Ecofeminist Spiritualities in Context of Social and Pandemic Crises: Sustainability and Shared Care

Abstract

The article contributes on ecofeminist spirituality, reflecting on the relationship between gender, ecology, and social and pandemic crises from contemporary tragedies, based on bibliographic and audiovisual (video) research. It is based on the transversality of approaches, which contemplate the power relations between gender, class, and ethnicity in dealing with people and the environment. In an ecofeminist approach, it affirms the ethics of shared care from the most vulnerable living beings, at a sociocultural, political, economic, and theological level.

“Estamos no mesmo mar,

mas não no mesmo barco”

(Maria Paula Meneses 2020)

Introduction

This article, which has its origins in the context of the COVID-19¹ in Brazil, seeks to understand pandemic and socioenvironmental tragedies from an ecofeminist perspective, and in this also lies its contribution. The coronavirus that has spread globally has entered public and private spaces in a frightening and deadly way for thousands of people. Governments, institutions, and people have been and are directly affected by it, albeit in different ways and intensities, and have taken (or not) measures to alleviate its impacts and prevent its action at a personal, social, economic, and political level, and each of these groups is responsible for the measures it has taken or not taken. During this same time and alongside this pandemic, socioenvironmental tragedies continued to violently impact some regions and many lives in Brazil, also causing desolation and many losses.

Why relate these two manifestations of suffering that, in principle, are not directly linked? The question and the hypothesis are based on studies on the negative impacts of COVID-19 and socioenvironmental catastrophes, which demonstrate that women and children are the ones who suffer the most directly and indirectly in these situations, along with other vulnerable links in nature. In order to observe this result of interdisciplinary research, I then made a memory and a list of some data about this specific situation, which serve as a basis for punctuating central perceptions of hermeneutic-historical approximation and understanding of the realities in question, in an intense process of interdisciplinary construction of knowledge.

During the bibliographic and audiovisual research,² intersectional aspects were outlined that indicated and converged towards the need for an interdisciplinary and transversal perspective and approach, which could account for the complexity of the issue. This perception, still under construction, is becoming evident as appropriate and necessary, because it aims to understand phenomena that are not immediately and directly interconnected in the context of diverse realities and experiences and, with that, to contingency intervention possibilities that place at the center of research and action human and non-human rights, responsible citizenship, an ethic of shared care, and a vulnerable life. It is therefore a matter of contributing to a construction of knowledge that perceives the complexity of relationships and experiences in an intersectional way at the level of sociability, considering the micro and macro perspectives in the relationships of interdependence and respect for diversity at the social and environmental level. These perceptions, in the course of the research, made me recognize these fundamental aspects for an ecofeminist epistemology and spirituality, which critically evaluate and undergo lived, narrated, and written experiences with transversal theoretical contributions of gender, class, ethnicity, and age for a better understanding humanized and humanizing of the different experiences and impacts suffered in contexts of pandemic and socioenvironmental tragedies.

Therefore, these two tragic manifestations of suffering and death aroused the interest of observing possible interconnections between ontological vulnerability and social vulnerability, the ethics of care and power relations at various levels, as well as weaving reflections on ecofeminist conceptions and spiritualities.

Tragedies, Memory, and Fundamental Perceptions

The impacts of COVID-19 and socioenvironmental tragedies in this context can evoke memories of similar experiences in other times and places. Between 2019 and 2021, several surveys were carried out on COVID-19, which also reported on pandemics in other times and contexts,³ as the Black Death/Bubonic, in the fourteenth century, seeking to understand, beyond the tragedy and its millions of dead people, how such pandemics influenced the development of vaccines and other preventive sanitary measures, as well as public health policies. The same could be the case in relation to socioenvironmental tragedies; however, it can be seen here that the Brazilian public power has not acted through legally punitive and politically preventive actions, as in the case of landslides in popular housing projects (favelas) located in unsuitable territory for construction (slopes in risky areas), a recurring fact in several cities in the country.⁴

Recurrent have also become the biggest socioenvironmental tragedies in recent years, caused by the failure of mining dams: the Fundão dam, in Mariana/MG (2015), about which many investigations and reports were carried out, as well as notifications and the infraction notices that the mining company Samarco (controlled by Vale and BHP Billiton) received from the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA).⁵ These measures, however, are necessary, but not very effective, as they do not interact or are effective with preventive measures. In January 2019, the same type of disaster occurred due to the rupture of a dam at the mining company Vale, in Brumadinho/MG, with a greater number of people killed.⁶ The loss of human and non-human life is blatant, and the socioenvironmental damage is irreparable. These disasters are environmental crimes, subject to judgment and conviction, provided for by law. In a critical perspective, however, in addition to punishing and indemnifying, it is necessary that governments, environmental public policies, and socioecological movements anticipate such new or recurrent tragedies through political and technological strategies that can avoid such tragedies through mentality reconstruction, which precedes and accompanies the legal elaboration: instead of an economy that has its objective in the profit, in the accumulation, in the exploitation of human and natural resources, it is essential to develop a sustainable, ecological, subsistence economy that has as objective what is necessary for the Good Living⁷ of all beings, with the use of water, wind, and terrestrial resources on a smaller scale. As long as this challenge is not faced and carried out at the micro and macro levels, in politics, science, technology, in the city and in the countryside, in homes and public institutions, the imminence of such tragedies will be the horizon on which and with which we will have to go on living and suffering.

From the perspective of possible changes, which do not dispense with the will for political-ideological change, I refer here to quilombo and Landless workers movement (MST) initiatives, as well as tragic reactions suffered through representatives of agribusiness. These are two socioenvironmental disasters in the midst of the pandemic tragedy in Brazil: (a) in late May/early June 2020,⁸ more than 530 ha of protected area of native cerrado were deforested, in Kalunga quilombo territory, in Cavalcante/Goiás, in Chapada dos Veadeiros, through the “big chain technique,” carried out by the Alagoas and Pequi Farms, in affront to the current Brazilian environmental law and the rights of the quilombo people in the region, extracting from there even tons of limestone; (b) on the morning of July 3, 2020, two tractors and several men, including one of the owners of Fazenda Santa Catarina (Sabarálcool power plant), Victor Vicari Rezende, invaded and began to destroy the crops ready for harvest at the Valdair Roque Camp, in Quinta do Sol/Paraná,⁹ where 50 farming families belonging to the MST produce food (grains, fruits, tubers, vegetables, eggs, honey, vegetables, breads, cheeses, cookies, milk, etc.) destined for self-support and the Donation Campaign, organized by the MST, in the context of social distancing/isolation caused by the pandemic.

Given these facts, how to relate gender and ecofeminist spirituality in experiencing and facing exploitation, violence, and pandemic crises, such as COVID-19, which devastated the planet and its inhabitants? Seeking to weave some threads to build reflections, I highlight ecofeminist elements and develop some items on the subject. To this end, I rely on bibliographic references, also using audiovisuals; I point to long-standing historical questions and to emerging questions that build on that history. I seek to point to existing connections in the existing power relations between people and from these to the (environment) environment. I highlight works carried out in ecofeminist social and theological movements, for which the ethical principle of care is fundamental.

Fundamental Theoretical Perceptions and Foundations

My first perception and conviction is that greed and the lack of seriousness and/or competence in the exercise of public functions have contributed and will continue to perpetuate situations of risks and losses, if there is not a profound change in mentalities, undertakings, responsibilities, and spiritualities.¹⁰ Thus, I express the pertinence and interconnectivity of the economic relations of the misuse/abuse of forces and raw materials of production with the construction of ideologies and imaginaries that sustain this political economy since Antiquity.¹¹ One of the main characteristics that sustain the relationship between ecofeminism and the critique of the patriarchal and capitalist economy is the interconnection between exploitation of the environment and human labor, specifically of impoverished women (Mies and Shiva 2021; Campusano and Schiavo 2021; Gebara 2021). It is these women who, even in times of a pandemic, suffer the most from the impacts of unemployment, falling wages, family responsibilities, and domestic violence.

The recognition of the interconnections of local and global, economic and political, public and private, cultural/religious and social thinking, and acting in relation to the environment in which we live remains equally central: We are part of the place we inhabit; we take care of it or with it we succumb. This has to do with food, social relations, health, in short, with a good policy that guarantees “our daily bread,” including in this “bread” a good and democratic government for the Good Living of all people (Lutero 1980 [1529], pp. 467–469; Shiva, 2021, pp. 155–160) in the whole of creation. From this perception comes another fundamental characteristic that supports the relationship between ecofeminism, all being’s interdependence, and spirituality: the shared care (Sattler 2019, p. 185) especially for the most fragile links in different life contexts, specifically in the midst of the pandemic crisis experienced (Meneses 2020).

Permeating the two previous items, gender relations become the neuralgic place of investigation and evaluation of political, social, religious, and economic relations. To understand such gender relations, we are based on the fundamental and interdisciplinary conceptualization of Scott (1995) and Schüssler Fiorenza (2009),¹² as an analytical category of power relations sociocultural constituted from the meaning attributed to hierarchical differences between the sexes in the invention of functions, powers and knowledge. This category matters to decode the meaning of sexual differentiation and to “understand the complex connections between the various forms of human interaction” (Scott 1995, p. 89), with the transversality of class, ethnicity, and age co-participating in these relationships. Public health, specifically women’s health, is a privileged place to perceive sociocultural and hierarchically constituted power relations, especially when it comes to reproduction and in situations of pandemics. In this way, public policies, including environmental policies, are interconnected by the care and/or control of the most vulnerable parts in the developmental civilizational process of patriarchal and neoliberal capitalism.¹³

It is clear, therefore, that the world we inhabit and that inhabits us has become a macro and global context, with its interconnections at the micro and local level. This world is characterized by asymmetrical relationships and networks of powers that, generating and consolidating inequalities, also classify, discriminate, and mark them through different forms of violence at home, at work, in religion, and in politics. The most vulnerable parties are found in all these spaces of relationships and increasingly suffer the whims, impacts, and consequences of these asymmetric relationships. This perception, critique, and call for the reconstruction of social and environmental relations is another central feature of ecofeminism in its intersection with gender and the economy. It is linked to factors in the world of women’s work and labor and market policies, such as labor and employment with/without labor rights, wages, access to land and water, means of production, and production itself. If, for example, the UN Decade for Women (1976–1985) assumed that the economic improvement of women, especially in the “third world,” would naturally result from the expansion and “opening up” of the Western capitalist development process, then during, at the end of the Decade, and in the post-Decade, it was realized that the problem was precisely this “development”: most women, even “participating” in it, were impoverished and suffered various forms of violence. In the words of Shiva (2021, p. 150, highlight is ours):

[this] increasing underdevelopment of women was not due to insufficient and inadequate “participation” in “development”; rather, it was caused by the imposed and asymmetrical participation whereby they bear the burden of costs but are excluded from the benefits.

For this author, entering such a capitalist world of work under these conditions means simultaneously giving up ancestral subsistence economies, considered by the market economy as “cultural poverty.” These subsistence economies were systematically replaced by the market and consumption economy, which caused privatization and loss of land, expansion of commercial crops, debts, migration to urban centers, terrestrial, vegetative and water destruction, therefore, ecological and cultural devastation, giving lead to a serious food and nutrition crisis.

Based on her research and work in ecofeminist movements in the perspective of “Southern epistemologies,” Shiva (2021, p. 153) states that women and children are the ones who suffer the most from the consequences of this type of labor market and consumption:

The poverty trap, created through the vicious circle of 'development', debt, environmental destruction and structural adjustment is most significantly experienced by women and children [mainly by the flow of capital between North and South, whose] economic outflow means a worsening of the crisis of impoverishment of women, children and the environment.

This complex and globalized structure of systems that produce goods and dictate market rules through the logic of surplus value and permanent/infinite growth denounces, in addition to the growth of impoverishment and environmental devastation, a “fundamental contradiction between production and consumption, because the sphere of production of goods is separated from consumption mainly by the sphere of circulation or market” (Mies 2021, p. 467). This basically means that those who produce don't eat or eat poorly. This material and cultural impoverishment is not unique to women and peoples of the 'South', but also to the richest countries and societies in the world.¹⁴

In view of this, Mies and Shiva (2021) as well as Sattler (2019) defend the need to reverse this “development” through the reconstruction of subsistence and self-sustainability economies, which place women and children at the center of an ethic of shared care through sustainable agroecological practices, claiming their rights to life and structural and debt adjustment. In this way, impoverished children and women are placed at the center of concerns and the construction of strategies that are simultaneously capable of empowering women and protecting nature (Souza 2000). This is a critical sociopolitical stance in the face of dominant political and economic systems, which is characterized as an “insurrection of subjugated knowledge,” aiming to rescue plural and ancestral visions that were despised and less valued by the homogenous culture of “monocultural logic” (Sattler 2019, p. 169). Understood as an insurrection, the reconstruction of a subsistence economy with the conscious use of technological resources to generate and guarantee (self) sustainability is a proposition that can be a survival strategy not only for millions of impoverished people who are on the margins of “development,” but for all the inhabitants of the planet. This is based on the assumption that women who suffer the greatest negative impact from environmental depredation have the (often lost) right to.

preserve autonomous control over their subsistence base, their common property resources: land, water, forests, hills. From their history and their own experience, they know that their survival, their freedom and their dignity [...] can be maintained only as long as they have control over these resources. (Mies 2021, p. 473).

It is in this way that, being the biggest victims, women and children also play a direct and indirect role in movements for the preservation and protection of life, nature, and healing the damage caused to it, in popular ecofeminist movements and academic spaces, questioning the paradigm of predominant, capitalist, patriarchal development, which is guided by profit and disorderly growth, and defending an agroecological subsistence alternative, in the countryside and in the city.¹⁵

Therefore, the intersection between capitalist economy,¹⁶ specifically gendered power relations and ecofeminist movements coalesces and is verified in the lives of women and children, who (a) suffer the most, everywhere, from the negative impacts of environmental degradation, losing their means of subsistence, migrating to other places in search of employment and/or being at the mercy of conditions of begging and prostitution; (b) displaced from their spaces of life and culture, they suffer various forms of sexual and economic violence, whether in domestic or work life; (c) seek strategies and articulate resistance, also through their spirituality that gives meaning to existence and resilience, to survive together with their children, taking care of the environment and seeking justice relationships.

In this context, it is worth highlighting Sattler’s analysis (2019, pp. 173–180), which states that the ideology of male supremacy and the class structure of capitalism, together, realize and legitimize control over bodies (not only) women, who simultaneously suffer violence and oppression and, thus, remain “an essential crutch for capitalism” (p. 174). The author names this set of social and epistemological relationships as capitalist patriarchy, with which “sexual, racial and class policies of elimination are combined with monocultural policies of agricultural and forestry extinction in the same vocabulary” (p. 180), which are linked to the markedly western mental monoculture. Thus, it is necessary to observe that ecofeminist movements question such monocultural and univocal paradigms to create dialogical, democratic, and critical processes and movements through paradigms of the complexity of all life and all forms of life, with respect to diversity in the construction of knowledge and powers. Women from all over the planet have been protagonists in these movements, because, in the words of Shiva (2021, pp. 164–65):

women identify with the interest of the land and their children in finding solutions to the crisis of survival. Against all odds, they try to remake the web that connects their lives to the lives of their children and the life of the planet. From a women's perspective, sustainability without environmental justice is impossible, and environmental justice is impossible without gender and generational justice.

The resistance and organization of women denounce the chain or network of inequalities, historically marked by violence, which interpenetrates and crosses the market economy and the world of work, laws, state policies, the media, churches, etc., influencing assumptions and prejudices that constitute the basis from which development macro policies are defined (Miranda 2015). The ecofeminism that we share here also denounces religious traditions that contribute to the construction and perpetuation of these assumptions and prejudices, specifically conservative and fundamentalist Christian traditions that make religion a powerful political instrument of subjugation and domination..¹⁷ Ecofeminist hermeneutical perspectives that we defend seek to rescue libertarian experiences of spirituality, also present in sacred texts, that offer support for the construction of fair and good relationships for the Good Living of all living beings.

Vulnerabilized Life as a Reference Axis

As a reaction and pro-action to this complex asymmetric set of powers that, from a theological perspective, encompasses all created/existing life, ecofeminist movements and theologies have been constituted as one of the agents and protagonists that aim at transformations at a personal, sociocultural, economic, political level. and ideological. Recognizing and assuming that the personal is political and that the political is personal, these movements are multi-dynamic and representative for various mobilization agendas, including the ecological one. It is noteworthy that the oppression of women has a political-ideological character, and, even though it is a personal experience, it cannot be restricted and “kept” to the private, personal, and domestic space. It is understood that historically conditions and contexts, as well as the circumstances of personal experiences, are structured and circumscribed through public, legal, and religious factors and that, therefore, “personal” and/or individual problems “can only be resolved through political means and actions” (Costa apud Richter Reimer 2019, p. 125). Considering simultaneously the ideological-political and sociocultural character of oppression and violence, these movements and theologies claim that any problem, including health and the environment, must have its solution through political actions (Gebara 1997) at the local and global levels (Souza 2000). These are, therefore, sociocultural and political movements in defense of all forms of life, with repercussions in all areas of activity, including the sciences of religion and theology, and which clash with groups that represent capital, alienated religion, and patriarchy (Santos 2020) that threaten life on Earth.

Asymmetrical gender relations have also been ideologically constructed for millennia and are continually cross-dressed. As they do not exclusively cover women’s problems, ecofeminist movements, spiritualities, and theologies, which have in gender and sex an analytical category¹⁸ of (re)construction of powers and transversalities with class, ethnicity, and age, they become a revolutionary reference and paradigm for reflections, analyses, and actions that intertwine religion, gender, and ecology.

In their various tendencies (Richter Reimer 2019), these ecofeminist movements show that they are not univocal, nor are they opponents. They work to raise awareness of the necessary and urgent change in mentalities, paradigms, and epistemologies, in order to transform the power relations between men and women and the relations of men and women with the environment/ecosystem (Candiotto 2012). Ivone Gebara, already in 1997 (p. 9), in dialogue with international feminists, advocated that ecofeminist theologies and movements were situated at “the political-ideological level of social struggles and national and international relations between human groups in the face of the growing ecological disaster.” This implies that there are no isolated relationships or environments, but that socioenvironmental and political-economic interdependence affects all environments and all beings on a planetary level.¹⁹ This is a fundamental aspect for an ecofeminist spirituality of liberation, which is committed to caring for life in its diverse, ambiguous, and complex relationships.

These relationships of interdependence and retro-projection are present in the propositions recorded by Flores and Trevizan (2015, p. 13), and continue to be one of the great ecofeminist challenges for the viability of sustainable and, therefore, healthy environments through new relationships:

opposition to a development that maximizes monetary benefits, to the detriment of the health of human communities and ecosystems; incorporation and appreciation of the knowledge and work of women involved in subsistence activities; concentration on the economic and political organization of women's life and work that presents alternatives to the ecological crisis and improvement of the living conditions of women and the poor; search for self-sufficiency, decentralization and self-organization, through the search for balance.

An ecofeminist perspective of liberation, which we share here, perceives, in the set of power relations, the interconnection between the exploitation of the environment with all its natural resources and of people with all their bodies in the name of the economy and the market, and it recognizes that this exploitation is characteristic of patriarchal systems of domination, of which all forms of violence are a part.²⁰ The fact is that the capitalist monetary maximization has not privileged and guaranteed the health of all people and the entire environment, which was evidenced and it is still terribly evident during the COVID-19 pandemic, highlighting some specific aspects and realities: the work of women, especially those that strive for ancestral knowledge, continues to be little recognized, also at a scientific, academic, and socioeconomic level; the lack of official recognition and protection at various levels of power of the productive and creative activities of small farmers who resist agribusiness has contributed to the advance of deforestation and outrageous attacks on organic food production, as enunciated in the introduction of that text; the arduous and gradual conquest of self-sufficiency by small producers continues to be threatened by the great undertakings of political economy, ideologically supported also by fundamentalist theologies, thus demeaning the search for the construction of balance in relations that affect class, gender, ethnicities, and the environment.

In fact, most governments have not been supportive, giving protection and motivation for these vulnerable lives that seek and build their organization, survival, and self-sufficiency also in solidarity with other threatened and discarded lives and in the care of the environment in which they produce food and relationships of affectivity and belonging, as also pointed out in the introduction. On the contrary, the Brazilian State, for example, through its government, has failed in relation to (not only) environmental and health public policies, failing to manage current disasters and to act preventively in relation to new disasters.²¹

It remains, therefore, a challenge and task for movements and ecofeminist theologies that articulate with various sectors of society, “to pressure, monitor and seek to influence this apparatus [the State], through its various organisms, for the definition of social goals adequate to the interests” (Costa 2005, p. 7) and the needs of vulnerable lives. To this end, it is essential to renew the articulation to guarantee and maximize the benefits of public policies on gender, health, education, and the environment in the construction of relations of equity, care, and protection. The inspection of public actions and private initiatives that threaten already vulnerable lives obviously needs to be redoubled, as they further exacerbate the pandemic state of exception, which paradoxically can become an embryo of reorganization of demonstrations and popular movements in defense and solidarity with the most suffering lives, as demonstrated by the solidarity actions and campaigns presented at the beginning of this article. Exactly this socioenvironmental and political care, also in its expressions of denunciation, is a fundamental characteristic of ecofeminist spiritualities of liberation (Ulrich and Rocha 2019; Gebara 2021).

For this reason, it should be noted, in this context of multiple and interconnected pandemic crises, that the capitalist technologies used, for example, to deforest and extract minerals and wood, as well as to explore protected bodies and environments and de-territorialize natural and human resources for the benefit of capital and its accumulation by a minimal portion of the population, offer few benefits in terms of public policies. On the contrary, the negative impacts caused to the “body”-environment (degraded land, polluted water and air, drought, reduced biodiversity, etc.) have repercussions on the bodies of women who need this body-environment preserved and being taken care of, so that they can guarantee his livelihood and that of his family. The reality of the exploitation of bodies becomes even worse in pandemic crises, for example, through the increase in unemployment of women in the formal and informal world of work, who go into an extreme situation of economic overexposure, without adequate social protection (On Women Brazil 2020). In this context, for popular ecofeminist movements that reflect the interaction between body-environment and body-woman, the challenges arising from these “capitalist technologies” reaffirm the organization and resistance around central socioeconomic and cultural agendas such as “food sovereignty, of women to the land, agroecology, care for native seeds, their knowledge and diversity, in addition to the promotion and reactivation of indigenous and peasant cultural, culinary and artisanal activities” (Noronha and Fraga 2017, p. 5). It is in this sense that we also understand that no feminist agenda and action will be politically and economically sustainable if they do not interconnect the emancipation of the exploited and violated bodies of women with the liberation of the environment/nature from the historical structural oppression created by patriarchy and capitalism (Cabnal 2015 apud Noronha and Fraga 2017, p. 8; Souza et al. 2020; Mies and Shiva 2021).

It is also in this bias and precisely as a result of the systemic dynamics of these capitalist technologies, which cause destruction, diseases, and deaths, that it is perceived that they are exactly the ones that pose great challenges to (re)articulate “theological technologies” (Cardoso 2016, pp. 108–109) that prioritize and provide diakonia to the most vulnerable parts of creation. It is about all beings violated, impoverished, discarded, and sickened by this patriarchal capitalist system, which also enters religious altars ideologically and economically marked by this same capital. Since women are the majority of people who find themselves in this condition, it remains essential that again and constantly be renewed the link between the struggle for the rights of women and the other qualitative minorities—as well as the maintenance of conquered rights!—with the movements and public policies in defense and preservation of the environment (Caminhos 2019).

In the Pandemic: Increased Violence and Visibility of (In)Competences, Challenges for Spiritualities

I thought about inserting the term POST-PANDEMIC in the title, but I did not, because, even if the cases of COVID-19 have decreased, the pandemic is not over yet, the vaccination campaign has not yet reached the entire population, and deaths continue to occur. See data in CONASS (2022).

This is exactly where I come back to the COVID-19 pandemic, a tragedy within many tragedies. In the news initially mentioned, it is highlighted that a large part of food production among the quilombo settlements is guaranteed by the work of women (Marinho 2020), which also happens in most other small agricultural properties. These peasant populations are part of the most socioeconomically vulnerable group in Brazil. Recent studies show that the pandemic unmasked the existing/permanent state of exception for a large majority of people on the planet, aggravating “a crisis situation to which the world population has been subjected” (Santos 2020, p. 6) and evidencing a global-structural crisis of life care. The coronavirus is globalized, but it does not “catch” equally. There are people sociohistorically more vulnerable to it: women, indigenous people, quilombos, informal and street workers, homeless people, homeless people and those from the metropolitan periphery, refugees, illegal immigrants, people with disabilities, the elderly, prisoners… In addition, the historical vulnerabilities of women have been exacerbated by social distancing, because the various forms of violence against women and children everywhere in the world have increased and protective and preventive measures by public authorities have decreased (Guevara 2020; Assis 2021). UN Executive Director Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, in a Virtual Roundtable (20 April 2020), stated and claimed:

One of the most devastating aspects of this pandemic is the way in which violence against women, including domestic violence, has soared in many countries. All governments must declare services to prevent and respond to violence against women as essential. This includes helplines and shelters. Not only must they receive the attention and funding they need now, but these resources must continue after the pandemic. (On Women Brazil 2020, s.p.)

Regarding the economic reality and the work of women in the context of the pandemic, Gabriela Ramos, chief of staff at the Organization and Cooperation for Economic Development (OECD), argued and postulated:

In an unequal world, a health crisis like the one we face today disproportionately hurts women. [...they] represent 70% of the healthcare workforce worldwide and 95% of the long-term workforce across the OECD. [...] are potentially over-exposed to these economic consequences, as they are over-represented in the informal economy without adequate social protection. [...] we face two choices in responding to this crisis: we can either allow these disproportionate impacts to exacerbate existing inequalities, or we can ensure that a strong gender lens is incorporated into response and recovery efforts to emerge stronger. [...]. The post-Covid-19 world will never be the same, and it's up to all people to make sure women do better. (On Women Brazil 2020, s.p.)

These findings impact and challenge, as, in addition to the fact that most governments do not protectively and preventively address the increase in domestic violence against women and children through compliance with existing legislation²³—or its creation—the pandemic also highlighted another problem in Brazil: the relationship between the permanent exceptional crisis in the economic area and the crisis in public health, favoring “saving capital and the market” instead of focusing efforts on public policies in the areas of health,²⁴ gender, economy, environment and education. The care of life in all its forms is not evident as a focus and ideological-political objective of several so-called democratic governments in the context (not only) of this pandemic. Incompetence becomes not only more visible, but even more ridiculous in the face of the seriousness of the situation that is minimized, distorted, and ideologically used to aggravate hostilities, expressions of hatred and ignorance among the people. In this way, for example, attitudes and speeches of some rulers have aggravated the lack of care of many people who circulate(d) without wearing a mask, gather(ed) in public places without the restrictive measures that must be observed. However, in the absence of compliance with the rules, supervision, and serious observance of preventive care, many of these people still get sick and, in hospital queues, dispute(d) the few vacancies in ICUs… Irresponsibility reached the limitless absurdity, which, in the saddest senselessness, evidences the generalized lack of responsible and loving care, of the generalized crisis of humanity that should exist in us.

I conclude this item with the words of Cunha (2020, p. 51):

The fact is that the pandemic has put health systems around the world in check, unmasking social exclusions, neglect and inefficiencies. It is also a blow to economies, which are globalized, centered on the logic of the financial market and profit. […Important elements revealed in this pandemic crisis]: vulnerability of the minimal state, mega-exploitation of work, growth of gender violence in spaces of social isolation, discarding the elderly, increase in police violence, racism against indigenous and Afro-descendant populations.

With the above, some interconnections between the various forms of violence committed specifically against women and children and the socioeconomic and political context of the COVID-19 pandemic were highlighted. This context accentuates the ecofeminist challenges in the sense of organizing resistance, guaranteeing rights, reviewing epistemologies and methodologies,²⁵ also considering spiritual experiences that support the practices arising from these challenges. In fact, these challenges create the need and call for us to create conditions to deepen criticism of the various patriarchal, capitalist, and fundamentalist forms and manifestations based on (co)experiences of ecofeminist spiritualities.

From Alienated Spiritualities to Shared Care Spiritualities

Alienated and alienating spiritualities are characterized by being fundamentalist, marked by fatalism, dualism, and essentialism (Gebara 1997), taking “things” as given by the will of God, who must, at some point, show people the meaning of their suffering.²⁶ In this way, people “settle” on the wills constructed socioculturally from conservative ideologies and theologies that appeal to the “will of God” to justify much of the existing suffering, without questioning structures and systems that build relationships that in most of the time they are the cause of much of this suffering, including poverty, racism, disease, violence, discrimination, and hatred….²⁷

Therefore, the epistemological, hermeneutic, and cultural-historical (de)construction in search of overcoming dualisms and hierarchies is a presupposition and condition for the change of power relations at all levels of knowing/doing, given that these two ideological pillars permeate the set of human relationships, and are also expressed in spirituality (Hoornaert 2014; REFLEXUS 2020; Senra 2020; Ecco et al. 2022). This reconstruction does not dispense with reviewing and deepening a radical critique of pleonexia-accumulation/greed and human hybris, roots of domination, and abuse of the bodies of all beings. Beyond the religious and theological field, but not detached from it, at a scientific and technological level, this implies carefully observing the “innovations and their impacts caused mainly in the most vulnerable lives, in order not to weaken the political-emancipatory force of movements and theologies ecofeminists, enhanced with the analytical category of gender in its transversalities with class, sex, ethnicity, and age.”

Among the proposals of ecofeminist theologies is the experience of a spirituality marked by the ethics of caring for life in its set of relationships, linked to the most vulnerable parts. To live this ethic, it is necessary to (re)invent spiritualities as part of the expression of social and political life at the service of qualitative minorities (Gebara 1997; Richter Reimer 2010; Ruether 2014). Theologically and pastorally, with regard to a large part of the Christian population in Brazil, it is important to reread biblical traditions, such as the creation and the covenant, to revisit the liberating praxis of Jesus and to perceive the dynamic and transforming power of the divine ruah, the Spirit of life and freedom in early Christian communities. Observing the power relations in these narratives and God’s option in favor of injured life, one can work together with socioenvironmental movements in the perspective of critical and constructive cooperation, as well as solidary reciprocity in favor of a theological, social, and political praxis for reorder and reorganize the interrelation between all beings of creation (Richter Reimer 2010). The pandemic times that plague us, incompetent governments and public health policies, as well as the fundamentalist and conservative ecclesiastical theologies and practices that are disseminated in this context paradoxically form the context for critical-constructive ecofeminist perceptions and practices that consider spiritualities of care as a vital component in its processes of organization and socioenvironmental and political insertion (Federici 2020, 2021; Andel 2022).

Thus, the experience of spiritualities of care challenges and is challenged to perceive and assume, in addition to the differences between the various ecofeminist trends, the renewed urgency of acting against a “utilitarian vision of nature, in the same style that […] takes place in the institutions of hegemonic, male-dominated society.” (Flores and Trevizan 2015, p. 23). In terms of hermeneutic and theological work, it is urgent to carry out uninterrupted critical research from an ecological and feminist perspective, which focuses efforts on an integrated understanding of the cries of vulnerable people and the groans of all beings, motivating socially, pastorally, and politically to overcome the causes of sufferings that give rise to such screams and groans, as well as their efforts to overcome them.²⁸ These causes and efforts must be seen in their respective contexts.

For many ecofeministly committed people, the experience of spirituality in its diversity of expressions is part of the desired integral Good Living committed to the principle of Life from the basements of humanity, specifically in the current pandemic times. In the words of Lassak (2012, p. 108), there is the challenge of constantly “reflecting religious elements in their potential for the development of a spirituality of resistance” and solidarity. An important dimension of spiritualities is to build and/or re-signify meanings of living, seeking personal and social fulfillment in the whole of life and in its various dimensions (Franco 2013). This spirituality involves and is impregnated with sensitivities, compassion, and tenderness that are also manifested as radical criticism and confrontation of injustices in all their relationships and expressions. These spiritualities are embedded in living, in everyday life and do not need specific spaces. Characteristic of contextual theologies of liberation, this experience of spirituality can make possible the celebration and the denunciation, the sadness of losses, and the joy of conquests on the path that the walk makes possible.

In this journey, a praxis and conception of the ethics of shared care are also being developed. In a critical stance towards essentialist, salvationist (women as saviors of the planet), and victimist perspectives, we are betting on perceptions that recognize capacities and actions of empathy and attentive and shared care of women and men, from work at home and in the education of women, children to professional and political-social life (Puleo 2019). Recognizing that there is already a practice of shared care at the family/domestic level, even if it is still incipient, is to hope and bet on teaching/learning and on a new division of tasks and care functions, critically observing the power relations that are established in them and are experienced. Working on the construction of an ethics of shared care is to deeply question the naturalized attribution of care to women and establish gender equality in the ethics of care, thus avoiding a general and innocuous discourse about care, which in fact lacks the daily experience at various levels of relationship. This work envisions pacts of mutual and solidary help between people and between people and nature, considering and respecting skills and possibilities. Mutual aid can exist from small food production units to associative contribution/distribution ventures, in the form of exchange of services and goods between people from the countryside and the city, between popular and academic knowledge… Thus, it is possible to propose a human society of mutual help that is expressed in various forms of shared care, a society that places in debate and dialogue one of the bases for the construction of Good Living. This shared care will be able to lay healthy foundations for a sustainable life by and for all beings.

From this experience of shared care spiritualities, the relationship between religion, gender, and ecology is fundamental in the sense of perceiving and experiencing the interrelationship between the most vulnerable links of life, beings, and creation. At this point, I want to say that, based on the foregoing, the relationship between religion, gender, ecology, and pandemic is not sustained or maintained on any horizon, if it does not constantly prioritize the most vulnerable parts of relationships, as well as the foundation of community and care as references for the exercise of power, in the democratic and solidary pursuit of Good Living.

Perspectives Through Conclusions

Among the efforts of ecofeminist theologies and movements are discernment, commitment, and commitment to affirm relationships of reciprocity, cooperation, and care for questioning and reordering the inter(re)action between all beings, human, and non-human in the whole of society life. Solidarity with the most vulnerable parties, also from the perspective of theoretical-referential elaboration, is a characteristic and central challenge. The experience of spiritualities centered and permeated by the ethics of care is a driving force for ecofeminist theologies, currently also through the construction and experience of shared care.

The impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are many and varied, including social isolation and its consequences, evidence of the permanent state of exception for the majority of the planetary population, illnesses, prejudices, an increase in domestic violence, femicides and almost one million people deaths from the virus in Brazil. Historical and long-lasting, these impacts directly and indirectly affect public policies, gender relations, religious expressions, and access to food and work for a large part of the people. These impacts can also have and are having significant repercussions in terms of seriousness, competences, and solidarity, such as the fact that some organizations carry out Donation Campaigns for food, clothing, and medicine. We specifically highlight the milestone of March 9, 2020, at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, the Campaigns for the Donation of in natura food, in lunchboxes, as well as protective masks made by hand with fabric, campaigns organized by the Landless Workers Movement in Paraná, which they became an expression of abundance and solidarity produced in the Camps and Settlements of that state, as stated at the beginning of this article. Notably, these solidarity donations have to do with proposals for land redistribution, distribution of the fruits of labor, agroecological production, women’s participation in action, decision, and celebration… The reprisal for this expression of solidarity came in the form of a destructive invasion carried out by representatives of agribusiness in the region (sugarcane—Sabarálcool power plant), which caused great damage to this production and solidarity network. However, this failed to paralyze the spirits and motivation of the women and men of the Camp and of the social movements: the day after the destruction, in the same space, the Pinheiro Machado Agroecological Production Center was inaugurated (Ferreira 2020), in honor of to the leading scientist of agroecology in Brazil, as a sign of hope also for this land to be declared, by INCRA, for the purposes of Agrarian Reform. In the news mentioned above, I noticed in the photos that all the workers in the field wore a mask during the planting of banana trees and Creole beans—another beautiful example of citizen responsibility, absent in so many other spaces!

Consciousness is built on the basis of life history, which also encompasses (co)experiences, learning in word and action, introspection and self-reflection in the effort to understand the meaning of life, overcoming (or not) difficulties, the help received and given (or not)… Respect and care are accompanied by the recognition of belonging, organicity, and the humility of realizing that we are part of a whole, and that we are passing through this world. This is how Argentine indigenous farmer Ângela Romano (2020), creator of a self-sustainable organic garden, also expressed herself, in a video, in questioning market and consumption economies. She recognized that she is not the owner of the land, but that she is part of the land, and exclaims: “Tomemos conciencia de la importancia de la tierra, el agua y el aire, cuidemos la vida, amemos la vida y el futuro. Si podemos ser autosustentables, basta de tanto consumo y volvamos a embarrarnos las patas.” In the lyrics and melody of a Brazilian song, it is necessary to put your hand in the earth, caress the earth, know the earth’s desires, and from it receive the fruits of our care… agribusiness with its thousands of hectares of land!

Finally, in consideration of the lands of Goiás, I ask for input from the poet from Goiás, Cora Coralina (1889–1985/2020), with her “The song of the land” which, for some people, praises the pride of contemporary landowners and agribusiness, but which, written in another context, questions exactly these same ones, as it addresses the small peasants: “O farmer, everything […] is mine”, including the bread from your house; “let's plant the swidden”, which is not a large estate; “let's take care of the nest, the cattle and the granary” which is for self-sustainability; and so, on the small farm (and not on the latifundium!), we will be happy, with enough abundance!

This enough of the abundance will motivate many Solidarity Campaigns. This enough of plenty will mark spiritualities of shared care also beyond the pandemic context. And this sufficient abundance will also permeate gender relations, which have repercussions on religious and environmental expressions of protection, care, and preservation. We can experience happiness in abundance without hoarding and greed, also in the midst of extended pandemic situations and crises. This is and will continue to be a fundamental characteristic of ecofeminist liberation movements, struggles, and spiritualities.