Dorothy Stang: Monkeys Cry and the Poor Die, Earth Stewardship as Liberation Ecology - Earth Stewardship: Linking Ecology and Ethics in Theory and Practice - page 403

and worldviews that were established in the sixteenth century continue to inform the
contemporary structure of power and worldviews. Colonialism was based on, and
continues to prosper from, the subordination of people and nature. So just as politi-
cal action seeks to empower powerless humans, Earth Stewardship—liberation
ecology—also seeks to empower the non-human inhabitants of the Earth. Only such
empowerment will make justice possible.
We see this dimension of socio-ecological justice in the life of Dorothy Stang
and in the defense of the poor and the forests by Andrés Tamayo; it is the same
dimension expressed from his jail cell by the Mapuche Nilsa Raín. Indeed, Bishop
Infante makes a similar claim in relation to Patagonian water. Community, in this
sense, refers to more than caring for one another. It implies commitment and strug-
gle in favor of the subaltern and respect for the other or the distinct (Ortega 2011 ,
p. 296). It demands that moral consideration be extended to all who live together,
although doing so is contextual. This will be relevant Earth Stewardship.

27.5.3 Interculturality

Finally, environmental ethics proposed by the theology of liberation will be
intercultural because, as Ortega affi rms, liberation “impels us to take into account
the local practices and languages that express social relations, for there we fi nd
subjugated knowledge and memories” ( 2011 , p. 298). As I have indicated, the theol-
ogy of liberation breaks with universalist-deontological ethics in favor of a contex-
tual ethics that emerges from historical conditions. Following this liberating
intuition, in recent years, pushed by the insurgence of vindicatory social movements
of original peoples and Afro-descendants among others, together with the feminist
insistence on diversity, an “intercultural” ethics has developed (Fornet-Betancourt
1994 ).
“Interculturality” as a hermeneutic for outlining environmental ethics, or think-
ing about Earth Stewardship, refers to other rationalities as legitimate and worthy of
consideration. Additionally, a situational environmental ethics “is not only respect-
ful of the Other but is actively committed to the liberation of the Other” and this
“must be done from and with the subaltern” (Ortega 2011 , p. 296; emphasis in the
original). Interculturality takes with utter seriousness the “diversity of forms of eco-
logical knowledge and practices rooted in Amerindian, colonial, and post-colonial
languages and cultural habits, which in turn are embedded in ancestral native habi-
tats and contemporary anthropogenic habitats,” as Rozzi ( 2012 , p. 346) urges.
Thus interculturality takes up the founding intuition of liberation theology that
the “place” from which refl ection is done is fundamentally important. In this way
the “deep wisdom” of original peoples is incorporated into environmental thought.
Above all, liberating environmental ethics defends the right of original peoples to
practice their own ancestral ethos.