Earth Stewardship and the Biocultural Ethic: Latin American Perspectives - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 106

Box 8.4. (continued)
(d) Losses of traditional ecological and cultural knowledge and practices; for
example, the disappearance of local markets where women offer and
exchange a wide variety of foods, provoking food insecurity leading to
malnutrition, dependency, losses of autonomy and dignity.
(e) Immigration of Quechua women and their families toward marginal
neighborhoods in cities where most frequently end up living in conditions
of extreme poverty.
The clear interdependencies among the life-habits of human and other-
than-human communities of co-in-habitants along Andean altitudinal gradi-
ents demonstrate that the conservation of habitats and access to them is a
necessary condition for the autonomy, identity, dignity, and well-being of
local communities. Assuring conditions that allow Quechua stewards to have
access to their ancestral land constitute a challenge and a responsibility for an
intercultural Earth stewardship endeavor involving all society.
The conservation of habitats and access to them is the condition of possibility for
the autonomy, identity, dignity, continuity of habits, and well-being of local com-
munities. The formal proposal of the biocultural ethic interrelates habits and habi-
tats with the identities and well-being of the co-inhabitants, humans and
other-than-humans. Consequently, the conservation of habitats and access to them
by communities of co-inhabitants becomes an ethical imperative. The biocultural
ethic demands that this imperative be incorporated into development policies as a
matter of socio-environmental justice.
Once displaced from their traditional lands and ways of life, indigenous people,
peasant, and fi shermen communities often confront material and cultural misery in
cities. In the marginal neighborhoods of metropolitan areas in Latin America, these
displaced people frequently lack access to basic services, such as food, water, shel-
ter, and sanitary conditions (Parentelli 1996 ; Gebara 1999 ; Rozzi 2001 ). Hence,
they face extreme conditions of poverty that are rapidly expanding in the marginal
neighborhoods of metropolitan areas in Latin America. At the same time, their
ancestral lands lose their traditional stewards and local custodians, and become
more vulnerable to large-scale, non-sustainable forms of exploitation. Box 8.4 illus-
trates the importance of conserving both the traditional habits and the regional habi-
tats that have sustained the well-being of human and other-than-human communities
in the Andean Cordillera.
I have proposed a biocultural ethic that aims to recover an integral understanding
of the interrelationships among the cultural habits and the habitats where these
habits take place (Rozzi 2012 ). I say recover, because these links have been
largely ignored by modern dominant ethics that are centered on eurocentric human
habits. However, pre-Socratic and other early Western philosophies (as well as