Church, Cosmovision and the Environment

Religion and Social Conflict in Contemporary Latin America

Evan Berry, Robert Albro

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781351596114
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Politica ambientale ed energetica

Though currently only partially understood, evolving interactions among Latin American communities of faith, governments, and civil societies are a key feature of the popular mobilizations and policy debates about environmental issues in the region. This edited collection describes and analyses multiple types of religious engagement with environmental concerns and conflicts seen in modern Latin American democracies.

This volume contributes to scholarship on the intersections of religion with environmental conflict in a number of ways. Firstly, it provides comparative analysis of the manner in which diverse religious actors are currently participating in transnational, national, and local advocacy in places such as, Peru, Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico. It also considers the diversity of an often plural religious engagement with advocacy, including Catholic, Evangelical and Pentecostal perspectives alongside the effects of indigenous cosmological ideas. Finally, this book explores the specific religious sources of seemingly unlikely new alliances and novel articulations of rights, social justice, and ethics for the environmental concerns of Latin America.

The relationship between religion and environmental issues is an increasingly important topic in the conversations around ecology and climate change. This book is, therefore, a pertinent and topical work for any academic working in Religious Studies, Environmental Studies, and Latin American Studies.

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Introduction

Religion and environmental conflict in Latin America

Robert Albro and Evan Berry

This collection aspires to a better understanding of religious engagement with environmental struggles in Latin America, in light of the lively public debate and political contestation around environmental questions in the region today, active participation of religious groups in such mobilizations, and centrality of these concerns for new forms of rights-based social justice mobilization. If in different ways, each chapter illuminates the variety of roles that religious actors and ideas currently play in social mobilization and public policy around the environment in Latin America. Our assessment is that public perceptions of environmental issues are changing, but in ways as yet poorly understood. Increasingly today environmental causes across the region are informed by interactions among grassroots activists, churches, governments, and civil society groups, facilitated by active religious participation in, and the circulation of religious concepts through, transnational or issue-specific advocacy networks dedicated to environmental concerns. Understanding religion’s role in such networked advocacy, as a notable component of contemporary popular mobilization and policy debates about the environment, is a recurrent focus of this volume.

This book is the product of a two-year project that convened a cohort of researchers concerned with religion and environmental contestation across the region, with support from the Henry Luce Foundation’s Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.¹ And the focus of this collection emerges from a confluence of related socio-historical factors, including: an unprecedented natural resource boom in Latin America over the previous decade – particularly in hydrocarbons and mining – the slowing of that boom, and rising interest in post-extractive alternatives; a growing public perception of climate change, as a clear and dire threat to the region; a steady increase in the frequency of conflicts over the environment, generated in response to these several developments (see Acuña 2015; Bebbington 2012; Bebbington and Bury 2013; Roberts and Thanos 2003); and the proliferation of popular environmental mobilizations in the region over the same period, particularly though not exclusively among indigenous communities, who have linked their environmental and territorial priorities to social justice goals and human rights frameworks (e.g. Brunnegger and Faulk 2016; De Castro and Hogenboom 2016).

Religious engagement with environmental disputes has influenced approaches among advocates and governments currently navigating these hotly contested issues, and accompanying public attitudes informing political behavior. Often in collaboration with religious actors, governments have pursued environmental policies and objectives – such as El Salvador’s recent decision to suspend all metals mining – directly affecting the lives of millions of people, which can strengthen or undermine the legitimacy of actors and institutions, especially religious and political leaders. That religious actors have emerged in the context of regional environmental struggles as promoters of rights and justice is not completely surprising. Religious ideas and interventions played a significant role in efforts to resist authoritarian regimes throughout the region during the period of the 1960s–1980s (see Wilde 2015), most notably through the influence of liberation theology. And as subsequent chapters make apparent, an earlier generation’s religious discourse and practice continue to echo in current debates about the environment, if in new and particular ways. This collection evaluates the extent to which the current involvement by religious groups in environmental conflicts represents a continuation of, or break from, that previous generation of pastoral work on behalf of rights and justice in the region.

Featuring nine case-driven chapters, this volume ranges from Argentina, Brazil, and Bolivia, to Ecuador, Guatemala, and Mexico respectively. Chapters are concerned with the various ways that religious actors, traditions, and concepts engage each other, as well as non-religious and secular concerns, while also taking account of interactions among indigenous cosmological systems and non-indigenous religious beliefs and practices. Chapters are, further, concerned with the ways these engagements have generated new and often religiously plural conceptual and ethical or rights-based frameworks and forms of public practice, as part of efforts to address urgent environmental challenges and conflicts now prevalent throughout Latin America. The volume concludes with a provocative chapter by the Uruguayan ecolo-gist and environmental activist Eduardo Gudynas, at once synthesizing its key themes, and describing the distinctive characteristics of the region’s environmentalism, while offering a persuasive account of where environmental activism in the region might go in the near future.

This collection is divided topically and conceptually into two complementary sections. The first set of chapters, including those by Kerber, Aasmundsen, Berry, and Freston, focus primarily on the agency of non-indigenous Catholic and Evangelical institutions and initiatives. As a set, they also consider the efficacy of religious advocacy in scalar terms, paying attention to how religious interventions currently engage and connect the local, with the national, the transnational, and the global. The set of chapters composing the second part, which includes those by Albro, Swanson, Grandia, Howe, and Tiedje, extend the range of concerns developed in the first half of the book, while also highlighting the emergent protagonism of indigenous peoples, and the accompanying circulation of indigenous cosmological concepts, around environmental conflict in the region and for multilateral policy making beyond the region. Chapters address how and why indigenous actors have come to be so prominent in such conflicts and in ongoing efforts to come to terms with environmental challenges such as climate change (see also Spikin and Hernández 2016).

Descriptively and analytically, therefore, this edited volume is concerned with understanding the efficacy of religious actors and concepts in arenas of environmental conflict in Latin America, that is, their success in promoting specific outcomes in the course of environmental struggles. “Religion” is treated as a site of encounter and contestation and is understood broadly to encompass multiple religious traditions and indigenous cosmological commitments. Against the background of an increasingly plural religious landscape in Latin America characterized by new kinds of religious and secular collaborations and conflicts, chapters collectively develop an account of the potentially transformational effects of religious protagonism, most often through participation in issue-specific advocacy networks.

In contrast to religion’s often conservative reputation, this collection also opens up new analytic directions for understanding the contributions of religion to environmental advocacy by examining religious efficacy as a productive form of cultural mediation. Contributors focus, if in different ways, on the transactional and translational work of religious engagement among both allies and parties to conflict, between scales of engagement from the local to the global, and frequently through networked forms of collaboration. In the process, they document the creative contributions of religious action and concepts to the transformation and, in some cases, revitalization and expansion, of prevailing ethical, rights and justice frameworks as part of the articulation of environmental goals in Latin America.

A. The environment in Latin America today

In contemporary Latin America concerns about the environment have risen to the top of the region’s agenda, and in some settings conflicts over natural resources are the primary challenges that governments encounter as they seek to retain public legitimacy (see Haarstad 2012). In large part these concerns reflect the value of extractive industries for the economies of many Latin American countries. An intensifying reliance in recent decades upon natural gas, oil revenues, and mining, itself fueled by growing demand for these commodities from China and Asia more broadly, brought about rates of economic growth during the early 2000s that had not been seen since before the debt crisis of the 1980s. This model has enabled governments of the right and left to use abundant natural resources to bolster state revenues and to invest in an array of public policies aimed at advancing economic development. For the first time in a half-century, Latin America’s stubborn income inequality decreased, and this is in part due to the state-led redistribution of revenues secured by an extractives boom. Once this boom came to an end amid the recent precipitous decline in the price of oil and the significant slowing of demand, most obviously from China, it has since become harder for the region’s governments to sustain these popular redistributive social policies.

At the same time, however, the extractives-based model of social redistribution, or what is now sometimes called “neo-extractivism” (Burchardt and Dietz 2014), has also led to contentious social conflict between states and corporations, on the one hand, and local communities on the other, most often over control of non-renewable resources and over the direct impact that their extraction can have on environmental sustainability (see Bebbington and Bury 2013; Li 2015). While these environmental conflicts share certain structural characteristics, they also vary tremendously across the region, shaped as they are by vagaries of national political contexts, ecological specificities, and local histories. Conflicts regularly erupt over control of non-renewable water, forest, mineral, gas, or oil resources, the impacts of extractive policies or climate change on environmental sustainability and on environmentally sensitive industries like agriculture or fishing, inequity in the distribution of benefits among various stakeholders, or the lack of adequate consultation by governments or corporations with affected communities. In many cases these are also expressions of long-standing community struggles for rights to, and ownership of, agricultural land and ancestral territory.

A growing trend linking justice arguments to environmental rights also coincides with enduring problems of economic inequality and exclusion inherited from the region’s authoritarian era. Given the disproportionate impacts of environmental degradation on poor and vulnerable communities in Latin America (see Verner 2010), religious actors motivated by obligations to justice have become more active in this arena. Interventions by religious groups around the environment in Latin America often align with popular struggle in efforts to combat the social, political, and economic inequities associated with marginalization and poverty. Exploitative models of economic development are frequent drivers of protracted struggles over land, forests, or water, and the defense or conservation of such resources, is regularly articulated in the terms of indigenous rights and environmental justice (see Perreault 2014). The idiom of environmental justice is an important way in which religious advocacy of the past has been brought into the present in Latin America, if with a relatively new focus on the environment. As multiple chapters in this volume point out, liberation theology-inspired commitments to social justice as a “preferential option for the poor” continue to be an important justification offered both by Catholic and Evangelical churches, and often make common cause with the priorities of indigenous and other socially marginal communities contending for control of local environmental resources.

If struggles over land, water, and competing models of economic development have been foremost among these conflicts, and are frequently treated as issues of environmental justice, new grievances have also been voiced, as both rural and urban working and middle classes question the fairness and benefits of extractive economies. These grievances have been reminiscent of critiques of the so-called “resource curse,” including rejection of the role of Latin American economies in the global economy as suppliers of natural resources, and insistence upon a more thoroughgoing and equitable social redistribution of wealth generated (e.g. Arellano-Yanguas 2008).

Another important dimension of social mobilization in Latin America around environmental justice has been concern for the perceived unfair burden of the costs of climate change, as these costs have become increasingly evident in the region over the last decade (see Goodman 2009; Spikin and Hernández 2016). Public debates have focused on the negative effects of climate change for economies and communities, as a result of glacial melt, deforestation, agricultural blight, desertification, beach erosion, and greater frequency of extreme weather events. With its multiplicity of ecosystems and concentration of global biodiversity, Latin America is often treated as a bellwether for the systemic effects of climate change, and dramatic evidence, such as the disappearance of Bolivia’s Chacaltaya Glacier in 2009, increasingly powerful El Niño events in the southern hemisphere (and associated extreme weather), or the particularly destructive 2017 hurricane season in the Caribbean, have raised public awareness of the risks (e.g. Edmonds and Roberts 2015).

The dynamics around the climate problem are revealing: its causes are predominantly global and systemic, but its effects are chiefly local. How, then, do particular societies envision just responses to climate change and how do they assert these visions in transnational efforts of climate mitigation? If religious civil society groups are currently contributing to efforts to reach a “just and equitable agreement” on climate change (Sultana and Loftus 2012), their contributions remain largely unmapped. Taken together, these multiple factors point to the gradual emergence of a distinctively Latin American context for conceiving of environmental justice, a context as of yet not thoroughly understood and which merits sustained analysis.

B. Religion and the environment

From the outset of the twenty-first century, public attention to religious matters has concentrated upon issues of religiously motivated violence, placing religious considerations at the heart of narratives about terrorism, intrastate conflict in the Middle East, and instability in various regions of the world, including sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia (e.g. Shah, Stepan and Toft 2012). For the most part, Latin America has been spared from explicitly religious forms of violent conflict during this period. But a focus on the conjunction of religion with violence has exerted a gravitational pull on the public understanding of religion, drawing attention away from other modalities of religious engagement with other often more pressing social and political issues.

With the goal of complicating this narrative, our collection gives attention to some of the counter-gravitational forces composing a more nuanced picture of religious engagement with contemporary politics and a broader range of social issues beyond violence. The mobilization of religious constituencies around refugee protection, anti-discrimination, and other social justice issues, for example, counterbalances otherwise prevailing conversations about religious violence. Most notably, in the wake of Pope Francis’s 2015 encyclical on climate change – in conjunction with his role in helping the United States and Cuba begin to normalize relations – public awareness about the convening power and productive diplomatic role of religion on behalf of the environment is on the rise.

Following on decades of important work by theologians and ethicists, the case studies presented here build on a prescient literature (inter alia, Gottlieb 2010; Globus Veldman, Szasz and Haluza-Delay 2014; and Gerten and Bergmann 2012), which has prioritized a more empirical and ethno-graphically grounded research agenda toward the relationship of religion to the environment. This body of work has begun to elaborate the complex specificities through which religious thought and action engage environmental issues in disparate regions of the world. Within this expanding area of scholarship, however, there remain only a handful of cases from Latin America. As regional publics begin to respond to the moral and ecological messages in influential statements like the encyclical, there is a growing demand for empirical investigations that connect the broad range of religious discourse and practice to environmental circumstances.

With few exceptions (e.g. Lorentzen and Leavitt-Alcantara 2006), otherwise insightful collections (see Carruthers 2008; Edwards and Roberts 2015; Latta and Wittman 2012; and Spikin and Hernández 2016), take up the social dimensions of environmental contestation in Latin America, but afford scarce attention to the specific role of religious actors. Academic treatments of regional environmental issues have likewise addressed the participation of indigenous groups in environmental resistance movements and conservation efforts (see Brysk 2000 and Gedicks 2001), but have by and large not attended to the influence of indigenous approaches beyond specific local conflicts, or to the broader circulation of associated cosmological concepts. Nor have they taken s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: religion and environmental conflict in Latin America
• PART 1 Ecclesial articulations of environmental rights and justice
• PART 2 Cosmovision and indigenous expressions of environmental rights and justice
• Index