A Letter to the Editor

Dear Emily, 

Congratulations on becoming EcoTheo's Social Justice editor!

My wife, Brenda, and I met as Peace Corps Volunteers in Brazil in the early 1970s and lived most of our adult life in that country.  From 1985 to 1992, we served with the Franciscans in the eastern Amazon, organizing subsistence farmers.  We later moved to Recife in the Brazilian Northeast, where we directed relief & development programs.  

Land on the margins of the Amazon basin was becoming more valuable, and the subsistence farmers we worked with were under strong, often violent, pressure to get off their land. The Church had established an ecumenical Land Pastoral to help the farmers retain their land, to help landless workers settle on land, and to help both to produce more abundantly and sustainably.  

In the 1980s in Brazil, there were conflicts between environmentalists, who saw people as a threat to the environment, and social justice advocates, who saw the desperate need of the people for land.  Thankfully, this was resolved, a vision of sustainable land use being developed.  Where we were able to help people stay on the land or help those without land to obtain it, the results were heartening.  A working family could produce enough to live well and have some extra to provide to the local market.  We came to recognize that small-scale agriculture is both more sustainable and more productive per acre.  

Later, in Recife, I directed a USAID program for at-risk youth.  Part of the project was to identify employment opportunities for at risk youth.  It was heartbreaking.  Jobs that had existed for semi-skilled labor, such as in print shops, were disappearing rapidly.  We did what we could, but more and more I became convinced that the opportunities in urban environments were very limited.  Not all people have a vocation for agriculture, but those who do should have an opportunity and a structure within which to exercise that vocation.  

In 2006, I had the opportunity to carry out a study of land reform settlements in the State of Bahia, Brazil.  The results were generally very positive.  When land reform is well organized, it can be a tremendously important way of meeting social and environmental needs.  

Our society is increasingly urban in orientation, and people no longer live with or understand the land.  There are wonderful voices, such as Wendell Berry and Catholic Rural Life, but on the whole land reform is not focused on as a serious ecological/social issue.  

So, when I think of environmental justice, I think of land, of small farms, of the people I worked with who worked that land.  I hope that this can be part of the EcoTheo social justice discussion.  

Yours,

Arthur Powers