The most threatened beings in creation: the poor

source

We now need to bring together these two types of discourse, that of ecology
and that of liberation theology. In its analysis of the causes of the
impoverishment afflicting the majority of the world’s population, liberation
theology came to appreciate the existence of a perverse logic. The
same logic of the ruling system, based on profit and social manipulation,
that leads to the exploitation of workers, also leads to the spoilation of
entire nations and eventually to the depredation of nature itself. We can no
longer simply make technological corrections and redefinitions – though
we still have to do so – in the style of reforms within this same logic; we
need to move beyond this logic and way of seeing ourselves, which we have
enjoyed for at least the last three hundred years. We can no longer go on
treating nature, as present-day societies do, as a sort of supermarket or
self-service cafeteria. Nature is our common heritage, which is being
impiously plundered, but which we must conserve. We also need to
guarantee the conditions for its later survival for our own generation and
for future generations, since the entire universe has been working for
fifteen thousand million years to bring us to the point we have now
reached.

From being the Satan of earth, we have to educate ourselves to be its
guardian angel, capable of saving the earth, our cosmic homeland and
earthly mother.

The astronauts accustomed us to seeing the earth as a spaceship floating
blue in interstellar space, bearing the common destiny of all beings. The
fact is that on this earthship, a fifth of the population travels in the space
reserved for passengers, and these consume eighty per cent of the
provisions made for the journey. The other four-fifths travel in the cargo
hold, suffering from cold, hunger and every other sort of deprivation.
They are slowly becoming conscious of the injustice of this distribution of
goods and services. They are planning to revolt: either we die passively of
starvation, they tell one another, or we make changes that will benefit us
all. The argument is not hard to understand: either we all save ourselves
within a system of living together in solidarity and sharing with and in
spaceship earth, or we explode it through our indignation and fling us all
into the abyss. This understanding is growing all the time.

The latest arrangements of the world order ruled by capital under the
regime of globalization and neo-liberalism have brought fantastic material
progress. State-of-the-art technologies, those of the third scientific
revolution, have enormously increased production. But the social effect is
perverse: the exclusion of workers on a massive scale, and even of entire
regions of the world, which are of little interest for the accumulation of
capital in a cruelly indifferent mentality. ‘4

Recent data suggest that total world profits are sacrificing the populations
of Hiroshima and Nagasaki every day. ‘5 Progress is immense, but
deeply inhuman. Its focus is not human beings and peoples with their
needs and preferences, but merchandise and the market to which
everything has to be subject.

In this context, the most threatened beings in creation are not the
whales, but the poor, condemned to an early death. UN statistics !ndicate
that fifteen million children die every year before finishing their fifth day of
life, from hunger or the diseases associated with hunger. ISO millions are
undernourished and 800 millions live permanently with hunger. ,6
It is from this human catastrophe that liberation theology starts when it
meets the ecological question. In other words, it starts from social ecology,
from the way human beings, the most complex beings in creation, relate to
one another, and how they organize themselves in their relation to other
beings in nature under regimes of great exploitation and cruel exclusion.
What is most urgently sought is the minimum social justice required to
ensure that life has its basic dignity. This presupposes more than social
justice. It presupposes a new alliance between humankind and other
beings, a new courtesy toward creation and the working-out of an ethic and
mysticism of brother/sisterhood with the entire cosmic community.
Democracy must become socio-cosmic: that is, the elements of nature such
as mountains, plants, rivers, animals and the atmosphere must be the new
citizens who share in the human banquet, while humans share in the
cosmic banquet. Only then will there be ecological justice and peace on
planet Earth.

Liberation theology should adopt the new cosmology of ecological
discourse, the vision that sees the earth as a living superorganism linked to
the entire universe. It should understand the human mission, exercised by
men and women, as an expression of earth itself and a manifestation of the
principle· of intelligibility and loving care that exists in the universe; it
should understand that human beings – the noosphere – represent the most
advanced stage of the cosmic evolutionary process on its conscious level.
They are co-pilots with the guiding principles of the universe that have
controlled the whole process since the moment of the ‘big bang’ some
fifteen thousand million years ago. Human beings were created for the
universe and not vice versa, in order to bring about a higher and more
complex stage of universal evolution.

Having adopted this basic stance, we need to define our starting point –
an option for the poor that includes the most threatened beings in creation.
The first of these is planet Earth itself, as an entity. Acceptance that the
supreme value is the conservation of the planet and the maintenance of
conditions in which the human species can flourish has not yet sufficiently
entered general consciousness. This option shifts the axis of all questions;
the basic question is not: What future is there for Christianity or Christ’s
church? Nor: What will be the fate of the West? It is rather: What future is
there for planet Earth and for humankind as its expression? To what extent
can Christianity with its spiritual heritage guarantee its collective future?
Then, we have to make an option for the poor of the world, for those
immense majorities of the human species who are exploited and decimated
by a small majority of the same species. The challenge is to make people see
one another as members of a great earthly family together with other
species and find their way back to the community of other living beings, the
planetary and cosmic community.

Finally, we have to find a way of guaranteeing the sustainability, not of
one type of development, but of the planet itself, in the short, medium and
long term. This requires as a non-consumerist sort of cultural practice one
that respects the rhythms of ecosystems, that produces an economy of
sufficiency for all and delivers the common good not only to human beings
but also to the other beings in creation.

 Liberation theology and ecological discourse as a bridge
between North and South

Two great problems will occupy human minds and hearts from now on:
What is the fate and future of planet Earth if we prolong the logic of
plunder to which our development and consumer model has accustomed
us? What can the poor two-thirds of humankind hope for from the world?

There is the risk that the ‘culture of the satisfied’ will close in on its
consumerist egoism and cynically ignore the devastation of the poor masses
of the world. Similarly, there is the risk that the ‘new barbarians’ will not
accept their death sentence and will launch themselves into a desperate
struggle for survival, threatening and destroying everything in their path.
Humankind could still be facing levels of violence and destruction never
yet seen on the face of the earth, unless we – collectively – decide to change
the course of civilization, shift its axis from the logic of means to exclusive
profit to a logic of ends as a function of the common good of planet Earth, of
human beings and of all beings, in the exercise of freedom and cooperation
among all the nations.

Today these two questions, with different emphases, are common
concerns of the North and South of the planet. And they make up the
central ‘content of liberation theology and of ecological reflection. These
two thoughts allow for dialogue and convergence in diversity between the
geographical poles of the world. They should be an indispensable
mediation in safeguarding the whole of creation and in redeeming the
dignity of the poor majorities of the world. (So liberation theology and
ecological discourse need one another and mutually complement one
another.)

Translated by Paul Burns

Notes
1. Cf. D. G. Hallman, Ecotheolo!!)’, Voices fmlll South al1d Xorth, Geneva and
Maryknoll, NY 1973.
2. Cf. F. Guatani, As H-es ecologias, Campinas 1988.
3. See further data in L. Boff, Ecologia, lIlul1dializa(“ao e espiritualidade, Slio Paulo
1993 (ET in preparation). .
4. Various, L’ecologie, ce mathialisme histOlique, Paris 1992; Various, Ecology,
f.’COIlOlIlics, Ethics. The Bmkell Circle, New Haven 1991.
5. Cf. M. Longair, The 01igins of our Universe, Cambridge 1992; R. R. Freitas
Mourlio, ‘Nature is an Heraclitean Fire: Reflections on Cosmology in an Ecological
Age’, Studies in the Spin’tllality of the Jesuits 25, New York 1991.
6. Cf. F. White, The O~’erl:iew Elfel’t, Boston 1987.
7. Seu’ }IJI”k Times, 9 October 1982.
8. J” Lovelock, The rWes 0.( Gaia: the Biography of Our Lh’illg Harth, New York
1988 .
9. E. Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Ul1i~’erse: Scielltijic al1d HUIIIlIlI bllplil’atiolls oj
the Hmetgillg Paradigm 0.( H~’ollltioll, New York 1980.
10. 0 SOllho da terra (The Dream of Earth), Petropolis 1991, 35.
I I. R. O. Muller. 0 1l1lscimellto de Ulllll ch’iliza{“{w global, Slio Paulo 1993.
Liberation Theology and Ecology 77
12. Cf. H. Assmann, ‘Teologia da solidaridade a da cidadania ouseja continuando a
teologia da liberta~ao’, Notas de ciencias da religiiio 2, 1994, 2–g.
13. See the already classic work by C. Boff, Teologia e pratica, Petr6polis 1993.
14. Cf. F. J. Hinkelammert, ‘La 16gica de la expulsi6n del mercado capitalista
mundial y el proyecto de Iiberaci6n’, Pasos, San Jose, Costa Rica 1992.
IS. Cf. R. Garaudy, Le debat du siecle, Paris 1995,14·
16. Cf. UNDP, Human Development Report, Oxford 1990.