Ecological Liberation Theology

This book focuses on issues of climate change related efforts to rebuild communities of resilience in areas affected by human induced disasters and natural hazards, and increasing vulnerabilities, resulting from mal-governance and unsustainable development in the Philippines. It considers some of the responses of some of the front-line church-based social action networks and organizations working in the face of climate change and some of its disastrous impacts on the Philippines, from the perspective of ecological liberation theology. Ecological liberation theology considers the relationship between poverty, ecological devastation, and oppression as an interrelated structural problem. By taking a bottom-up approach to redressing structural quandaries, church workers involved in this movement organize faith-based communities to transform local political, social, and ecological relationships by empowering the poor. The argument is that when the affected community trusts the community facilitator, who actively works with them to devise solutions and reach their goals, from the beginning to the completion of the project, they work more effectively together as a collaborative community for their collective interests. This type of development model is different from that of the acquisitive development and globalization model that is the dominant approach of many local and international aid organizations today.

The Philippines experiences frequent earthquakes and typhoons, due to its location on the western rim of the Pacific Ring of Fire, a U-shaped series of more than 450 volcanoes in the Pacific Ocean that trace an arc along the coasts of South America, North America, Asia, and Australia. Just off the coast of Vietnam and China, south of Taiwan, and north of Borneo and Indonesia, in the South China Sea, it consists of, approximately, 7100 islands. The Philippines has a total landmass of 115,124 mile², 298,170 km², and current estimated population of 100,096,496 people (Worldometers 2015).

Climate change, or global warming, is caused by increasing levels of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide (CO₂), methane, or water vapor, in the Earth’s atmosphere. As solar radiation enters the Earth’s atmosphere these gases cause the sun’s heat to remain within the atmosphere instead of radiating back out into space and, as a result, the Earth warms. Although CO₂ is the weakest of the various greenhouse gases it is also the most common and, consequently, is the greenhouse gas most responsible for global warming as there has been a 42% increase in atmospheric CO₂ since 1800 and a 24% increase since 1959 (De Buys 2011). A basic description of the physics of climate change is that provided by De Buys (2011, p. 10):

The Philippines is one of the world’s most hazard prone countries. Located on the Pacific Ring of Fire, the archipelago is vulnerable to geophysical hazards, such as earthquakes, tsunamis, and volcanoes (Bankoff 2003; Holden and Jacobson 2012) as well as climatological hazards such as El Niño induced drought (Holden 2013) and tropical cyclones (Holden 2015). Arguably the most salient of these hazards, particularly insofar as climate change is concerned, are typhoons. One of the strongest tropical cyclones ever recorded in the world, typhoon Haiyan, locally referred to as Yolanda, swept widespread havoc and destruction across the Philippines on November 8, 2013. According to the United Nations’ Office of Coordinated Humanitarian Affairs, 14 million people in the Philippines were affected by this typhoon, including thousands of precious lost human lives and 4 million people were displaced, including 1.8 million children. Nearly, 12,000 babies were born in the month following the typhoon.

Since the mid-1970s an aggressive new strain of capitalism has come to dominate the world and it is called “neoliberalism.” The word “liberalism” is used because neoliberalism looks back to the classical economists, such as Adam Smith, for its inspiration but it is an aggressive new variant of liberalism lacking the empathy for other humans that the classical economists articulated; consequently, the prefix “neo” is added to the word “liberalism.” A widely used definition of neoliberalism is that used by Harvey (2006, p. 2) who defined it as:

Neoliberalism’s policy prescription is an almost exclusive reliance upon the market as the institution to be used for resource allocation and the goal of neoliberalism is to increase foreign investment (McCarthy 2007). Since the state is presumed to be inefficient, neoliberalism eschews any role for the state in responding to the needs of the populace (McCarthy 2007). For example, wages can be kept inordinately low to lure outside corporations and businesses to invest in the Philippines. Under the auspices of neoliberalism, major multilateral agencies such as the Asian Development Bank, World Bank, International Monetary Fund, and World Trade Organization, ‘have become increasingly aggressive in their willingness to look inside countries, evaluate their governance structures, and recommend both sweeping and highly specific changes’ (McCarthy 2007, p. 40). These multilateral agencies have called for foreign investors in developing countries to be guaranteed parity rights and protections against expropriation, and to be allowed to freely move investment funds and profits into, and out of, a country as they wish (McCarthy 2007).

Neoliberal approaches to solving problems of climate change are further increasing the gap between the rich and poor, by promoting development projects in the affected communities that may empower some people but not everyone. Some individuals benefit by being given jobs and material goods but other individuals are left wanting. A creative alternative development approach to that of neoliberal capitalism and globalization is being put into practice by some of the frontline churches and community organizers partnering with Philippine faith-based communities to build what Armstrong (2008) refers to as communities of compassion, also called social geographies of compassion, from the perspective of ecological liberation theology. This ecological theology movement is a revolutionary social and environmental peace and justice movement that bridges differences and brings people together for a common cause. Theoretically, it articulates not only reading scripture in accordance with the spirit of the letter, across different world religions and philosophies but, also, a creative and non-dogmatic eco-feminist and neo-Marxist perspective. However, while Marx argued that religion serves to legitimate the privileges of elite classes by disguising socio-cultural and economic inequities of production, this brief takes the more flexible position that religion can liberate as well as oppress.

Throughout much of history, the Roman Catholic Church was aligned with the rich and powerful of society and, with a few notable exceptions, showed little, if any, concern about the poor and marginalized. The church traditionally justified this disregard for temporal matters by using an approach known as the “distinction of planes,” which argued that there were two planes of existence: the sacred plane (the concern of the church) and the secular plane (the concern of secular society) (Smith 1975). Any potentially destabilizing influences emerging from a discussion of Jesus’ love for the poor in the scriptures were blunted by making it abundantly clear that any poverty being referred to was spiritual poverty and not material poverty (Nangle 2004).

Faith-based communities are very different from those motivated by competitive individualism. They often model themselves after the Basic Christian Communities, which are inspired by liberation theology and later by ecological theology and feminism. These rehabilitation and development communities have long engaged in a variety of livelihood projects designed to improve their members’ quality of life. They are involved in income-generating activities such as handicraft production, food processing, garment making, soap making, cooperative stores, communal farming, and livestock dispersal programs (for more detailed examples, see Holden and Nadeau 2010 and 2011). They typically use a participatory approach that partners with local people who are interactively given an education on how to do research to determine what types of livelihood programs they would like to implement. In accordance with the Philippine’s Local Government Code, they often help to monitor internal revenue allotments to local governments and the election process to make sure there is no corruption, but, as Evita Jimenez (2012) of the Center for People Empowerment explains, computerized voting technology makes this difficult because they have no way to make sure the requirements for transparency and integrity of the software have been complied with.