Back in the ’80s you may remember the rise of “Liberation Theology,” an approach practiced by a faction of Catholic clergy who took the message of helping the poor seriously by working for social justice. Now there is a movement gaining strength in Latin America called “Liberation Ecology,” which takes the concept a step further to promote the idea of human stewardship of the land as being one of the prime directives of our spiritual path.

The following clips are from a fine article that documents this rising movement.

AlterNet: Environment: Latin America’s Surprising New Eco-Warriors:

Although few North Americans seem to have noticed it yet, in the past few years a “liberation ecology” movement, with the church at its spiritual heart, has been taking shape from Chile to Mexico. Will the Vatican, I wonder, encourage or stifle it? Latin American Catholics have, after all, taken on what they saw as forces of injustice before.

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In his essay “Christianity and the Survival of Creation,” Wendell Berry writes that our destruction of nature “is not just bad stewardship, or stupid economics, or a betrayal of family responsibility; it is the most horrid blasphemy. It is flinging God’s gifts into His face, as if they were of no worth beyond that assigned to them by our destruction of them.”