Settling environmental problems is a strategy to end conflicts nonviolently. Catholic teaching on moral duties to protect the environment has shifted from a traditional utilitarian approach to a more holistic one, well summarized in Laudato Si’s two central themes: the Gospel of creation and integral ecology. Scholars, in engaging the relationship between nonviolence and peacebuilding, consider Tobias Winright on “ethical and policy discourse” and Catholic “integral peace” to articulate norms for active nonviolent actions that can address environmental conflicts, including mining-related ones. This essay underlines the tweaking role “environmental justice” must play in this relationship. It focuses on the latter role with a focus on mining.
Andrés McKinley, one of the nonviolent anti-mining movement scholars, in his article titled “The Mining Struggle in El Salvador and the Role of the Catholic Church,” asserts that “In the middle of the sixteenth century, when King Ferdinand of Spain was orienting his men on the priorities for the conquest of the new world, his instructions were clear and concise: “Get the gold, humanely if possible; but, at any cost, get the gold.”[1] Postmodern mining expresses this principle of getting gold at any cost, damaging environmental resources on which communities heavily depend. Marshall argues, “Over the past sixty years, an estimated forty percent of civil wars can be associated with natural resources; since 1990, at least eighteen violent conflicts have been fueled by the exploitation of natural resources….”[2] Thus, the importance of paying attention to policies and practices of extractive industries in the broader context and their link to peacebuilding. As Rigobert Minani argues, “a better understanding of mining’s influence on conflict could help improve interventions to prevent and reduce conflict and build lasting peace.”[3]
The first aspect to consider in the relationship between nonviolence and peacebuilding is a just use of land, which requires the protection of rainforests and biodiversity. Karl M. Gaspar argues that though conflicts have lasted more than 50 years in the Philippines, they have implemented a radical land-reform program, promoting a national economic policy that “has survived six presidents and remains a force to reckon with.”[4] Land reform, coupled with Pope Francis’ anthropocosmic vision, which “sees meaning and value emerging from the intimate intertwining of humans and the world,”[5] is a means to peacebuilding.
Pope Francis’s anthropocosmic vision: Gospel of Creation and Integral Ecology
A few of Pope Francis’ ideas on mining and environmental justice have called the attention of just peace scholars. First is the statement that an integral ecology “is made up of simple daily gestures that break with the logic of violence, exploitation, and selfishness.” (LS, 230). Second, the call to maintain harmony with creation through active nonviolence, and third, the self-determination of indigenous peoples.
Biblical scholar, theologian, and activist Walter Wink asserts that nonviolence should not be mistaken for avoiding conflicts. Instead, nonviolence “seeks out conflicts, elicits conflict, exacerbates conflicts to bring it out into the open and lance its poisonous sores.”[6] Pope Francis is even more explicit that nonviolence is not the absence of conflicts. Conflicts must be faced “constructively and peacefully so that ‘tensions and oppositions can achieve a diversified and life-giving unity’”[7] Following this claim, it is safe to affirm that using land and resources justly is a nonviolent endeavor with peacebuilding potential.
Karl M. Gaspar points to the fact that, during a Day of Reflection between the Vatican and mining executives, Pope Francis reminded everyone that “the great challenge of business leaders is to create a harmony of interests, involving investors, managers, workers, their families, the future of their children, the preservation of the environment on both a regional and international scale, and a contribution to world peace.”[8] In this contribution, using land and natural resources justly has become a vital component in strengthening the relationship between nonviolence and peacebuilding. The land has religious value for all peoples, especially indigenous people whose self-determination to hold companies accountable to protect the environment has become a powerful means to mitigate conflict peacefully.
Pope Francis calls on the indigenous peoples to apply the right to self-determination (Fratelli Tutti, 14) and social protest. José Bayardo Pacoricona argues that States put mining at the center of the national economy without considering the vision of the development of indigenous peoples.[9] They do so by “granting mining concessions that skirted constitutional standards,”[10]sacrificing the interests and values-land of indigenous peoples. Raymond Offenheiser argues, “Many mining projects are located on lands titled under legacy treaty arrangements to indigenous populations. They may be aboriginal peoples in Australia, low-caste tribal groups in India, or native populations in the depths of the Amazon. Or they may be the Giyuku people of Kenya or the Lendu people of Ituri, the Northern province of the Congo. Quite often, these lands have powerful cultural importance.”[11] So, when indigenous communities are expelled from their lands or lose their living standards to mining, they also lose their identity. These losses result in multiple resources and socio-environmental conflicts that can take generations to settle.[12] However, I argue that these socio-environmental conflicts become an opportunity calling for self-determination, which seeks peaceful means of “ethical and policy discourse” for ecological sustainability.
The peaceful means of self-determination is another factor linking nonviolence to peacebuilding. For Pacoricona, respect for “communities’ rights to land and territory, adequate and balanced environment, and participation, prior consultation” must be ensured.[13] Indigenous peoples must stand up for self-determination when these conditions are not met for mining in their lands. The peaceful means of self-determination include marches, rallies, protests, boycotts, and civil disobedience. Anna Floerke Scheid and Daniel P. Scheid give an example of Tía María copper mines in Peru, where nonviolent direct action led the government to delay a mining opening to 2024.[14] For Emmanuel Katongole, the peaceful means of self-determination include reimagination and remembering. He uses stories of Central African Republic’s (CAR) conflicts that have made people hopeless in CAR, making them hopeless, with only three options available to young people: “Join politics, go abroad, or join the militia.”[15] In the CAR case, victims have become killers, and the oppressed have become oppressors.[16] It illustrates how the people need self-determination to counter structural and direct violence imposed on them by mining exploitation. Reimagining Self-determination helps to reinvent the future and a fresh vision of politics.[17] Settling environmental issues and advocating just land use are suitable spaces for such reimagination.
Lederach’s moral imagination is pushed further. Drawing on him, Robert Schreiter notes that “the capacity to imagine peace, that is, to think differently about conflicts to come to new peaceful possibilities, is now being recognized as one of the most important qualities of a peacebuilder…. [Social imaginary] is “framed by certain assumptions about the world and certain rules of connection and communication…filled with certain values, images, and practices.”[18] In African social imaginary, ecological just peace must include efforts of indigenous peacebuilding. These include Palaver’s Tree in Liberia, Gacaca courts in Rwanda, and TRC in South Africa in the aftermath of apartheid.
For Tobias Winright, Imaginative Thinking requires “placing just war theory within the larger framework of peacemaking.”[19] He suggests, “Like just war theory, just mining theory has criteria, or action guides, fitting under three categories: jus ad extractionem, jus in extractione, and jus post extractionem.”[20] Integral ecology and ecological just peace become a kind of culture: participatory and intergenerational.[21] So, for Winright, in just mining, the right intention criteria of just war theory becomes a means to pursue peace and reconciliation. Eli McCarthy has added a virtue-based justice approach for sustainability to this conversation. For him, the just peace norm of ecological sustainability strengthens the relationship between nonviolence and peacebuilding in many ways. He includes three main virtue-based just peace components: 1) Develop virtues and skills for constructively engaging conflict (jus in conflictione); 2) Break dynamics or cycles of violence (jus ex bello); and 3) Build sustainable peace (jus ad pacem). He includes Ecological justice and sustainability in the latter as the long-term well-being of people, non-human animals, and the environment. Besides, he considers promoting relationality and reconciliation across all sectors of society, such as inter-religious dialogue and cooperation or truth and reconciliation commissions. Robust civil society and just governance, such as re-distribution of political power; affirming human dignity and human rights of all, including adversaries by cultivating empathy for all actors; Economic, gender, and racial justice with a focus on the marginalized and vulnerable.
For Elias O. Opongo, virtues and skills that strengthen nonviolence and peacebuilding regarding Resource-based conflicts in countries such as “Kenya, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Burundi, the Central African Republic, Liberia, and South Sudan,”[22] include approaches to making local communities participate in decision-making processes concerning mining management. These include platforms such as Episcopal Commission for natural resources, Extractives Industry Transparency Initiative, and the transnational approach the Episcopal Conferences have taken on mining. A vital example of the Congo bishops’ actions is the “engagement on the 2010 Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Protection Act… This US legislation included landmark provisions to ensure greater transparency—“non-blood-mineral—in the supply chain of minerals.”[23] The bishops have provided data on how mineral exploitation is the source of arms conflicts in DR Congo.
Turning to the Philippines, Karl M. Gaspar suggests examples of nonviolent skills such as “grassroots-based ecological actions that influenced the bishops in the Philippines in 1988 to issue the pastoral letter “What is Happening to Our Beautiful Land?”[24] This Letter is another means that has kept nonviolence and peacebuilding tied in the Philippines. It calls on the government “not to pursue short term economic gains at the expense of long-term ecological damage.”[25] The bishops showed that “the 29 out of the 30 million hectares of the [Philippines]’s primary forests had been destroyed.”[26] The bishops urged the people to get together as mining is often performed where indigenous communities reside.
Offenheiser provides examples of the coalition that made El Salvador succeed in becoming “the first country to ban this form of Mining.” [27] The Jesuit-led University of Central America (UCA) helped organize a massive social protest in 2017 to get to this ban. Another example is the “Free, prior, and informed consent (FPIC) …[with aim] to give a community the opportunity to conduct a public referendum on whether it endorses proposed mining in its region”[28] in Peru. For Offenheiser, “FPIC and transparency are perhaps the most powerful tools available to raise ethical questions and drive social change in the mining sector.”[29] But they are also among the decisive factors that sustain the relationship between nonviolence and peacebuilding in mining-based conflict areas.
Nonviolent strategies can be effective to avoid, reduce, end conflicts, and build just and peaceful societies.[30] Lisa Sowle Cahill suggests “practical validation of social trust”[31] and practices for imaginative ecological just peace which include “song, story, art, and ritual” that contribute to the “transformation of imaginations and worldviews so that a different reality is grasped as truly possible.”[32] These can be performed through what Pope Francis has called the culture of encounter, allowing spaces of encounters to dismantle structures of violence, including cultural and environmental violence.
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[1] Andrés McKinley, “The Mining Struggle in El Salvador and the Role of the Catholic Church,” in Catholic Peacebuilding and Mining: Peacebuilding, Development, and Ecology, ed. Caesar Montevecchio and Gerard F. Powers, Routledge Studies in Religion (London: Routledge, 2021), 80.
[2] Catherine Marshall, “Religion and Extractive Industries: Ethics, Practice, and Engagement,” in Catholic Peacebuilding and Mining: Peacebuilding, Development, and Ecology, ed. Caesar Montevecchio and Gerard F. Powers, Routledge Studies in Religion (London: Routledge, 2021), 24.
[3] Minani Rigobert, “The Mining Industry, Conflict, and the Church’s Commitment in the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” in Catholic Peacebuilding and Mining, by Caesar A. Montevecchio and Gerard F. Powers, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2021), 51, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003094272-4.
[4] Karl M. Gaspar, “Mining in the Philippines: A Catholic Peacebuilding Approach,” in Catholic Peacebuilding and Mining, by Caesar A. Montevecchio and Gerard F. Powers, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2021), 55, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003094272-4.
[5] Francisca Chimhanda, “African Theology of Land: A Shona Perspective,” Journal OfTheologyfor Southern Africa 148 (March 2014): 44.
[6] Walter Wink, Walter Wink: Collected Readings (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2013), 211.
[7] Francis, “For the Celebration of the Fiftieth World Day of Peace: Nonviolence: A Style of Politics for Peace,” December 8, 2016, # 6 https://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html.
[8] Gaspar, “Mining in the Philippines: A Catholic Peacebuilding Approach,” 62.
[9] José Bayardo Chata Pacoricona, “Dynamics between the State, Mining Companies, and Indigenous Peoples in Peru,” in Catholic Peacebuilding and Mining: Peacebuilding, Development, and Ecology, ed. Caesar Montevecchio and Gerard F. Powers, Routledge Studies in Religion (London: Routledge, 2021), 67.
[10] Pacoricona, 70.
[11] Raymond Offenheiser, “The Mining Industry: The Journey from Impunity to Consent,” in Catholic Peacebuilding and Mining, by Caesar A. Montevecchio and Gerard F. Powers, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2021), 226, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003094272-13.
[12] Pacoricona, “Dynamics between the State, Mining Companies, and Indigenous Peoples in Peru,” 71.
[13] Pacoricona, 72.
[14] Anna Floerke Scheid and Daniel P. Scheid, “Integral Ecology, Just Peace, and Mining,” in Catholic Peacebuilding and Mining: Peacebuilding, Development, and Ecology, ed. Caesar Montevecchio and Gerard F. Powers, Routledge Studies in Religion (London: Routledge, 2021), 127.
[15] Emmanuel Katongole, Who Are My People?: Love, Violence and Christianity in Sub-Saharan Africa (Indiana: University of Notre Dame, 2022), 106.
[16] Katongole, 117.
[17] Katongole, 121.
[18] Robert J. Schreiter, “The Catholic Social Imaginary and Peacebuilding: Ritual, Sacrament, and Spirituality,” in Peacebuilding: Catholic Theology, Ethics, and Praxis, ed. Robert J. Schreiter, R. Scott Appleby, and Gerard F. Powers (Maryknoll, N.Y: Orbis Books, 2010), 221.
[19] Tobias L. Winright, “A Just Mining Framework for the Ethics of Extraction of Natural Resources and Integral Peace,” in Catholic Peacebuilding and Mining: Peacebuilding, Development, and Ecology, ed. Caesar Montevecchio and Gerard F. Powers, Routledge Studies in Religion (London: Routledge, 2021), 106.
[20] Winright, 107.
[21] Scheid and Scheid, “Integral Ecology, Just Peace, and Mining,” 125.
[22] Elias O. Opongo, “Good Governance for Mining and the Promotion of Peace in Africa,” in Catholic Peacebuilding and Mining, by Caesar A. Montevecchio and Gerard F. Powers, 1st ed. (London: Routledge, 2021), 191, https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003094272-13.
[23] Rigobert Minani Bihuzo, “The Mining Industry, Conflict, And The Church’s Commitment In The Democratic Republic Of The Congo,” in Catholic Peacebuilding and Mining: Peacebuilding, Development, and Ecology, ed. Caesar Montevecchio and Gerard F. Powers, Routledge Studies in Religion (London: Routledge, 2021), 50.
[24] Gaspar, “Mining in the Philippines: A Catholic Peacebuilding Approach,” 59.
[25] Gaspar, 59.
[26] Gaspar, 60.
[27] Offenheiser, “The Mining Industry : The Journey from Impunity to Consent,” 235.
[28] Offenheiser, 227.
[29] Offenheiser, 235.
[30] Lisa Sowle Cahill, Blessed Are the Peacemakers: Pacifism, Just War, and Peacebuilding (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2019), 3.
[31] Cahill, 340.
[32] Cahill, 332.