Dorothy Stang: Monkeys Cry and the Poor Die, Earth Stewardship as Liberation Ecology - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 398

This third source is key because from Latin America, in the liberationist tradi-
tion—certainly in the theology of liberation—we emphasize the primacy of praxis
and action as the originating and generative source of theoretical refl ection. As
Ortega ( 2011 , p. 273) explains, “The intellectual practice [of liberation] comes out
of the feeling of indignation that springs from becoming aware of social, institu-
tional, and cultural violence that is generated with the structural perversion proper
to colonialism, underdevelopment and the consequential and concomitant state of
cultural dependence.” Social movements have incorporated environmental themes
precisely because they constantly confront environmental situations that cannot be
separated from social situations; situations that political economy or mode of pro-
duction create and so produce “indignation.”
From their struggles for social justice, activists have found it impossible to
separate social struggle from environmental struggle. As they confront environmen-
tal situations, these are incorporated into social struggles. They confront situa-
tions—social as well as environmental—that produce indignation. They see, as
Dorothy Stang did, that environmental struggle is “naturally allied with liberation
theology and the struggles for justice in Latin America” (Murphy 2007 , p. 96). So,
“in the past few years a 'liberation ecology' movement, with the church as its spiri-
tual heart, has been taking shape from Chile to Mexico” (Snell 2007 ; see also Infanti
de la Mora 2008 ; Vicariato 2011 ). Although the church often has been on the mar-
gins of social justice, in Latin America a Christian prophetic voice has long been
present.
As early as Antonio Montesinos and Bartolomé de las Casas in the sixteenth
century, sectors of Latin American Christianity have vehemently protested social
injustice and struggled against it. Priests, nuns, even Protestant pastors, have been
involved in such struggles. Since the 1960s, this tradition has acquired a relevant
role in Latin America and worldwide through liberation theology (see Dussel 1981 ).
Dorothy Stang and Andrés Tamayo are emblematic of this social justice tradition
and represent committed expressions of bottom-up stewardship. In this community-
based tradition, ethics and political action are inseparable because the origin of the
crisis, whether it is social or environmental, is in political economy or power
relations (Ortega 2011 , pp. 270-271). In this sense, the original source for under-
standing the meaning of stewardship must be confl ict and the struggles of those who
defend the Earth.
In addition to the struggles of militants such as Dorothy Stang and Andrés
Tamayo and social-environmental movements, the ancestral ethos or the deep
wisdom of original peoples also constitutes a point of departure for ethical environ-
mental refl ection. These too are social practices, praxis with nature that has molded
social life. This ancestral praxis or deep wisdom is characterized by reciprocal
exchange between nature and human society that assumes adaptive forms of relating
to the environment. This is a deep source for environmental ethics.
Contemporary environmental struggles and ancestral practices (deep wisdom)
are generative sources of environmental ethics because, as Ortega ( 2011 , p. 271)
insists for Latin American philosophy generally, such ethics is “thinking through a
situational, critical, and consciously participatory history.”