Imagining ecopolis: Visions of ecofeminist political theology and ecocriticism in Latin America

Abstract

Although often overlooked by mainstream accounts of political theology and ecocriticism in the Global North, powerful visions of an ecopolis have been emerging in Latin America. In this article, we review the status of mainstream approaches to notions such as subject, citizen, and personal dignity and put them in a critical dialogue with Latin American Ecofeminist Political Theologies (LAEPT). We argue that those notions, often conceived from a Western and anthropocentric perspective, show their limits when interrogated from the perspective of LAEPT. Accordingly, we suggest that their main contribution lies not only in their critique of the Western paradigm but also in advancing alternative conceptions of an ecologically conscious political community that considers the Earth as sacred, and nature as a reflection of the divine. We conclude that such conceptions can also be seen at work in the rights of nature enshrined in the so-called new Latin American Constitutionalism.

Introduction

At any event, while world alienation determined the course and the development of modern society, earth alienation became and has remained the hallmark of modern science.

Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition

There is the story – both ancient and new – that we are earthlings, that our history as well as our future is radically connected to the fate of this fragile green planet we call home.

Mary Judith Ress, ‘Remembering Who We Are’:

Reflections on Latin American Ecofeminist Theology

This article is an invitation to imagine a polis, or a political community, from the perspective of Latin American ecofeminist political theologies (hereafter LAEPT), and ecocriticism in the Anthropocene. The notion of polis or city-state has been part of the conversation in political and social theory for centuries. Accordingly, the sole question of whether the Greek πόλις can be accurately rendered as ‘city-state’ could take all the space available for this article. However, the polis stands not only as an example of a particular, historically situated, political experiment carried out in Classical Greece but is also an invitation to rethink the political community as an integral whole, comprising institutions, social customs, as well as specific types of citizens. In this context, we suggest that the polis should not be conceived merely as a communitarian counterpart to contemporary liberal and representative democracies. Rather, twentieth-century philosophers and political thinkers interested in recasting a reflection on the political draw on the idea (and ideal) of the polis to interrogate the conceptual foundations of political modernity, as well as to shed light on its limitations.

For example, Martin Heidegger suggests in Parmenides that the polis is more than a mere arrangement of institutions in, and of, a city-state. Heidegger sees the polis as a more encompassing site ‘wherein the Being of man in its relation to beings as a whole has gathered itself’ (Heidegger, 1992: 96). Thus, polis is for Heidegger, as put by Gregory Fried, ‘not a utopia, a place – a being – defined by certain ontic features so perfect as to never require change, but rather a topos for polemos’ (Fried, 2000: 141). Put differently, the polis is, for Heidegger, the ontological site where Dasein interprets, challenges, confronts, and gives a world to herself, thereby establishing the conditions of the relation between Being and beings. Hannah Arendt, in turn, also thinks of the polis as a site where the political, so to say, takes place, but she shifts emphasis from ontology to the active life of citizenship in the polis. According to Arendt in The Human Condition, the polis is the place that enables citizens to distinguish themselves through words and deeds, providing ‘a remedy for the futility of action’ (Arendt, 1998: 197). By offering a space where words and deeds can be remembered and immortalized, providing a sense of shared reality and possibility, humans remain at home on Earth and are prevented from undergoing world alienation.

Influential contemporary iterations of the idea of polis in political theory go beyond the anthropocentric contours of the Greek city-state, and seek to rethink the political community beyond the human species in the Anthropocene. In particular, Sue Donaldson and Will Kymlicka’s Zoopolis: A Political Theory of Animal Rights (Donaldson and Kymlicka, 2011), a contemporary classic in the field of animal ethics and animal rights, draws on urban theorist Jennifer Wolch’s idea of zöopolis to conceive the possibility of non-human animal citizenship (Wolch, 1998). According to the authors, domestic animals have been extracted from the wild; brought to our human societies, and manipulated through selective breeding to fit our needs and demands (DeMello, 2021; Donaldson and Kymlicka, 2014). In this context, redressing the situation of domestic animals means, according to the authors, granting animals citizenship in order to avoid tyrannizing them as a subjugated caste. Although it could be argued that Donaldson and Kymlicka’s use of the term polis is more rhetorical than theoretical, in the sense that they are not invested in the notion of polis per se, later work by Donaldson suggests consistency in exploring Greek ideals of politicality through her concept of ‘animal agora’ (Donaldson, 2020). By ‘animal agora’ Donaldson means a special space in the city where humans and different kinds of domestic, and even farm, animals can interact and associate freely, without restrictions of movement.

Bearing in mind the plurality of contemporary takes on the notion of polis, it is surprising that neither social nor political theory have developed the concept in light of contemporary challenges such as climate change, and the Anthropocene. Whereas the issue of recalibrating knowledge to a planetary scale has received much scholarly attention (Chakrabarty, 2021; Connolly, 2017; Latour, 2017, 2018), the idea of recasting the polis in the Anthropocene remains underexplored. Interestingly, it is again in the field of urban theory where the notion of ‘ecopolis’ begins to take root. In his book Ecopolis: Architecture and Cities for a Changing Climate, Australian practicing architect Paul F. Downton (2009) seeks to conceive the city anew from an ecological and sustainable perspective. Although Downton sees the city primarily as an urban setting where the majority of the earth’s human population currently lives, his vocabulary and approach can serve as an invitation to rethink the polis from an alternative, ecological perspective.

Thus, in this article we seek to imagine an ecopolis by drawing on ecofeminist political theologies and ecocritical approaches from Latin America. By doing so, we situate our inquiry within the so-called post-secular turn in feminist theory (Braidotti, 2008) and seek to engage with conceptual and empirical work made by social scientists in relation to ecofeminism. According to the post-secular turn, religious traditions not only establish limitations to women’s agency but also enable such agency in often subtle and complex ways that remain out of sight to secularist approaches and perspectives (Asad et al., 2013; Mahmood, 2011). Thus, whereas post-secular feminism has problematized questions of agency, autonomy, gender, and spirituality, the link between post-secular feminism and ecocriticism has remained underexplored. In this context, adding a Latin American perspective to the post-secular turn in feminism and ecofeminism, we argue, contributes to a larger conversation where Latin American voices often remain unheard. Put differently, as we see it, LAEPT offers a distinctive contribution both to the post-secular turn in feminism, and to ecofeminism broadly understood.

The term ecofeminism was introduced in the context of feminist and environmental struggles in the late 1970s and early 1980s (Mies and Shiva, 1993). Since then, ecofeminism in the social sciences has problematized the relationship between women and nature by acknowledging land struggles and empowering women in social movements (Abatemarco, 2018; Kwaymullina, 2018; Nofrima et al., 2023; Pabón et al., 2021; Ramírez-García, 2020; Sempértegui, 2021); by incorporating a critical perspective on the structural impact of colonialism and imperialism in Global South’s peoples (Agarwal, 1998; Pérez Neira and Soler Montiel, 2013; Ranjith and Pius, 2017; Sánchez, 2021), and by discussing new challenges posed by neoliberalism (Galvez Muñoz and Agenjo-Calderón, 2022; Mair, 2020; Phillips, 2016), climate change (Gaard, 2015; Isla, 2020; Vizcarra Bordi et al., 2014) and, more recently, the Covid-19 pandemic (Afrin and Shammi, 2023; Bernacchi, 2020; De Vido, 2021; Triguero-Mas et al., 2022; Walters and Von Kotze, 2021).

But what are the main tenets of LAEPT? One basic idea of LAEPT that overlaps with ecofeminist approaches is a holistic approach to life on Earth. According to one of the most influential Latin American ecofeminist theologians, the Brazilian thinker Ivone Gebara, a holistic approach presupposes a non-cartesian epistemology whereby the ‘thinking I’ has no priority. Gebara assumes that individualistic, cartesian, epistemologies have elective affinities with the kind of anthropocentric and androcentric perspectives that she seeks to challenge and displace. Contrary to these perspectives, Gebara (1999) cultivates a holistic approach hospitable to the ‘multiple ways of knowing what is to be known’ (p. 62) that also affects theology itself, by ‘inviting [Theology] to broaden its horizons beyond monotheistic discourse about God (…) beyond a dogma that can become authoritarian and punitive and can even exhibit fascist characteristics’ (p. 63).

Another basic idea underlying LAEPT’s understanding of ecopolis is the interconnectedness of all forms of life on Earth, an idea that resonates with Amerindian cosmologies as well. Describing such cosmologies, Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro argues that they rely on a myth of origin where every creature was in the beginning human, and where non-human creatures never actually sever the ties of an ‘intersubjective’ relation with human beings (Viveiros de Castro, 2004). As another representative of LAEPT, the theologian Mary Judith Ress, suggests: ‘Everything is related to everything else and nothing is independent. We are one interconnected web with all and in all’ (Ress, 2008: 392). In addition, she refers to Latin American women who are both political and spiritual activists as being in ‘(c)onnection – to each other, to their own bioregion, to the seasonal cycles, to the elements, to the Earth itself and to the entire Cosmos’ (Ress, 2008: 395). Although Ress and other Latin American political theologians, such as Ivonne Gebara and Arianne Van Andel, remain in a critical dialogue with liberation theology, and often frame their worldviews according to a (post) Christian conception of God, we suggest that their vision of an ecopolis is relevant, even pressing, to believers and non-believers alike.

Unpacking ecopolis: challenging anthropocentrism in the Anthropocene

In order to better appreciate the potentialities of LAEPT for imagining an ecopolis, it is useful to examine recent discourses that question the centrality of the human being within the Western tradition of political thought. ¹ From our perspective, key notions in the Western tradition of political and social philosophy, such as subject, citizen, and person, have been under heavy scrutiny since the second half of the twentieth century, and begin to show signs of exhaustion. Nonetheless, we suggest that an alternative conceptual vocabulary for thinking about the polis in the Anthropocene is not yet available and continues to be a work in progress. Accordingly, in the context of the triple planetary crisis due to climate change, pollution, and the loss of biodiversity – the recent pandemic could be added as well – several concepts that grounded the centrality and integrity of the human being in political and social philosophy have been consistently challenged and displaced, in order to make room for more encompassing and hospitable approaches to life on Earth. Thus, in the context of a more-than-human turn in the humanities and social sciences, we argue that LAEPT offers alternative conceptual resources for understanding and assessing the current planetary crisis, and for rethinking the polis in the Anthropocene. Moreover, LAEPT’s approach can contribute to de-colonize a theoretical conversation often hegemonized by perspectives from the Global North.

At least since the rise of so-called ‘post-structuralism’, in the early 1970s of the twentieth century, the idea of the human as subject has been consistently under pressure. From Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault’s announcement of the death of the author, to Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of the subject, the notions of subject and subjectivity were conceived as part of a metaphysical understanding of the human being and his or her relationship with the non-human – objects, animals as well as nature. Together with the deconstruction of the subject came the challenge to the Descartian thinking-self, as opposed to an inert res extensa, as well as to authorial intentionality both at the level of agency and at the level of writing (Derrida, 1991, 2008). As a further development of the critique of logocentrism, Derrida became interested in the subordination of animals and human beings’ animality, extending an invitation to link his work with environmental philosophy broadly understood (Fritsch et al., 2018). Moreover, the emergence of new materialisms puts extra pressure on the idea of human subjectivity by pluralizing agency beyond the human in two different, but interrelated, ways: by conceiving agency as an emergent property in a system (Bennett, 2010); and by thinking of bodies of human and non-human animals as ‘attentive’ and ‘meaning making’ (Frost, 2020).

The idea of citizenship has also been radically transformed in the twentieth and the beginning of the twenty-first century. Citizenship has historically been conceptualized as belonging to demos and, more recently, as a set of rights (civil, political, social, etc.) that individuals have in a political community. However, already in the twentieth century sketches of an environmental philosophy associated with conservationism began to rethink the idea of citizenship. For example, noted conservationist Aldo Leopold developed a ‘land ethic’ where human beings are regarded as only one member, among many others, in the biotic community. According to Leopold, all members of the biotic community should have equal standing; in his words:

(…) a land ethic changes the role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it. It implies respect for his fellow-members, and also respect for the community as such (Leopold, 1989: 204).

Building upon a different set of premises than Leopold, mostly – but not exclusively – from animal rights theory, Donaldson and Kymlicka (2011) make the case for extending citizenship beyond the human species. Attending to the fact that the co-evolution of humans and some animal species is irreversible and that freeing domestic animals from all bonds with human animals is unfeasible, Donaldson and Kymlicka seek to avoid the subjugation of domestic animals by granting them citizenship. According to Donaldson and Kymlicka (2011: 60), domestic animals have a ‘dependent agency’ where the subjective good of animals can be considered and interpreted by their care-givers. The arguments in Zoopolis should be viewed in company with recent judicial rulings where non-human animals (often big apes) are declared ‘non-human persons’ in order to protect their rights (Thompson, 2015).

But the justification of rights on the basis of personal dignity is a recent phenomenon for humans as well. We suggest that prior to our present planetary environmental crisis there was a civilizational crisis that demanded a response in terms of personal dignity. What do we mean by this? The joint impact of WWII and the Holocaust provoked a crisis of values and normative frameworks in Europe and beyond – a crisis that, shockingly, was not prompted earlier, neither by the transatlantic slave trade nor by the genocide of native peoples in the Americas. Such a civilizational cornerstone was conceptualized in terms of massive and systematic violations of human rights and was sought to be redressed through the construction of an incipient international human rights order. The response to what was perceived as a civilizational crisis enlisted the support of several intellectuals and philosophers who contributed to the conceptual vocabulary of The Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948. Recent literature on intellectual history, however, adds new layers to the vexed legacy of the Declaration, challenging the assumption that a progressive liberalism is undergirding the conceptual foundations of the document.

Samuel Moyn has cogently argued that the personalist Catholic thinker Jacques Maritain had a major influence on the declaration. Not only did he take part in the initiative led by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to assist the Human Rights Commission of the United Nations, in charge of drafting the Declaration, but he also helped reorient the political theory of Catholicism after WWII in the direction of a Christian democracy (Maritain, 2012; Vatter, 2021). One of the key insights of Maritain’s thought was investing in the idea of personal dignity. Maritain understood personal dignity as opposed to, at the same time, the individual in liberalism and state idolatry in fascism and national socialism (Maritain, 1998).

Following Moyn’s (2015, 2017) argument, we suggest that the allusion to dignity in the Preamble of the Declaration should be understood in the context of Maritain’s personalism:

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world (…). (United Nations n.d.)

However, recent literature has been contesting whether dignitarian justifications of human rights are compatible with the novel challenges posed by the Anthropocene. Dignitarian justifications of human rights reproduce a species hierarchy whereby human beings are the only creatures with dignity on Earth. Several critics of dignitarianism call attention to the species’ narcissism presupposed in, and cultivated by, the dignitarian position. Political and feminist theorist Anne Phillips (2015), for example, notes that there is something troubling about the dignitarian fixation with human being’s higher status among all species on Earth. Diego Rossello (2017) also criticizes what he sees as a species aristocratism at work in how dignitarians ground human rights. According to Rossello, dignitarians argue that humans deserve respect because they belong to the ‘human family’, and cannot be assimilated to mere animals. Kymlicka (2018), in turn, sees the dignitarian position as human supremacism, where human rights are justified at the expense of animal rights. For Kymlicka, the dignitarian position based on species hierarchy should be replaced with arguments that stress horizontality, and shared vulnerability across species.

As we can see, Western conceptions of the subject, citizen, and personhood, have been undergoing a thorough deconstruction. Such deconstruction amounts to a challenge to the centrality of the human being and its rights in the Anthropocene, as well as to a reconsideration of the conceptual vocabulary that accounts for the role that human beings play on Earth. We argue that LAEPT is attuned to this process in the Global North, but may also go a step further in terms of alternative cosmologies. By exploring and modulating Amerindian cosmologies, environmental approaches in Latin American are prone to universalize ‘personhood’ from the very beginning. This perspective can be seen at work, for example, in anthropologist Marisol de la Cadena’s (2015) discussion of ‘earth beings’, by means of her ethnographic account of the political experience of indigenous populations in Cuzco; as well as in the work by Eduardo Grillo, an expert on Andean agricultural cosmologies, who captures the universalization of personhood characteristic of such cosmologies:

For us, all those of us who live in this pacha [locality, local world] are persons: the stone, the soil, the plant, the water, the hail, the wind, the diseases, the sun, the moon, the stars, we all are a family. To live together we help each other. We are always in continuous conversation and harmony (Grillo, 1990: 105) (our translation)

Imagining ecopolis: Latin American ecofeminist political theologies and ecocriticism

From deep ecology to ecofeminism

In this section, we delve deeper into LAEPT’s perspective to imagine an ecopolis. As we have already explained, LAEPT puts emphasis on a holistic approach that stresses the interconnection of all beings on Earth. In addition, LAEPT draws on cosmologies where all beings are seen as vital and agentic or, to put it differently, where all beings count as ‘persons’. Thus, in order to lay out LAEPT’s understanding of ecopolis, we will first discuss the origins of ecofeminism to then focus on LAEPT’s philosophy, concepts and political agenda. We will argue that LAEPT offers the possibility to reorient and expand ecofeminism, as well as to contribute to the debate on ecofeminism in the global context. Moreover, by stressing the link between LAEPT and the so-called Latin American constitutionalism, we suggest that LAEPT can contribute to rethinking the polis in the Anthropocene.

The concept of ecofeminism was first introduced by French feminist François d’Eaubonne in the late 1970s and early 1980s, in the context of feminist struggles against the destruction of the environment (Mies and Shiva, 1993: 13). The concept was based on the link between ecology and feminism, with a peculiar understanding of the ‘interdependence of all things’ in relation to the universe or cosmos. In other words, ecofeminism, broadly understood, advocates for a ‘post-patriarchal’ understanding of the universe, and of how human beings are connected with the cosmos (Ress, 2006). Vandana Shiva, the Indian scholar and environmental activist, writes that ecofeminism represents a new vision expressed in how human beings preserve ‘a new life for present and future generations, and for our fellow creatures on earth’, blending theory and praxis to respect and preserve such creatures (Mies and Shiva, 1993: 192).

Ecofeminism was born as a response to deep ecologists, who made their appearance in the early 1970s, and argued for the need to examine the patterns (symbolic, psychological, and cultural) that forced humans to distance themselves from nature, and to establish a hierarchical rule over the latter. Deep ecologists explicitly advocated respect for all life-forms, whether human or non-human, while at the same time insisting on the danger posed by human overpopulation on Earth (French and Heffes, 2021: 5). However, this approach remained inattentive to the intrinsic relation between anthropocentrism and androcentrism, since unpacking such relation requires a perspective informed by gender and feminist theory (Ruether, 2003: 24).

In this sense, ecofeminism was more explicit than deep ecology about undermining a logic of domination and oppression on the basis of gender, race, sexual orientation, class, and species (French and Heffes, 2021: 6). Accordingly, ecofeminism entails an ethics that emphasizes mutual interdependence, and the eradication of hierarchies between beings on Earth. Rosemary Radford Ruether, one of the most renowned US American ecofeminist theologians, summarized the ecofeminist position as follows: ‘all racist, sexist, classist, cultural and anthropomorphic assumptions of the superiority of whites over blacks, males over females, managers over workers, humans over animals and plants, must be discarded’ (Gnanadason, 2005: 78).

Early Western ecofeminists argued that the domination of nature is similar to the domination of women, whose roots can be found in the patriarchal culture predominant in the West. At the cultural-symbolic level, women remained caught in essentialist and binary claims ² such as the definition of women as ‘closer to nature’, or ‘on the nature side of the nature-culture split’. ³ As a consequence, women were one-sidedly assimilated to the body; the earth; reproduction; the flesh in its mortality, and weakness of body and mind. On the contrary, masculinity was built upon ideas of reason; production; spirit; mind; strength, and sovereignty over the fragility of women and nature (Ruether, 2003: 24). According to ecofeminism, however, the critique of the cultural-symbolic bias against women does not seek to erase the connection between women and nature altogether. On the contrary, although ecofeminism denounces patriarchal domination and abuse, it also believes that the connection between women and nature does indeed exist but has been distorted. In other words, for ecofeminist theologians, there is a positive connection between women and nature that deserves to be cultivated and affirmed:

Women are the life-givers, the nurturers, the ones in whom the seed of life grows. Women were the primary food gatherers, the inventors of agriculture. Their bodies are in mysterious tune with the cycles of the moon and the tides of the sea. It was by experiencing women as life-givers, both food providers and birthers of children, that early humans made the female the first image of worship, the Goddess, source of all life. Women need to reclaim this affinity between the sacrality of nature and the sacrality of their own sexuality and life-powers (Ruether, 2003: 27–28).

Nevertheless, the cultural-symbolic critique proved to be insufficient when trying to do justice to women’s needs and stories around the world, particularly women living in the margins. In this context, Ruether incorporated another level of analysis for modulating ecofeminist theology: the socio-economic system. The main problem of the Western cultural-symbolic level, Ruether argued, is the risk to turn ecofeminism primarily into a kind of mystical ‘escapism for a privileged Western female elite’. Thus, according to her, ecofeminism needs to recognize and make concrete connections with women at the bottom of the socio-economic system (Ruether, 2003: 28). The realities of non-white women living in non-affluent contexts – such as some areas in Latin America, Asia, and Africa – are different from mainstream Western experiences because the baseline of domination of women and nature is poverty: ‘Deforestation means women walk twice and three times as long each day gathering wood; it means drought, which means women walk twice and three times farther each day to find and carry water back to their huts’ (Ruether, 2003: 29). Poverty is thus understood as the impoverishment of the majority of local people (particularly women and children), but also as impoverishment of the land because of the gender gap in property ownership and the dependency on natural resources (Gaddis et al., 2021; United Nations, 2023). ⁴ The latter is especially relevant in the Latin American context, historically marked by colonialism and, later on, by novel forms of extractivism (Svampa, 2019).

From ecofeminism to LAEPT

As we anticipated above, LAEPT emerged, at the same time, as a response to the Western tradition of deep ecology and to male-centered perspectives in Latin American liberation theology. Hence, although LAEPT was in a critical dialogue with Christianity from the very beginning, later approaches addressed a more holistic framework that incorporated indigenous cosmologies, as well as non-Christian perspectives, in a context of planetary crisis. In this section, we delve into LAEPT’s two most important perspectives, namely, Christian and indigenous spiritualities.

The early 1990s is perhaps the most significant moment in LAEPT’s history because it is then that US American ecofeminist based in Chile, Judith Ress, invited a small group of feminist theologians and activists to create the collective Con-spirando (Orrego Torres, 2020). Ress acknowledged the growing number of activists, theologians, and faith-based women who were describing themselves as ecofeminists, and decided to organize them. They all belonged to the liberation theology movement that began in the 1970s, in the context of revolutionary struggles and the rise of military dictatorships in South America. Despite state violence, torture, and disappearances across the region, the number and strength of small Christian communities located in urban slums increased and established a close relationship with their inhabitants. Community organizers and women theologians committed to liberation theology’s method and practice focused on applying the gospel to their own context – namely, the Latin American reality of inequalities, poverty, and oppression – and their political experience began to grow in strength and consciousness.

Biblical readings and theological reflections produced local knowledge and intellectual exchanges in the region. However, at the beginning, there was no dialogue with either secular Latin American feminist organizations or with first-world feminist theologians, as Elsa Tamez notes (Ress, 2006: 9). At the time, Latin American feminist theologians saw feminism as ‘another imperialistic invasion from the north’ (Ress, 2006: 9), which prevented them from focusing on class-based economic and political oppression in the region. Therefore, in her attempt to understand the new wave of feminism, particularly ecofeminism from the South, Judith Ress conducted in-depth interviews with 12 women who were active in the liberation theology movements in Latin America (Orrego Torres, 2020). She later organized a four-day workshop in Santiago, Chile, with activists and theologians. Based on their different histories and theologies, these women raised questions, drew conclusions, and set new directions for a Latin American ecofeminist political theology that acknowledges their commitment to the poor and the oppressed. In this context, ecofeminist theology was, in Ress’ words, more of a ‘process rather than constructive theology in itself’ (Ress, 2006: xi), stressing the fact that Con-spirando was less a theological school of thought than a transformative experience of political and social consciousness. The birth of Con-spirando was the seed that promoted transnational and transformative understandings of ecofeminist theology in the continent, opening new opportunities for dialogue with ecofeminist theologians in the North, such as Rosemary Radford Ruether.

In this context, it is worth noting that ecofeminist theology in the Global North was constructed on a critique of the so-called Christian ‘covenantal ethics’. Covenantal ethics derives from the Biblical idea of a bilateral contract between God and Adam in Genesis 1,28 ⁵ and Genesis 2,16-17. ⁶ In these verses, God invested men with power and authority in Eden, and originated the relations of domination of men over women; humans over nature, and masters over slaves. Thus, according to ecofeminist theology in the Global North, the biblical concept of covenanted people is originally patriarchal, androcentric, anthropocentric, as well as ethnocentric (Ruether, 1992: 217, 2003: 3). By describing God as the cosmos creator in the vocabulary of Christian anthropocentrism, ‘covenantal ethics’ reinforced domination by ratifying the hierarchies that ecofeminism sought to question and overcome.

The covenant also reinforced the imago dei doctrine, whereby humans created in the image of God were responsible for taking care of nature. Nevertheless, in mainstream readings of Christian theology the responsibility of such care is assumed by men only. Rather unsurprisingly, men are conceived in this literature after the figure of Adam, whereas women are associated with the figure of Eve. Although the biblical verses demonstrate that stewardship over creation is shared by men and women, ecofeminist theologians discuss how this univocal interpretation of scripture led particular theologies to relegate women to a second place in society. As Ruether wrote, ‘The Eve-Mary split reflects this split image of woman in Christianity. For Christianity, all women suffer the punishment due to being daughters of Eve, but the “good woman” is redeemed by being “Mary-like”’ (Ruether, 1996: 3). In other words, Christianity perpetuated the image of women as subjugated to the patriarchal power and sublimated as the ‘angel in the house’, whose figure looks like an ‘animal’ (Ruether, 1996: 3) in the private, domestic sphere.

A recent iteration of this ‘Mary-like’ imperative for women can be found in the encyclical Laudato Si. The encyclical has been criticized by ecofeminist theologians because in it Pope Francis speaks in the name of women’s life situations, sufferings, and demands. Even though the Encyclical is in many ways revolutionary, as it introduces environmental issues – such as climate change; living together in the Common Home; and equality among species – in connection to Catholic Social teachings and theologies, Pope Francis remains inattentive to feminist perspectives and agendas. Instead, the encyclical advances an idealized image of women mirrored on Mary as ‘more important than the apostles’, therefore elevating women to unreal qualities, and idealized models of femininity (Gebara, 2017: 76). The clearest example is the portrayal of Mary as the ‘Mother and Queen of all creation’, who ‘cared for Jesus, now cares with maternal affection and pain for this wounded world’ (Pope Francis, 2015: 241).

These distorted images of women and womanhood invited Christian ecofeminists to rethink their own relationship with the notion of a monotheistic, androcentric, and anthropocentric God, as well as women’s place in the cosmos. Ivone Gebara, for example, suggests that the image of God will change only by changing the image of men and women within the cosmos (MacKinnon and McIntyre, 1995: 210). By re-situating humans within and as part of the cosmos, the hierarchical and anthropocentric image of God and Christianity shifts, and is displaced. The position of humans inhabiting a world interconnected with nature, then, becomes an essential feature of LAEPT. This is shown by the Dutch ecofeminist theologian and activist, based in Chile, Arianne Van Andel, who writes that ‘Playing God’’ at the global scale reveals that even if humans can intervene and destroy nature, they can also develop relationships of responsibility and compassion at various levels (Van Andel, 2021: 148). Since Western culture constructed the divine around ideas of domination of women and nature, LAEPT proposes deconstructing them through a change in consciousness, education, and action.

In this sense, LAEPT incorporates new concepts about relationships with nature based on the interconnectedness between humans and the cosmos. Interconnectedness also means interdependence and coexistence with all forms of life on Earth. This connection has been understood as a new ethics that goes beyond the ‘Christian covenantal ethics’. Thus, rather than establishing a vertical contract between God and its creation, LAEPT emphasizes reciprocity and responsibility with the cosmos, as both indigenous and afro-descendant spiritualities argue. Ecofeminists suggest that interdependence is the basis of a new ethics that calls for a consciousness of care and healing, grounded in a new symbolic culture and spirituality (Gebara in MacKinnon, 1995; Gnanadason, 2005; Ruether, 1992). In other words, the ethics of care and healing is seen as replacing hierarchies of domination promoted by Western culture that include racist, sexist, classist, cultural, and anthropological assumptions.

What is noticeable about this new ‘cosmic-political proposal’ proposed by Sofia Chipana Quispe – an Aymara theologian from Bolivia – is that LAEPT accentuates the significance of ecological spiritualities grounded in indigenous cosmologies, as well as on afro-descendant spiritualities. In addition, when discussing ‘ecofeminism’ and its connection to Earth, ecofeminists around the world conceptualize it differently. The planetary; cosmos; common home; and Pachamama are some of the concepts that emphasize the distinction between LAEPT and mainstream Christian anthropology. The planetary refers to the biosphere, and integrates a larger framework for understanding the Earth as a process and ecosystem with evolutionary trajectories (Eaton, 2017). Cosmos, instead, derives from indigenous cosmologies and spiritualities, and underlines the vitality of the forces of nature and the cycles of life.

Chipana Quispe writes that colonizers invalidated the knowledge and spiritualities linked to the cycles of the cosmos in the Americas, by imposing a hegemonic religion dominant until today. What she calls ‘cosmopraxis’, reveals new forms of relational practices of co-participation with and in the world, where ‘everything has life, its place in the Cosmos, where humanity is part of the great community of interrelations that flow reciprocally and in a complementary way to raise life’ (Chipana Quispe, 2019: 62). Common home, in turn, has been recently used in specialized literature after the publication of Laudato Si’ (2015), the encyclical that criticizes consumerism and irresponsible economic development. Thus, common home is often used in discourses that make humans accountable for destroying the environment and advocate for profound changes in lifestyles in times of climate collapse (Esteva Figueroa, 2019; Legorreta Zepeda, 2019). Finally, Pachamama is a recurrent word from the Andean cosmologies (predominantly Aymara and Quechua) to express the sense of interconnectedness between the Earth and the people (Chipana Quispe, 2019; Ress, 2006). Indeed, Pachamama means ‘Mother Earth’, whereas Pacha is the concept of universe, cosmos, and Earth. By making room for all these different concepts, we can see that LAEPT seeks to acknowledge indigenous and Latin American cosmologies and spiritualities, as well as to suggest new ways of relationality between humans and nature.

LAEPT in current times

As we have stated above, LAEPT accounts for an intersectional approach that acknowledges and connects faith, community, religious experiences, gender, and personal identities of people living in the margins, and suffering the consequences of climate change, particularly women. In addition, LAEPT recognizes the particularities of peoples living in Latin America, and how they experience their faith and spiritualities with a deep connection to their land and territories. Their vision of a practical ecumenism entails the defense of the environment, as well as solidarity with those most affected by climate change. Thus, the purpose of LAEPT’s concepts and perspectives is to suggest new narratives and vocabularies but also to remain attentive to the decolonial and postcolonial approaches that help rethink ecofeminism from, and for, the Abya Yala’s ⁷ context.

Needless to say, LAEPT is a plural position that comprises women thinkers and theologians in several different countries. Among the most prominent representatives of LAEPT are Coca Trillini in Argentina; Sofía Chipana Quispe, Fanny Geymonat-Pantelís and Aleira Agreda in Bolivia; Ivone Gebara, Agamedilza Sales de Oliveira, Sandra Duarte and Sandra Raquew in Brazil; Mareia Moya in Ecuador; Rosa Dominga Trapasso in Perú; Mary Judith Ress and Arrianne Van Andel in Chile; Graciela Pujol in Uruguay, and Gladys Parentelli and Rosa Trujillo in Venezuela (LasCanta, 2017). For reasons of space, we cannot address the work by all these thinkers in detail. However, in this section, we focus on the work by Van Andel in Chile, as her case addresses the link between LAEPT and the possibility of rethinking an ecopolis in the Anthropocene.

Arianne Van Andel writes about the urgency of climate change, and calls for action to believers and non-believers alike. Based on her experiences living in Chile, and in her work with environmental movements there, she witnessed the struggles of ecological activists and understood the importance that women often have in mobilizing hope and putting pressure on the authorities (Van Andel, 2021). She suggests that climate change affects mainly women and children in territories affected by colonialism and imperialism. ⁸ Her theology is inspired by liberation theologies from Latin America; however, her theological practice seeks dialogue with non-religious social movements as well, particularly feminism and ecological movements. In other words, as she expresses, ‘a theology in movement is one that is moving, inspiring, and a theology that mobilizes people’ (Van Andel et al., 2021: 15).

In Teología en movimiento, Van Andel delves into experiences of ecological struggles against transnational and multinational companies in Chile. In particular, she focuses on how religious authorities and communities responded to the hydroelectric mega-project Hidroaysén, and to projects developed by the gold mining company Barrick Gold. But perhaps the most notorious example of ecological struggle and activism is the case of the inhabitants of Quintero and Puchuncaví. These two non-affluent cities in the Valparaíso area became famous due to high levels of chemical pollution in the air and water, as well as by the intoxication of locals due to emissions of sulfur dioxide by companies in the region. What is worth noting about Van Andel’s ecofeminist theology is how she interweaves her experience working with faith communities and social movements, with her Christian alternative narratives modulated through particular affects. Rage, suffering, and hope are often invoked in her writing to show the complexities of those who live their faith and spiritualities in deep connection with the Earth under the conditions of extractivism and climate change.

But Van Andel’s work is not an isolated voice since philosophical, political and juridical debates with an ecological perspective are on the rise in Latin America, and LAEPT has strong affinities with them. ⁹ In 2008, Ecuador became the first country in the world to officially recognize the rights of nature in its constitution (Echeverría, 2019). Ecuador’s constitution establishes nature as a subject of rights by drawing on indigenous cosmologies as well as on (post) Christian spiritualities. Its preamble acknowledges the age-old roots that bring men and women of different peoples together; celebrates the Pacha Mama (Mother Earth); invokes the name of God, and acknowledges diverse forms of religion and spirituality (ECLAC United Nations, 2022). The rights of nature are included in the section ‘Rights of Good Living’ and include rights to access to water, food, and a healthy environment (ECLAC United Nations, 2022). The Ecuadorian experience inspired other countries in the region, such as Bolivia and Chile, who began to debate and articulate the rights of nature in their own constitutional texts. The Constitution of the Plurinational State of Bolivia (from 2009) also recognizes the right to live in a healthy, protected, and risk-free environment. The constitutional principle guarantees the exercise of this right to individuals, collectivities, and other living beings in the present and the future (art.33) (Justia Bolivia, 2022).

After the social uprising of October 2019, Chileans began the process of writing a new constitution through a Constitutional Convention. This was an opportunity to leave behind the legacy of Pinochet’s dictatorship under the motto of ‘dignity’, hailed in demonstrations throughout the country (Heiss, 2021; Prieto and Verdugo, 2021; Suarez-Cao, 2021). The drafting of a new constitution opened the debate about including ecological and ecofeminist perspectives to respond to structural inequalities and social-environmental conflicts in the country (Berasaluce et al., 2021; Larrain, 2022; Martinic, 2021). Although on September 4, 2022, Chileans rejected the proposal; for the first time in Chilean history, civil society, including organizations based on faith (OBFs), churches, interreligious organizations, and ecofeminist theologians actively participated in the debate for a new ‘ecological and democratic constitution’ (Sociedad Civil por la Acción Climática, 2021; Van Andel, 2020).

Arianne Van Andel, as part of the Feminist Coordination of Civil Society for Climate Action (Coordinación Feminista de la Sociedad Civil por la Acción Climática, SCAC), participated in the drafting of the document ‘Ecofeminist Proposals for the Constituent Process, Economical Reactivation and Socio-Ecological Transformation in Chile (Propuestas Ecofeministas para el Proceso Constituyente, Reactivación Económica y la Transformación Socio-Ecológica en Chile’) (Van Andel et al., 2021). The document suggested five areas in which the new constitution could endorse an ecofeminist approach: (1) the model of development and a socioecological transition; (2) water governance; (3) energy and ecofeminism; (4) housing, city, and ecofeminism; and (5) food policies. The document was handed to the then President of the Chilean Constitutional Convention, the indigenous rights activist Elisa Loncón Antileo, and a group of members of the Convention (Universidad Diego Portales, 2019).

The final draft of the Constitution included a chapter on ‘Nature and Environmental Rights’ (chapter III), whose first article declared: ‘Nature has rights. The State and society have the duty to protect and respect them’ (art. 127). Furthermore, the proposal emphasized the role of the State in deepening public policies to confront climate change through ‘dialogue, cooperation, and international solidarity’ (art. 129) (Convención Constitucional, 2022). Despite the unfortunate outcome of the Constitutional Plebiscite in September 2022, it is clear how ecofeminist ideas and feminist collectives managed to advance their ideas and agendas of an ecological and feminist constitution for the country. The Chilean experience also demonstrates the ongoing influence of LAEPT on social movements and networks of solidarity and resistance, ¹⁰ such as the already mentioned Feminist Coordination of Civil Society for Climate Action, and how such movements helped shape the discussion on environmental issues during the Convention.

Conclusion

LAEPT emerges as an alternative approach to Western epistemologies that seeks to approach the Earth holistically, leaving behind hierarchies and binarisms characteristic of modernity. In this interconnected and holistic world, LAEPT proposes that new relationships with nature are essential to change our conceptions and approaches to the current environmental crisis. As Van Andel notes, the combination of the coronavirus pandemic and climate change taught us that there is no distinction between the ‘natural’ and the ‘human’, because ‘the human is natural’ (Van Andel, 2021: 232). Although these dichotomous narratives are often reinforced by standard Christian theologies and anthropologies, LAEPT seeks to transgress and complicate our philosophical and religious frameworks to confront the current ecological crisis. In this context, perhaps LAEPT’s ideas can cultivate a fruitful dialogue with Western attempts to deconstruct mainstream ideas of the subject, citizenship, and personhood. But such a dialogue can be prevented if Western epistemologies become rigid, or even hostile, to LAEPT’s potential contributions.

In this article, we sought to imagine an ecopolis based on Latin American ecofeminist political theologians in the Latin American context. We argued that their contextual theologies add to the vibrant agenda of post-secular feminism and offer alternative perspectives to think about our planetary crisis. Their own experiences living with and in the margins, as ‘practical ecumenists who crossed cultures’, as Ruether writes (1996: 7), show the significance of rethinking our relationship with the planet from the Global South. Thinking of an ecopolis, as LAEPT proposes, cannot exclude the spiritualities, cosmologies, and experiences of Indigenous peoples. Indeed, only by attending to their wisdom and teachings can we begin to rethink the political community as an integral whole. Moreover, by thinking ecopolis from LAEPT’s perspective, we can amend the androcentric bias in the classical Greek idea of polis, as well as its logocentric and anthropocentric scope. By attending to LAEPT’s ideas, we can begin to imagine a political community in harmony with non-human animals, nature, and the Earth. Thus, by drawing on LAEPT’s insights, we sketched a political site of a new kind, where ecopolis meets cosmopolis –echoing the ‘cosmopraxis’ invoked by Chipana Quispe – with a focus on biodiversity and more-than-human rights. Such an eco(smo)polis should be able to lay the foundations of a political community capable of facing the challenges of climate change in the Anthropocene.

Finally, advances at the constitutional level are positive signs toward a notion of ecopolis in Latin America, as the region continues to suffer the consequences of climate change, particularly after the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. But constitutional advances still contrast with everyday politics in the region. In particular, studies show that environmental activists in Latin America have reached the highest murder rate of activists in the world due to their opposition to corporations engaged in the extractivist-capitalist model (Fernandez Candial, 2021). However, people continue to organize to act ‘glocally’ (Van Andel, 2021: 250) in favor of the environment, and to save their territories and communities. Van Andel proposes ‘glocal thinking’ in connection with a ‘cosmopolitan’ mindset, where both groups and grassroots movements organize at the transnational level to exchange strategies and local practices in response to powerful transnational corporations in a planetary age (Van Andel, 2021: 250). These are the kind of conceptual, existential, and geopolitical challenges that LAEPT faces when trying not only to imagine an ecopolis but also to make it a reality.