Earth Stewardship and the Biocultural Ethic: Latin American Perspectives - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 100

Box 8.3. (continued)
this trend, Boff proposes recovering the original meaning of economy:
“the administration of the fair and modest means necessary for life and
well-being. Rational application of scant income is the central activity of
most households in the Third World…. [In this alternative] model of soci-
ety, not only work but leisure, not only effi ciency but gratuitousness, not
only productivity but the absurd, playful dimension must be encouraged.
Imagination, fantasy, utopia, dreams, emotions, symbolism, poetry, and
religion have to be valued as much as production, organization, functional-
ity, and rationality.” (Boff 1995 , pp. 19 and 28)
4. The Eco-ethics Path defi nes ethics as the “unlimited responsibility for
everything that exists and lives. The supreme good is to be found in earthly
and cosmic integrity. That does not amount merely to the common good of
humanity, but includes the welfare of nature.” (Boff 1995 , pp. 29-30)
5. The Mental Ecology Path emphasizes the diversity of beings inhabiting not
only nature but also ourselves, as images, symbols, and values. The water,
plants, and animals that inhabit us are archetypes and fi gures fi lled with
emotions. This understanding counteracts the modern fabrication of the
“one-dimensional man.” 6 Overcoming this one-dimensionality reintegrates
the forces of reason with the multiple forces of the universe that are present
in our impulses, visions, intuitions, dreams, and creativity.
6. The Cosmic Mysticism Path shows that spirituality and mysticism origi-
nate in the sacramental, symbolic, and affective reasoning that captures
gratuitousness and the sense of communion among all beings.
7. The Eco-theology Path , based on a Christian-Franciscan panentheism, is
rooted in tenderness as the main attitude in the encounter with other beings.
This Christian praxis generates a cordial knowledge ( cordial = from the
heart) which does not distance itself from diverse realities. Instead it makes
possible communion and friendship with them, as was done by St. Francis
for whom the moon and the sun, water and fi re, the birds and the herbs are
our sisters and brothers with whom we share the same divine genealogy.
In the infl uential article “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” his-
torian Lynn White Jr. ( 1967 ) criticized Western Christianity as “the most anthro-
pocentric religion the world has seen” (1205). However, he concluded his essay
proposing Saint Francis “as a patron saint of ecologists” (1207). Later, in 1979
Pope John Paul II formalized it, and in 1986 the World Wide Fund for Nature
(WWF) organized in Assisi a meeting that generated The Assisi Declarations
from Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish and Islamic relationships with nature
and sacred duty to care for it (ARC 1986 ). Thirty years later, the Argentine-born
Pope Francis took his name from Francis of Assisi, and is writing an encyclical
6 Boff alludes to Herbert Marcuse's concept, and homonymous topic One-Dimensional
Man: Studies in Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society (Beacon Press: Boston,
Massachusetts, 1964).