today from Margaret Swedish:
Today I give this space to another voice, a voice from Brazil. This reflection was sent to me by a colleague of my many years in the Central America solidarity movement, a journey that led many of us to this place, addressing the broken relationship between the human and, well, just about all the rest of Nature. For us, the link between the brokenness of injustice among peoples is integrally linked to that other brokenness.
Leonardo Boff was a liberation theologian who inspired many of us during those decades. Got into plenty of trouble with the church, too. A Franciscan priest at the time, he was ordered to a year of silence after he critiqued the church for its historic role in the oppression of Latin America’s poor. He left the order in 1992, but has continued to work as a pastoral leader and theologian among Brazil’s Landless Movement. He took the path towards an Earth spirituality long before many of us did, seeking to integrate a commitment to deep ecology with liberation theology. Some of his supporters felt that he had broken with ‘the struggle’ when he published his remarkable book, Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor, moving as he clearly was from a strict social justice liberation paradigm. The book had no small impact on my own thinking.
Of course, in many ways, this put him much more in touch with, or in tune with, the indigenous of his country and the spirituality of his land of Brazil.
Which is what we need to do — to get back into harmony with the land from which we emerged, that gave birth to us, to restore that fundamental bond.
It’s Lent in the Christian world, and Boff wrote this little reflection, which I offer here:
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The Challenge of the Amazon
Leonardo Boff, Theologian
Earthcharter Commission
The central theme of the «Fraternity Campaign» of this period of lent in the Roman Catholic Church of Brazil is about the Amazon. Millions of the faithful will reflect, during these four weeks, on the importance of the Amazon to us, and to the future of the Earth.
The Amazon houses the largest aquatic and genetic inheritance of the Planet. We know from Eneas Salati, one of our finest scholars, that: «In few hectares of Amazon forest the number of species of plants and insects is larger than of all the flora and fauna in Europe.» But this luxurious forest is extremely fragile, because it stands over one of the poorest soils on Earth. If we do not control deforestation, in few decades the whole Amazon could be transformed into an immense savannah.
The Amazon is not untouched virgin land. For thousands of years, scores of Native peoples that have lived and still live there, have functioned as true ecologists. A great part of the Amazon jungle has been managed by Native peoples, setting up «resource islands», creating favorable conditions for the development of useful species of vegetation such as the babaçu, the palm, bamboo, the chestnut forests and all varieties of fruits, planted or tended for them and for all those who venture that way. The famed «black lands of Indians» speak of that management.
The idea that Native people are purely “natural” is an erroneous ecologization of them, created by urban imagination, tired of the artificiality of life. The Native is a cultural being. As anthropologist Viveiros de Castro witnesses, «the Amazon we see today is the result of centuries of social intervention, in the same way that the societies that live there are the result of centuries of coexistence with the Amazon.» E. E. Moraes says the same in his enlightening book, «When the Amazon Flowed into the Pacific»,(Cuando el Amazonas desembocaba en el Pacífico, Vozes, Petrópolis 2007): «Not much nature remains untouched and unaltered by humans in the Amazon.» For 1,100 years, Tupi-Guarani people have lived in a broad territory that stretched from the Andean foothills of the Amazon river to the Paraguay and Parana basins.
Native people and the jungle, therefore, mutually conditioned each other. Their relations are not “natural,” but cultural; a complex weaving of reciprocities. Native people feel and see nature as part of their society and culture, as an extension of their personal and social beings. To them, nature is a living being, full of purpose. Nature is not, as for us modern people, something simply objective, mute and without spirit. Nature speaks and Native people understand her voice and her message. This is why Native people are always sensing nature, and adapting themselves to her in a complex play of inter-retro-relations. They found a subtle socio-cosmic equilibrium and a dynamic integration, notwithstanding that they also have wars and true exterminations, such as those of the Sambaqueiros and of other tribes.
There are wise lessons we must learn from them as we face present environmental threats. It is important to understand the Earth, not as something inert, with unlimited resources, available to us to our whim, but as something alive, the Mother of all, who must be respected in her integrity. If a tree is cut down, an apology rite is performed to restore the alliance of friendship. We need a symphonic relation with the community of life, because as has been shown, Gaia has already surpassed her limits of sustainability. If we let things continue as they are going, doing nothing, the threats will turn out to be a devastating reality.
Leonardo Boff
02-23-2007
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