Dorothy Stang: Monkeys Cry and the Poor Die, Earth Stewardship as Liberation Ecology - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 400

27.3 Contextual Ethics and Material Problem

This focus suggests a type of contextual or historical ethics that takes its clues from
concrete realities rather than from preconceived and universalist moral notions.
Historical reality carries within itself is own normativity (May 2012 ). As the Brazilian
ecofeminist and liberation theologian Ivone Gebara explains, “[Contextual ethics]
means that it is a requirement of the historical moment in which we live, and that it
unfolds from local contexts, although it connects to and opens toward a global per-
spective” (Gebara 1998 , p. 99). Such ethics is material, not ideal. The theology of
liberation assumes this type of material contextual non-universal ethics, breaking with
idealist and deontological categories (May 2012 ; Silva-Gotay 1981 , pp. 273-313).
As contextual, liberation environmental ethics corresponds to concrete situations
and struggles, frequently local, without forgetting that they are part of much larger
struggles. Such environmental ethics is formed from within subaltern groups that
struggle for their own well-being as well as that of the environment, groups such as
the poor peasants with whom Dorothy Stang worked in Brazil or Andrés Tamayo in
Honduras, or the Mapuches jailed in Chile for defending their traditional territory,
or even the defense of the integrity of water that Bishop Infanti leads in central and
southern Chile. At the same time, a contextual focus necessitates ethics that corre-
spond to specifi c ecosystemic and bioregional realities, whether they are Amazonian
rain forest, sub-Antarctic temperate forests, Patagonian pampas, or high Altiplano
deserts. This suggests that ethical generalizations should be avoided in order to
respond to specifi c situations; nevertheless the contextual focus “connects to and
opens toward a global perspective,” as Gebara ( 1998 , p. 99) reminds us, even while
respecting and affi rming the particular.
This contextual approach proposes that liberation ecology understands environ-
mental problems as material problems that correspond to socio-historical condi-
tions. Environmental problems are not simply problems of attitudes and personal
commitments, because ideas and attitudes are rooted in material realities.
Environmental ethics is political ethics because, at bottom, it is a question of politi-
cal economy or mode of production. We see the political character in its purpose to
transform unjust socio-historical reality and, therefore, its material character in the
sense that it locates environmental problems in the confi guration or structural orga-
nization of communities and in structures of power (political economy), or the
material conditions of human life.
Behind national material realities is the continuing North-South contradiction
and the role of neocolonialism/recolonialization, stimulated by the globalization of
raw materials and markets, this in function of the enrichment of capital, whether it
be foreign or national. The development of the world's wealthy continues to be
predicated on the exploitation of the poor. This international structure is replicated
at the national level and confi gures national political economies to the benefi t of
national elites (Robinson 2004 ). In every sense, this reality urges that political econ-
omy is the hermeneutic for planting environmental questions, and therefore, Earth
Stewardship.