The Fourth Sunday of Easter this year falls on the eve of Earth Day, a day dedicated to motivating and mobilizing our communities to safeguard the environment and seek human and planetary flourishing for our own generation and generations to come. Earth Day has been commercialized and coopted in many ways, just like so many other holidays rooted in radical movements for justice, peace, and liberation (MLK Day, International Women’s Day, Mother’s Day, and Labor Day to name a few!). To counteract this cooptation, we should be ever attentive to the real people on the ground around the world who have been on the front lines of environmental justice movements fighting to defend their lands, waterways, atmospheres, and ecosystems from ecologically destructive extractivist projects, along with the present and pending effects of the climate crisis. 

For example, African American communities that inaugurated the contemporary environmental justice movement in Warren County, North Carolina, continue to fight for a healthy environment and climate justice. The Standing Rock Sioux and other Indigenous communities continue to resist the Dakota Access Pipeline and the fossil fuel industry more broadly. And across the Americas and around the world, multiracial coalitions persistently resist extractivist projects like metallic mining, logging, intensive monocrop agriculture, hydroelectric dams, and the privatization of water. These movements are all met with serious opposition by brokers of global capital and local corruption, which places the lives and livelihoods of land and environmental defenders at risk every day. In many contexts, this work places land and environmental defenders in danger of intense smear campaigns, violent persecution, and even assassination. In fact, since the turn of the century alone, thousands of land and environmental defenders around the world have been assassinated as a result of their work to protect the earth and its inhabitants from exploitation and destruction by profit-driven, extractive industries. The world has rejected these defenders, but their witness to an alternative world characterized by just and equitable flourishing for human and more-than-human creation is the cornerstone of a livable future for us all.  

The readings for today all speak of rejection, lack of recognition by the world, and even suffering and death for the sake of love and salvation. As we traversed through Lent and the Easter Triduum just a few short weeks ago, we remembered how Jesus was rejected and scorned by the world for his radical vision and concrete embodiment of an alternative world in which all people have life in abundance, a world that he followed his Jewish tradition in naming the reign of God. This first century Palestinian Jewish man laid down his life freely, for the sake of bringing this vision to fruition and inaugurating a beloved community in which the love, justice, peace, and liberated existence of divine life reign “on earth as it in heaven.” 

As we contemplate this pascal mystery of death to life, cross and resurrection, our faith tradition tells us that the one who was rejected by the world becomes the cornerstone, and that the power to lay down one’s life is met by God with the power to take it up again. This is the good news of Easter! Martyrs of social solidarity and liberation, like Saint Óscar Arnulfo Romero and Blessed Rutilio Grande, are indeed the cornerstone of contemporary faith communities committed to justice and liberation across Latin America and beyond. So too are ecological martyrs like Chico Mendes, Dorothy Stang, and Berta Cáceres, “seeds” that have multiplied the effects of their lives and commitments in the individuals and communities that carry on their legacies. May their witness inspire all of us to recommit our own lives to honoring the earth and its inhabitants every single day by defending our common home from all that which threatens its sacred beauty and life-giving capacities. 

This Embody section draws from the companion website to Ecomartyrdom in the Americas at www.ecomartyrdom.net 

Visit the site for many resources for contemplation and action.

Berta Cáceres was born on March 4, 1971, in La Esperanza, Honduras to a family of Lenca heritage. The daughter of a midwife who was a humanitarian and activist, she traveled to El Salvador to support the Salvadoran revolution in the late 1980s. Having witnessed the ravages of war firsthand, Berta returned to Honduras seeking paths of nonviolent transformation that would resist socioeconomic injustice and defend Indigenous peoples and rural territories from extractivism.

In 1993, Berta co-founded the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH), which successfully resisted multiple extractivist projects in the mountainous regions of Honduras. Berta reclaimed her family’s Indigenous identity and insisted on the rights of the Lenca people to defend their sacred lands and waters. With her leadership, COPINH also promoted the full incorporation and leadership of women and LGBTQ+ folks in the work of the organization. In Berta’s estimation, the struggle against the extractivist paradigm of neoliberal capitalism could not be separated from struggles against patriarchy and racism. 

For over two decades, Berta and other members of COPINH were targets of smear campaigns and death threats to themselves and their families. As extractivist projects proliferated and hydroelectric dams were popping up throughout Honduras, one river particularly at risk was the Gualcarque River, sacred to the Lenca people and essential to the life of the Río Blanco community. When construction for the Agua Zarca dam began in 2012, it was clear the company had violated the rights of Indigenous peoples to prior, free, and informed consultation regarding the use of their sacred and life-sustaining river. COPINH organized resistance to the project and eventually blocked the road to the construction site for two whole years, even in the face of harassment and violence, including the murder of Tomás Garcia in 2013. 

Berta was awarded the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize in 2015 for her role in the struggle against the Agua Zarca dam project, a struggle that continued when Berta returned home from receiving the award. She had a trip scheduled to Europe to put pressure on international banks and corporations to divest from this project and others like it, but the trip never came to pass. In the late hours of the night on March 2, 2016, Berta Caceres was shot to death in her home in La Esperanza. She was forty-four years old, just two days shy of her forty-fifth birthday. Berta lives on in the work of COPINH, in her daughters who continue her struggle, and in her prophetic words shared across the world on YouTube videos, posters, murals, t-shirts, and more. As many of those devoted to her legacy declare: “Berta did not die, she multiplied!” Berta’s Goldman Prize Acceptance Speech is an apt way to conclude this contemplation on her witness and that of all the martyrs who, in her words, “gave their lives in the struggle to defend the goods of the natural world.” 

Video of Berta Cáceres’ Goldman Environmental Prize Acceptance Speech, 2015: https://youtu.be/AR1kwx8b0ms?si=fBoabGak5Qob-VnG 

Videos of the artist interpreting the artwork can be found at https://ecomartyrdom.net/the-art-of-memory