Earth Stewardship and the Biocultural Ethic: Latin American Perspectives - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 103

land and the community of co-inhabitants , and (iii) the conservation and access to
ancestral lands or habitats .
Ecofeminist analyses tend to agree with perspectives and studies of biological
and cultural conservation in Latin America which demonstrate that women are key
stewards of the land. Earth stewardship is not gender-neutral, neither is poverty.
Indigenous and rural women have harvesting and farming habits that imply a rich
empirical knowledge and close interactions with plants and other organisms that
become companions or co-inhabitants in daily family life and other social interac-
tions. Women acquire an experiential understanding about the need for conserving
the integrity of and access to the habitats where they live and farm, obtain water
and other goods. Hence they are not only stewards of the land but often custodians
of it, and are leading resistance movements in its defense. Examples include the
Afro-Latina concheras who defend the mangroves along the Pacifi c coasts of
Colombia and Ecuador (Martínez-Alier 2001 ; Suárez and Ortiz 2006 ; Rozzi 2012 );
Rarámuri or Tarahumara women who defend the forests to assure continuous water
supplies in the Sierra Madre of northwestern Mexico (Fig. 8.5 , Rozzi 2001 ); and
Fig. 8.5 Tarahumara indigenous people from the Sierra Madre in northern Mexico marching to
the city of Chihuahua to protest illegal deforestation that put at risk their water resources. Women
marching with their babies through the streets of Guadalajara were graphically portrayed by US
journalist Wesley Boxley in The New York Times on April 28, 1999, thereby contributing to stop the
illegal deforestation, which ended three months afterwards (Photograph courtesy of Wesley
Boxley)