René Dentz: The Earth Remembers. Forgiveness, Territory, and Ecological Trauma in the Anthropocene. Toward an Ecological and Decolonial Hermeneutics of Forgiveness. In: Ostium, vol. 22, 2026, no. 2. (study)
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
This article proposes an interdisciplinary reinterpretation of forgiveness within the context of the Anthropocene, articulating hermeneutics, psychoanalysis, phenomenology of embodiment, liberation theology, and Indigenous Brazilian cosmologies. Beginning with Paul Ricoeur’s understanding of forgiveness as inseparable from memory, recognition, and narrative identity, the text argues that contemporary ecological crises expose the limits of modern individualistic and anthropocentric conceptions of reconciliation. Ecological devastation affects not only ecosystems, but also bodies, territories, communal belonging, and embodied forms of memory. Through dialogue with Jacques Derrida, René Girard, Julia Kristeva, Emmanuel Falque, and Jean-Luc Marion, the article develops an understanding of trauma as embodied, relational, and ecological. In dialogue with Latin American liberation theology — especially Gustavo Gutiérrez, Jon Sobrino, Ignacio Ellacuría, Leonardo Boff, and Vicente Ferreira — ecological destruction is interpreted as historical and structural violence inseparable from coloniality, extractivism, and territorial dispossession. The collapse of the Fundão dam in Bento Rodrigues is analyzed as a paradigmatic form of territorial trauma in the Anthropocene, revealing how ecological catastrophe fractures relationships between body, memory, territory, and communal identity. The article further engages Indigenous Brazilian cosmologies through the thought of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Ailton Krenak, and Davi Kopenawa, whose relational ontologies challenge the modern separation between nature and culture, humanity and cosmos. The article ultimately proposes an ecological and decolonial hermeneutics of forgiveness in which forgiveness is no longer understood merely as moral absolution or interpersonal reconciliation, but as relational recomposition involving territory, ancestry, ecological responsibility, embodied memory, and the reconstruction of the common world after devastation.
Keywords: Forgiveness, Anthropocene, Ecological Trauma, Territorial Memory, Liberation Theology, Indigenous Cosmologies, Paul Ricoeur, Decoloniality, Ecological Hermeneutics, Embodiment
Introduction
The contemporary ecological crisis does not concern only the destruction of ecosystems, climate instability, or the accelerated exhaustion of natural resources. More radically, it reveals a fracture in the very way modern humanity understands itself in relation to the earth, to the body, and to the experience of coexistence. The Anthropocene appears not merely as a geological category, but as a hermeneutical symptom of a civilization founded upon unlimited extraction, technological domination, and the progressive dissociation between human existence and the living world. As Byung-Chul Han argues, contemporary society increasingly transforms existence into a regime of exhaustion and permanent performance, eroding the conditions for genuine relationality and contemplation (Han 2015, 2–5).
In this context, the question of forgiveness acquires a new and unsettling horizon. Traditionally interpreted within moral, juridical, or interpersonal frameworks, forgiveness has often been reduced to the reconciliation between individuals or to the interior transformation of resentment and guilt. Yet the contemporary ecological collapse exposes the insufficiency of these anthropocentric conceptions. How can forgiveness be thought when the trauma exceeds the individual and reaches rivers, forests, territories, communities, and forms of life? Can there be reconciliation where the very conditions of inhabiting the world have been devastated?
These questions become unavoidable in a time marked by environmental catastrophes that are simultaneously social, political, spiritual, and cosmological. The Anthropocene reveals that violence is not only directed toward human beings, but toward the fabric of relational existence itself. The earth, once treated as inert matter available for technical exploitation, returns as wounded memory. In this sense, ecological devastation is never merely external. The destruction of territories also fractures symbolic worlds, collective identities, and embodied forms of memory. Paul Ricoeur insists that memory is inseparable from ethical responsibility and from the difficult work of recognition through which suffering becomes narratable without being erased (Ricoeur 2004, 78–86).
Latin American liberation theology offers important resources for this displacement. Thinkers such as Leonardo Boff, Jon Sobrino, and Ignacio Ellacuría insist that suffering is inseparable from historical structures of domination and exclusion. For Boff, the cry of the poor and the cry of the earth belong to the same wounded reality generated by a civilization structured around exploitation and accumulation (Boff 1997, 11–18). Ecological devastation therefore cannot be reduced to a technical problem; it reveals a spiritual and civilizational crisis rooted in the logic of domination.
The disaster of Bento Rodrigues, caused by the collapse of the Fundão dam in 2015 in the state of Minas Gerais, emerges here as a paradigmatic expression of ecological trauma in the Anthropocene. More than an environmental accident, the catastrophe represented the devastation of communities, the contamination of rivers, the fragmentation of collective memory, and the interruption of symbolic ties between bodies and territory. Entire ways of inhabiting the world were violently suspended. The mud that crossed cities and rivers also crossed memories, mourning processes, and existential horizons. In this sense, Bento Rodrigues reveals that ecological violence cannot be adequately interpreted through technical or juridical categories alone. It demands a hermeneutics attentive to suffering inscribed in bodies, landscapes, silences, and interrupted narratives.
This article therefore proposes an ecological and decolonial hermeneutics of forgiveness. Rather than treating forgiveness as mere moral reconciliation, the text seeks to understand it as a practice of recomposing broken relations between memory, body, territory, and community. Such a perspective requires moving beyond modern dualisms that separate nature and culture, subject and world, spirit and matter. The Anthropocene obliges philosophy, theology, and psychoanalysis to rethink responsibility at the level of relational existence itself.
2. Forgiveness, Memory, and Historical Responsibility
The philosophical problem of forgiveness occupies a paradoxical place in contemporary thought. On the one hand, forgiveness appears as an ethical possibility capable of interrupting cycles of hatred, resentment, and violence. On the other hand, every attempt to conceptualize forgiveness encounters the persistence of trauma, the opacity of suffering, and the impossibility of fully repairing historical wounds. The twentieth and twenty-first centuries — marked by genocide, colonial violence, ecological devastation, and technological forms of dehumanization — transformed forgiveness into one of the central questions of philosophical anthropology and political ethics.
Far from being merely a moral virtue or religious commandment, forgiveness increasingly emerges as a complex hermeneutical problem involving memory, responsibility, narrative, corporeality, and historical violence. The question is no longer simply whether one ought to forgive, but rather how forgiveness can become thinkable in a world structured by traumatic repetition and collective destruction. As Paul Ricoeur suggests, forgiveness belongs to the horizon of “difficult memory,” precisely because it cannot exist independently of the labor of remembering and recognition (Ricoeur 2004, 457–460).
At the same time, contemporary philosophy reveals profound tensions surrounding the very possibility of forgiveness. If forgiveness risks becoming moral normalization or historical amnesia, its absence risks imprisoning individuals and communities within irreversible cycles of revenge and resentment. This aporia becomes particularly visible in the works of Ricoeur, Jacques Derrida, and René Girard, whose approaches profoundly transformed the contemporary understanding of reconciliation, violence, and ethical responsibility.
2.1 Paul Ricoeur: Memory, Recognition, and Narrative Reconciliation
Among contemporary philosophers, Ricoeur offers one of the most nuanced hermeneutics of forgiveness. His reflections are inseparable from broader concerns regarding memory, narrative identity, and historical responsibility. In Memory, History, Forgetting, Ricoeur argues that memory is never merely archival preservation of the past, but an ethical relation to suffering and truth (Ricoeur 2004, 21–25). Remembering therefore becomes a moral task rather than a purely cognitive operation.
For Ricoeur, forgiveness cannot emerge through the denial or erasure of trauma. Genuine reconciliation presupposes recognition — recognition of the victim, of suffering, of responsibility, and of historical fracture. Forgiveness thus belongs to what Ricoeur calls a “poetics of the possible,” opening fragile spaces of future without dissolving the irreversibility of the past (Ricoeur 2004, 490–496). In this sense, forgiveness differs fundamentally from forgetting. Forgetting seeks disappearance; forgiveness seeks transformation.
This perspective is inseparable from Ricoeur’s concept of narrative identity developed in Oneself as Another. Human subjectivity is not fixed substance, but narrative construction shaped through memory, temporality, and relationality (Ricoeur 1992, 140–168). The self is constituted through stories capable of integrating rupture, guilt, fragility, and reconciliation. Forgiveness therefore operates not as cancellation of history, but as reconfiguration of one’s relation to memory itself.
Ricoeur’s approach remains particularly important because it avoids reducing forgiveness either to juridical rationality or to purely emotional experience. Forgiveness becomes an ethical excess that interrupts the logic of equivalence between fault and punishment. Yet Ricoeur simultaneously resists naïve reconciliatory discourse. Certain traumas, especially collective and historical traumas, resist symbolic integration. Forgiveness remains possible only as fragile and unfinished work.
Nevertheless, Ricoeur’s thought still largely remains within the horizon of interpersonal and anthropological reconciliation. Even when discussing historical violence, memory continues primarily associated with human narrative communities. The Anthropocene challenges this limitation by forcing philosophy to confront forms of suffering inscribed not only in subjects, but also in territories, rivers, ecosystems, and collective forms of life.
2.2 Jacques Derrida: The Impossible and the Unforgivable
If Ricoeur emphasizes forgiveness as hermeneutical possibility, Derrida radicalizes its paradoxical structure. In texts such as On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness, Derrida argues that authentic forgiveness can only concern what appears unforgivable (Derrida 2001, 32–40). If forgiveness merely excuses what is understandable, reparable, or morally acceptable, then it ceases to be forgiveness in the strict sense.
Forgiveness therefore belongs to the order of impossibility. It exceeds juridical reconciliation, political negotiation, and economic exchange. Derrida insists that genuine forgiveness cannot be conditioned by repentance, compensation, or reciprocity. Once forgiveness becomes conditional, it risks being absorbed into systems of moral calculation and institutional normalization.
This radicality introduces an essential ethical tension. Derrida reveals that forgiveness contains an irreducible excess that escapes every political or juridical appropriation. At the same time, however, this very excess renders forgiveness almost impossible within concrete historical life. Absolute forgiveness belongs to what Derrida calls the “madness of the impossible” (Derrida 2001, 39).
Such reflections become particularly relevant in contexts of collective trauma and colonial violence. Modern history is marked by atrocities whose scale seems to exceed symbolic reconciliation. Derrida therefore warns against premature reconciliatory narratives that risk neutralizing the gravity of suffering through superficial gestures of closure.
Yet Derrida’s approach also encounters limits. By emphasizing the impossibility and unconditionality of forgiveness, his thought sometimes distances forgiveness from embodied, historical, and communal practices of healing. Forgiveness risks becoming an infinite ethical ideal detached from concrete processes of social recomposition. The question remains whether communities devastated by ecological trauma, territorial dispossession, and historical violence can survive through impossibility alone.
2.3 René Girard: Mimetic Violence and the Rupture of Sacrifice
The contribution of René Girard introduces another decisive dimension into contemporary reflections on forgiveness: the relationship between violence, desire, and sacrifice. Girard’s theory of mimetic desire argues that human desire is fundamentally imitative. Individuals desire according to the desire of others, generating rivalry, competition, and escalating violence (Girard 1977, 145–149).
For Girard, societies historically stabilized violence through sacrificial mechanisms. Collective aggression becomes displaced onto scapegoats whose exclusion temporarily restores communal order. Religion, myth, and social structures frequently conceal this mechanism by presenting sacrificial violence as legitimate or sacred.
The importance of Girard’s thought for forgiveness lies in his interpretation of reconciliation as rupture with sacrificial logic itself. Genuine forgiveness interrupts cycles of retaliation by refusing the reproduction of mimetic violence. In this sense, forgiveness becomes anti-sacrificial practice.
Girard’s reading of Christianity remains central here. The crucifixion reveals the innocence of the victim and unmasks the violence hidden beneath collective unanimity (Girard 1986, 189–196). Forgiveness therefore emerges not as moral sentimentalism, but as interruption of mechanisms that perpetuate exclusion and destruction.
This perspective possesses profound relevance for understanding contemporary ecological crises. The Anthropocene frequently reproduces sacrificial structures in which vulnerable populations, Indigenous territories, forests, rivers, and marginalized communities become expendable in the name of economic progress. Ecological devastation often depends upon hidden scapegoating mechanisms through which certain bodies and territories are rendered disposable.
Yet Girard’s theory also remains partially limited by its anthropocentric horizon. Violence primarily appears as interhuman rivalry, even when extended to collective structures. Ecological suffering itself remains secondary rather than constitutive. The earth appears as stage for human conflict rather than as participant in wounded relationality.
3. Bodies, Trauma, and Embodied Memory
The ecological crises of the Anthropocene cannot be understood exclusively through political, economic, or environmental categories. Ecological devastation also penetrates the sphere of embodied existence, affecting sensibility, affectivity, memory, and the very experience of inhabiting the world. Trauma is never merely psychological or symbolic. It traverses bodies, territories, gestures, rhythms of life, and forms of belonging. The collapse of ecosystems simultaneously produces the collapse of existential horizons.
Modernity frequently interpreted suffering within excessively rational or individualistic frameworks, reducing trauma to interior psychic experience detached from material and historical conditions. Yet contemporary philosophy, psychoanalysis, and phenomenology increasingly reveal that memory itself is embodied. The body does not simply contain trauma; it becomes the place where historical violence inscribes itself. Ecological suffering therefore cannot be reduced to external catastrophe. It transforms corporeal experience, spatial perception, social bonds, and the affective texture of collective life.
In contexts such as Bento Rodrigues and Brumadinho, the devastation of rivers and territories simultaneously produced ruptures in mourning, identity, temporality, and communal belonging. Mud invaded not only landscapes, but also memory, language, and corporeal life. The Anthropocene thus demands an expanded understanding of trauma capable of articulating psychic suffering, embodied vulnerability, ecological destruction, and territorial dispossession.
3.1 Psychoanalysis and Trauma
The psychoanalytic tradition inaugurated by Sigmund Freud remains fundamental for understanding the persistence of trauma within psychic and embodied life. Freud’s reflections on repetition and mourning reveal that traumatic experience resists full symbolic integration. Trauma is not simply remembered; it returns compulsively through symptoms, affects, and repetitive structures that exceed conscious control.
In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud observes that traumatic events frequently produce repetitive reenactments rather than successful remembrance (Freud 1961, 18–26). The psyche returns obsessively to the site of rupture because trauma interrupts ordinary processes of symbolization. What cannot be adequately represented reappears through repetition. Trauma therefore destabilizes linear temporality itself.
This perspective becomes particularly significant in contexts of ecological catastrophe. Communities devastated by environmental destruction often experience not only material loss, but also the impossibility of completing mourning. The destruction of territories interrupts symbolic continuity between memory, place, and belonging. Mourning becomes suspended because the world that sustained communal existence no longer remains intact.
Freud’s reflections on mourning and melancholia further illuminate this condition. In mourning, the subject gradually detaches libidinal investment from what has been lost. In melancholia, however, loss becomes internalized in destructive and unresolved ways (Freud 1957, 243–258). Ecological trauma frequently produces collective forms of melancholia in which devastated landscapes continue haunting embodied existence long after the catastrophe itself.
3.2 Lacan: The Body and the Traumatic Real
If Freud reveals the repetitive structure of trauma, Jacques Lacan radicalizes the relationship between trauma, corporeality, and the Real. For Lacan, the Real designates precisely what resists complete symbolization — the dimension of experience that exceeds language and returns as rupture, anxiety, and impossibility (Lacan 1998, 53–64).
Trauma therefore cannot be fully integrated into narrative coherence. Something always remains irreducible. The subject becomes constituted around fissure rather than totality. This insight proves particularly relevant for ecological suffering in the Anthropocene. Environmental catastrophe often produces forms of anxiety and disorientation that exceed available symbolic frameworks. The destruction of territories destabilizes not only material existence, but also the coordinates through which reality itself becomes intelligible.
Lacan’s understanding of the body is equally significant here. The body is not merely biological organism; it is traversed by language, desire, affect, and jouissance. Corporeality emerges through fragmentation, vulnerability, and incompleteness. Trauma therefore affects the body not externally, but constitutively. The body becomes the site where historical violence and symbolic rupture are registered.
Ecological trauma intensifies this condition because it simultaneously destabilizes bodily security and spatial belonging. Toxic contamination, environmental destruction, forced displacement, and territorial fragmentation produce new forms of embodied precariousness. The Anthropocene reveals how profoundly subjectivity depends upon ecological and territorial conditions often rendered invisible by modern technological rationality.
The work of Julia Kristeva deepens the psychoanalytic understanding of suffering by emphasizing alterity, fragility, and the ethical dimensions of psychic life. Kristeva repeatedly argues that contemporary culture increasingly struggles to symbolize suffering, producing societies marked by depression, narcissism, and affective fragmentation (Kristeva 1989, 3–14).
For Kristeva, forgiveness cannot be understood as moral obligation or juridical resolution. Rather, it emerges through processes of psychic transformation capable of interrupting hatred and reopening relational possibility. Forgiveness therefore requires confronting vulnerability rather than denying it. It depends upon the difficult recognition of alterity within both oneself and the other.
This perspective acquires particular importance within ecological contexts. The Anthropocene reveals the illusion of autonomous subjectivity sustained by modernity. Ecological suffering exposes radical interdependence between bodies, territories, and forms of life. Trauma becomes collective, relational, and transgenerational.
Kristeva’s reflections also illuminate how ecological devastation frequently produces crises of meaning and belonging. The destruction of symbolic environments generates forms of existential exile in which individuals lose not only physical territory, but also affective orientation within the world itself. Ecological violence therefore affects the capacity for relationality, mourning, and symbolic continuity.
3.3 Phenomenology of the Body
Emmanuel Falque: Flesh, Vulnerability, and Incarnation
Contemporary phenomenology offers crucial resources for rethinking corporeality beyond dualistic separations between mind and body, subject and world. The work of Emmanuel Falque becomes particularly significant in this regard. Falque insists that human existence is fundamentally incarnated and vulnerable. There is no subject outside flesh, finitude, suffering, and exposure to the world (Falque 2012, 5–17).
For Falque, suffering cannot be reduced to an external accident affecting an otherwise autonomous subject. Corporeal vulnerability constitutes the very condition of existence. Human beings do not merely possess bodies; they are embodied beings whose relation to the world unfolds through fragility, limitation, and affective exposure.
This phenomenology of flesh becomes profoundly relevant for ecological thought. The Anthropocene reveals the vulnerability of embodied existence within devastated ecological conditions. Environmental catastrophe exposes the illusion of technological mastery that modernity frequently projected onto nature. Human bodies remain inseparable from air, water, territory, climate, and ecological rhythms.
Falque’s reflections on incarnation also challenge abstract ethical approaches detached from material suffering. Ecological trauma is not simply theoretical or symbolic. It affects breathing, movement, nourishment, habitation, mourning, and relational life. The destruction of territories therefore simultaneously becomes destruction of embodied worlds.
3.4 Jean-Luc Marion: Excess and the Saturated Phenomenon
The phenomenology of Jean-Luc Marion further deepens this discussion through the concept of the saturated phenomenon. Marion argues that certain phenomena exceed the capacity of conceptual mastery and intentional control (Marion 2002, 199–220). Such phenomena overwhelm the subject through excess rather than availability.
Trauma frequently manifests precisely through this excess. Catastrophic events cannot be fully grasped, represented, or controlled. Ecological devastation often appears as overwhelming presence that destabilizes ordinary frameworks of understanding. The subject becomes exposed to phenomena that exceed symbolic and conceptual containment.
Marion’s thought therefore offers an important corrective to modern rationality’s obsession with mastery and transparency. Ecological suffering reveals dimensions of reality that resist technological reduction and economic calculation. Rivers, forests, bodies, and territories appear not merely as objects, but as excessive presences that confront humanity with its own finitude.
This excess also transforms the understanding of memory. Trauma is not only remembered cognitively; it remains present affectively, spatially, and corporeally. The earth itself becomes archive of violence. Territories carry scars that continue exceeding narrative closure.
3.5 Toward an Embodied Ecology of Memory
The dialogue between psychoanalysis and phenomenology reveals that trauma cannot be confined to the interiority of isolated subjects. Suffering traverses bodies, affects, territories, and forms of communal life. Ecological devastation therefore produces embodied and relational wounds that reshape how individuals and communities inhabit the world.
The Anthropocene intensifies this condition because ecological destruction increasingly affects the material and symbolic conditions of existence itself. Climate collapse, contamination, forced displacement, and territorial devastation generate forms of suffering that are simultaneously psychic, corporeal, social, and ecological.
The body emerges here not merely as biological entity, but as living memory of historical and ecological violence. Bodies remember contamination, displacement, rupture, and loss. Territories likewise become embodied archives of extraction and destruction. Ecological trauma therefore demands a hermeneutics attentive not only to consciousness, but also to flesh, affectivity, spatiality, and belonging.
Forgiveness, within this horizon, can no longer concern only moral reconciliation between autonomous subjects. It must also become a practice of healing wounded forms of inhabitation and relational existence. The next chapter will therefore explore how liberation theology and Indigenous cosmologies offer alternative understandings of territory, relationality, and ecological responsibility capable of expanding contemporary theories of forgiveness beyond modern anthropocentrism.
4. Liberation Theology, Ecological Crisis, and Historical Suffering
The ecological devastation characteristic of the Anthropocene cannot be adequately interpreted through technical, economic, or managerial categories alone. Climate collapse, extractivist violence, contamination of rivers, forced displacement, and territorial destruction reveal a deeper historical crisis rooted in structures of domination that have shaped modernity since colonial expansion. Ecological catastrophe therefore belongs not only to the sphere of environmental imbalance, but also to the history of oppression, exclusion, and sacrificial violence imposed upon vulnerable peoples and territories.
Latin American liberation theology offers decisive conceptual resources for understanding this relation between historical suffering and ecological devastation. Emerging from contexts marked by poverty, authoritarianism, colonial dependence, and structural injustice, liberation theology insists that suffering is never merely accidental or individual. Poverty, exclusion, and death are historically produced realities. Theology therefore cannot remain neutral before structures that systematically destroy life.
The contribution of liberation theology becomes particularly significant for ecological reflection because it expands the understanding of violence beyond interpersonal morality. Structural sin, historical oppression, and economic exploitation appear as collective realities that shape bodies, territories, and social relations. Ecological destruction thus emerges as continuation of colonial and capitalist forms of domination that transform both nature and vulnerable communities into expendable resources.
Within this horizon, forgiveness cannot be interpreted as abstract moral reconciliation detached from justice and historical responsibility. Genuine reconciliation requires confronting the material conditions that perpetuate suffering and exclusion. The ecological crisis therefore demands not only environmental policies, but also ethical, spiritual, and political transformation.
4.1 Gustavo Gutiérrez: Integral Liberation and Historical Justice
The theology of Gustavo Gutiérrez inaugurated one of the most influential critiques of modern Christianity’s separation between spirituality and historical reality. In A Theology of Liberation, Gutiérrez argues that theology must emerge from concrete historical praxis rather than from abstract speculation detached from suffering communities (Gutiérrez 1973, 11–15). Liberation therefore concerns not only spiritual salvation, but also social, political, and economic transformation.
Central to Gutiérrez’s thought is the notion of structural sin. Sin cannot be reduced to individual moral failure because injustice becomes embedded within institutions, economic systems, and historical relations of domination. Poverty itself represents a violent condition historically produced through exclusion and exploitation. As Robert McAfee Brown observes in his interpretation of Gutiérrez, liberation theology begins from the conviction that “the world should not be the way it is” (Brown 1990, 51).
This perspective becomes essential for ecological thought. Extractivist devastation in Latin America cannot be understood merely as unfortunate consequence of development. Environmental destruction frequently reproduces colonial patterns in which Indigenous peoples, rivers, forests, and marginalized communities are sacrificed in the name of economic progress. Ecological suffering therefore belongs to the broader horizon of structural violence.
Gutiérrez’s theology also emphasizes historical responsibility. Liberation requires transformation of the conditions that perpetuate suffering. Forgiveness detached from justice risks becoming ideological reconciliation that preserves systems of domination. Ecological reconciliation must therefore include historical accountability for territorial destruction, displacement, and environmental violence.
4.2 Jon Sobrino: Crucified Peoples and the Memory of Victims
The reflections of Jon Sobrino deepen liberation theology’s understanding of suffering through the concept of “crucified peoples.” Sobrino argues that contemporary history continues reproducing forms of collective crucifixion through poverty, violence, exclusion, and political repression. The suffering of the poor is not peripheral to theology; it becomes the privileged place for understanding both history and revelation.
In Jesús Cristo Liberador, Sobrino insists that theology must begin from “the underside of history” and from the perspective of victims whose lives are systematically rendered disposable (Sobrino 2014, 9–11). The poor are not merely social categories; they reveal the truth of historical violence hidden beneath dominant narratives of progress and civilization.
Sobrino’s reflections acquire renewed significance within the Anthropocene. Ecological devastation increasingly produces “crucified territories” and “crucified communities” subjected to contamination, forced displacement, environmental collapse, and abandonment. The victims of ecological destruction often remain invisible within global systems structured around consumption and technological expansion.
Particularly important is Sobrino’s insistence on the memory of victims. Historical suffering cannot be erased through abstract reconciliatory discourse. Theology must preserve dangerous memory — the memory of those excluded, silenced, and sacrificed. As Sobrino repeatedly emphasizes, Christian faith becomes inseparable from solidarity with those who suffer unjustly (Sobrino 2014, 13–15).
This perspective profoundly transforms the meaning of forgiveness. Forgiveness cannot emerge through forgetting historical violence. Ecological reconciliation requires preserving the memory of devastated territories and vulnerable populations whose suffering continues being normalized by extractivist economies.
4.3 Ignacio Ellacuría: Historical Reality and Structural Suffering
The philosophy and theology of Ignacio Ellacuría provide one of the most sophisticated articulations between historical reality, liberation, and ethical praxis. Influenced by Xavier Zubiri, Ellacuría argues that reality itself possesses historical dynamism and ethical demand. Human existence is always situated within material, social, and historical relations that shape possibilities for liberation or oppression.
Ellacuría rejects abstract understandings of salvation detached from historical suffering. Theology must engage “historical reality” concretely, confronting the structures that produce exclusion and death. In Essays on History, Liberation, and Salvation, he argues that liberation concerns the transformation of reality itself through praxis directed toward justice and human dignity (Ellacuría 2013, 5–8).
Particularly influential is Ellacuría’s concept of the “crucified people,” through which he interprets oppressed populations as historical continuations of the suffering Christ. Violence is not accidental but structurally produced through economic exploitation, political repression, and colonial domination. History itself becomes the site where salvation and destruction unfold simultaneously.
This perspective becomes decisive for ecological hermeneutics. The Anthropocene reveals that structural suffering extends beyond human communities to territories, ecosystems, and forms of life subjected to extractivist exploitation. Rivers poisoned by mining, forests destroyed by agribusiness, and displaced Indigenous populations reveal the historical continuity between colonial violence and ecological devastation.
Ellacuría’s insistence on praxis also challenges passive or purely contemplative approaches to ecological crisis. Ethical responsibility demands historical transformation rather than symbolic lament alone. Ecological reconciliation therefore requires confronting the political and economic structures that perpetuate destruction.
4.4 Leonardo Boff: Integral Ecology and the Living Earth
Among liberation theologians, Leonardo Boff most explicitly develops an ecological expansion of liberation theology. Boff argues that the environmental crisis reveals a civilizational rupture grounded in anthropocentrism, technological domination, and capitalist exploitation. Humanity’s relation to the earth has been shaped by a paradigm of control rather than care.
In Cry of the Earth, Cry of the Poor, Boff insists that social suffering and ecological devastation belong to the same historical process (Boff 1997, 3–7). The poor suffer first and most intensely the consequences of environmental collapse because ecological violence disproportionately affects vulnerable communities.
Boff’s concept of integral ecology rejects the separation between humanity and nature characteristic of modern rationality. The earth is not inert matter available for exploitation; it is living relationality. Ecological spirituality therefore requires recovering forms of coexistence grounded in care, reciprocity, and vulnerability.
This perspective profoundly transforms the ethical understanding of forgiveness. Ecological reconciliation cannot concern only interpersonal relations because the very conditions of shared existence have been fractured. Forgiveness must therefore become relational recomposition between humanity, territory, bodies, and the living world.
Boff also emphasizes spirituality as resistance against the logic of extraction and commodification. The ecological crisis ultimately reveals a spiritual crisis — the inability to inhabit the world without domination. Ecological forgiveness thus demands conversion not only of institutions, but also of sensibility and forms of life.
4.5 Dom Vicente Ferreira and Ecological Wounds
The reflections of Vicente Ferreira on mining disasters in Minas Gerais provide a particularly important contribution for understanding ecological trauma within Latin American contexts. Dom Vicente repeatedly argues that the Church has been “too slow regarding integral ecology,” emphasizing the urgency of confronting extractivist violence not merely as environmental issue, but as ethical and spiritual catastrophe.
His reflections on Mariana and Brumadinho reveal how mining devastation destroys not only ecosystems, but also communal memory, symbolic belonging, and embodied forms of life. Ecological wounds therefore cannot be reduced to material damage. Territorial destruction fractures relationships between communities, history, spirituality, and land itself.
Dom Vicente interprets predatory mining as form of structural violence inseparable from colonial and capitalist logics of exploitation. Extractivism transforms territories into disposable commodities while rendering invisible the suffering of affected populations. Rivers, mountains, and communities become sacrificed in the name of economic productivity.
The mud that devastated Bento Rodrigues and Brumadinho did not merely contaminate landscapes. It traversed mourning processes, collective identities, and historical continuity. Ecological violence therefore appears simultaneously as corporeal suffering, territorial trauma, and spiritual fracture.
5. Bento Rodrigues and Territorial Trauma
The collapse of the Fundão dam in Bento Rodrigues, Minas Gerais, on November 5, 2015, cannot be adequately interpreted merely as an environmental accident, a technical failure, or an economic tragedy. Although the catastrophe produced immense material destruction, contamination of the Rio Doce basin, displacement of communities, and irreversible ecological damage, its meaning exceeds juridical and environmental categories. Bento Rodrigues reveals, in a paradigmatic way, the emergence of territorial trauma in the Anthropocene: a form of suffering that simultaneously affects bodies, memories, landscapes, symbolic worlds, and communal forms of inhabiting existence.
The mud that crossed rivers, villages, forests, and cities did not only destroy infrastructure or ecosystems. It fractured relationships between body, memory, territory, ancestry, and belonging. Entire communities lost not simply houses or economic resources, but the spatial conditions through which collective identity and historical continuity were sustained. Churches disappeared, cemeteries were buried, agricultural practices were interrupted, and rivers historically associated with life, nourishment, and memory became contaminated spaces of mourning and absence. Ecological catastrophe therefore became existential catastrophe.
5.1 Territory as Memory and Narrative Identity
Modern technocratic discourse frequently approaches environmental disasters through the language of compensation, institutional management, and material reparation. Yet Bento Rodrigues exposes the limits of these approaches. The destruction of territory cannot be reduced to financial loss because territory itself constitutes a living dimension of memory and embodied existence. Human beings do not inhabit neutral spaces. They construct their identities through landscapes, rhythms, rivers, paths, communal rituals, and affective forms of belonging sedimented historically within specific territories.
In dialogue with Paul Ricoeur, memory may be understood not as a merely internal or psychological faculty, but as constitutive dimension of narrative identity and historical existence. Ricoeur insists that memory is inseparable from the symbolic structures through which individuals and communities narrate themselves historically (Ricoeur 2004, 78–86). The destruction of territory therefore destabilizes not only material life, but also the narrative continuity through which communities sustain their sense of belonging and identity.
Bento Rodrigues reveals this rupture with particular intensity. The catastrophe interrupted the continuity between generations, memories, and places. Territory functioned not simply as physical environment, but as archive of lived experience. Rivers carried stories. Paths preserved gestures and rituals. Landscapes embodied forms of collective life transmitted across generations. When the territory was devastated, memory itself became fragmented.
5.2 Trauma, Corporeality, and Ecological Suffering
This fragmentation cannot be understood solely in psychological terms. Ecological trauma traverses corporeality, affectivity, spatiality, and communal belonging simultaneously. The body itself becomes affected by territorial rupture. Survivors frequently describe sensations of uprootedness, estrangement, suspended temporality, and existential disorientation after environmental catastrophe. Ecological suffering therefore exceeds the boundaries of individual consciousness. It becomes embodied memory.
The Anthropocene intensifies precisely this form of suffering globally. Climate collapse, forced displacement, contamination, and territorial devastation increasingly produce populations detached from stable ecological and symbolic horizons. Ecological suffering therefore concerns not only survival, but the crisis of inhabitation itself.
Ricoeur’s notion of narrative identity becomes particularly illuminating here. Human beings construct meaning through narratives capable of articulating past, present, and future into temporal continuity (Ricoeur 1992, 140–168). Territory often functions as material support for this continuity. Places preserve memories, gestures, rituals, and forms of communal recognition. The destruction of territory therefore interrupts narrative coherence itself.
5.3 Extractivist Violence and Relational Devastation
The Bento Rodrigues disaster also reveals the violence underlying contemporary extractivist rationality. Mining in Latin America frequently reproduces colonial structures that subordinate territories and vulnerable populations to the logic of accumulation and technological exploitation. The catastrophe cannot be separated from broader historical processes through which rivers, mountains, forests, and communities are transformed into expendable resources within global economic systems.
In this sense, ecological devastation appears as form of relational destruction. The problem is not only contamination of nature, but the collapse of relational worlds sustained between bodies, territories, memories, and communal life. The mud that devastated the Rio Doce basin symbolically exposes the deeper crisis of a civilization founded upon extraction, acceleration, and domination.
The reflections of Vicente Ferreira become especially significant within this context. Dom Vicente repeatedly argues that mining disasters must be interpreted not merely as environmental crimes, but as ethical and spiritual ruptures affecting the very possibility of communal existence. The destruction of territories simultaneously destroys memory-bearing spaces, weakens symbolic belonging, and intensifies social abandonment. Ecological wounds therefore become inseparable from historical wounds.
5.4 Toward a Hermeneutics of Territorial Trauma
This perspective allows Bento Rodrigues to be interpreted beyond purely environmental discourse. The catastrophe represented the destruction of communal memory, fragmentation of belonging, violence against bodies and territories, interruption of ways of inhabiting the world, and collapse of symbolic continuity between past and future.
The territory thus emerges not as external scenery surrounding human existence, but as constitutive dimension of corporeal belonging, historical continuity, and communal identity. Rivers, landscapes, and ecosystems participate actively in the formation of memory and subjectivity. Ecological violence therefore affects not only environments, but the relational foundations of existence itself.
Bento Rodrigues reveals, in this sense, one of the central truths of the Anthropocene: ecological devastation simultaneously constitutes historical violence, embodied suffering, symbolic collapse, and relational fragmentation. The catastrophe exposes the impossibility of separating environmental destruction from the crisis of memory, belonging, and communal life. Ecological trauma is never merely ecological. It is anthropological, historical, corporeal, and spiritual at once.
6. Indigenous Brazilian Cosmologies and Relational Ecologies
Beyond Anthropocentrism and the Modern Subject
The ecological crisis of the Anthropocene reveals not only the exhaustion of natural resources or the destabilization of climate systems, but also the collapse of the metaphysical assumptions that historically sustained modernity. The separation between humanity and nature, subject and world, culture and territory increasingly appears incapable of accounting for the complexity of ecological existence. The devastation of forests, rivers, mountains, and vulnerable communities exposes the limits of anthropocentric rationality and of the modern conception of the autonomous subject detached from relational belonging.
Within this horizon, Indigenous Brazilian cosmologies offer not merely alternative cultural perspectives, but profound ontological critiques of the modern world. Their importance lies precisely in the capacity to destabilize the metaphysical dualisms through which Western civilization organized its understanding of reality. Indigenous thought frequently refuses the rigid separation between nature and culture that became foundational for modern rationality.
The Anthropocene therefore demands more than environmental reforms or technological adjustments. It requires epistemological and ontological displacement. Indigenous cosmologies allow forgiveness itself to be reconsidered beyond the framework of isolated individuality and moral interiority. Relationality emerges not as secondary ethical principle, but as constitutive condition of existence itself.
6.1 Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Relational Ontologies
The anthropology of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro offers one of the most important conceptual frameworks for understanding Indigenous ontologies in Amazonian thought. Through the notions of perspectivism and multinaturalism, Viveiros de Castro challenges the modern assumption that humanity alone possesses subjectivity while nature remains passive object available for domination and exploitation.
In A Inconstância da Alma Selvagem, Viveiros de Castro argues that Amerindian cosmologies destabilize the binary opposition between nature and culture characteristic of Western thought. Rather than conceiving one universal nature interpreted by multiple cultures, perspectivism proposes a relational ontology in which humans, animals, spirits, forests, and rivers participate through different perspectives upon reality. Humanity thus becomes relational position rather than exclusive ontological privilege.
This multinaturalism radically transforms the meaning of alterity. The other is no longer external object to be classified or dominated, but participant in a shared relational cosmos. In Metafísicas Canibais, Viveiros de Castro deepens this critique by proposing an anthropology capable of confronting the narcissism of Western metaphysics itself. Indigenous cosmologies reveal that the modern subject is not universal condition, but historical construction grounded upon exclusion and separation.
Such reflections acquire particular importance within the Anthropocene. Ecological devastation emerges precisely from the reduction of territory and nature to inert material subordinated to extraction and productivity. Indigenous relational ontologies resist this logic by understanding rivers, forests, landscapes, and animals as living presences participating actively in communal existence.
This relational perspective also transforms the understanding of memory and suffering. Ecological trauma cannot concern only human consciousness because territory itself participates in relational life. Rivers preserve wounds. Forests carry histories. Landscapes embody memory. The destruction of territory therefore simultaneously constitutes destruction of relational worlds.
6.2 Ailton Krenak and the Living Earth
The reflections of Ailton Krenak deepen this critique of anthropocentrism through a powerful philosophical and political defense of relational existence. Krenak repeatedly argues that modern humanity constituted itself through the exclusion of other forms of life and other ways of inhabiting the earth. The ecological crisis therefore reveals the collapse of the illusion of human autonomy.
In Ideias para Adiar o Fim do Mundo, Krenak criticizes the modern concept of humanity as exclusive category detached from rivers, forests, animals, and vulnerable peoples. Modern civilization progressively abandoned everything considered disposable in the name of development and progress. Ecological devastation thus emerges from a metaphysical rupture separating humanity from the living world.
Krenak’s critique of progress becomes even more radical in A Vida Não é Útil, where he argues that contemporary civilization increasingly transforms existence itself into productivity, extraction, and utility. The Anthropocene appears here not merely as environmental crisis, but as symptom of a civilization incapable of coexistence and relational belonging.
Particularly significant is Krenak’s understanding of the earth as living presence rather than passive object. In Futuro Ancestral, he insists that rivers and territories are not external resources but ancestral forms of continuity and belonging. The future can only emerge through reconnection with ancestral relationality and with forms of inhabiting the world capable of resisting extractivist destruction.
Such reflections profoundly transform the ethical horizon of forgiveness. Forgiveness can no longer concern merely reconciliation between isolated individuals. Ecological devastation demands forms of responsibility attentive to territory, ancestry, memory, and the continuity between human and cosmic existence.
6.3 Davi Kopenawa and the Spirituality of the Forest
The cosmological reflections of Davi Kopenawa offer one of the most radical critiques of extractivist civilization in contemporary thought. In A Queda do Céu, Kopenawa describes the destruction of the forest not simply as environmental devastation, but as cosmological collapse. The forest is alive. Rivers, spirits, mountains, animals, and humans participate within a relational totality sustained through reciprocity and spiritual balance.
Kopenawa repeatedly warns that the destruction of the forest threatens not only Indigenous peoples, but humanity itself. “The forest is alive. It will die if the whites continue destroying it,” he writes. Ecological devastation therefore appears simultaneously as spiritual catastrophe, ontological violence, and ethical rupture.
This cosmology profoundly destabilizes modern separations between material and spiritual reality. The forest is not merely biological ecosystem. It is inhabited by xapiri spirits who sustain cosmic equilibrium and relational continuity. When the forest is destroyed, the conditions of existence themselves collapse. The image of “the falling sky” symbolizes the breakdown of relational balance sustaining life.
Kopenawa’s reflections reveal how extractivism operates as ontological violence. Mining, deforestation, and ecological destruction interrupt the relationships between humans, spirits, rivers, and territory that sustain collective existence. The Anthropocene thus appears as crisis of relationality itself.
In the opening pages of A Queda do Céu, Claude Lévi-Strauss observes that Indigenous cosmologies already perceived the danger represented by civilizations founded upon greed and destruction. Kopenawa’s cosmology therefore emerges not as archaic worldview, but as profound warning concerning the future of planetary existence.
6.4 Relational Ecologies and the Expansion of Forgiveness
The cosmologies articulated by Viveiros de Castro, Krenak, and Kopenawa fundamentally challenge modern individualism, anthropocentrism, and the isolated conception of the subject. Existence appears not as autonomous individuality, but as relational participation within networks connecting humans, territories, spirits, forests, rivers, animals, and ancestors.
Ecological suffering therefore cannot be interpreted merely as environmental damage external to human existence. It affects the relational fabric through which life itself becomes possible. Territory participates in memory. Rivers participate in identity. Forests participate in belonging. Ecological devastation thus becomes simultaneously spiritual, corporeal, historical, and communal trauma.
This perspective profoundly transforms the meaning of forgiveness. Forgiveness can no longer concern only moral absolution between autonomous individuals. Ecological devastation requires broader forms of reconciliation attentive to territory, ancestry, memory, and communal continuity. The Anthropocene therefore demands an ecological and decolonial expansion of hermeneutics itself.
Conclusion
The Anthropocene reveals not only an ecological crisis, but also the exhaustion of the metaphysical and anthropological assumptions that sustained modernity. The devastation of rivers, forests, territories, and vulnerable communities exposes the limits of conceptions of forgiveness centered exclusively on autonomous individuals and interpersonal morality. Ecological violence demonstrates that suffering exceeds the boundaries of isolated subjectivity. Bodies, memories, territories, and communal forms of existence are wounded simultaneously.
Throughout this article, forgiveness was progressively displaced from a merely moral or juridical category toward a broader hermeneutical horizon capable of articulating memory, corporeality, ecological belonging, and historical responsibility. In dialogue with Paul Ricoeur, forgiveness emerged as difficult work of memory rather than erasure of trauma. Through the contributions of Jacques Derrida and René Girard, forgiveness appeared simultaneously as ethical excess and interruption of sacrificial violence. Psychoanalysis and phenomenology further revealed that suffering is inscribed not only in consciousness, but also in bodies, affects, and forms of inhabiting the world.
Liberation theology deepened this horizon by demonstrating that ecological devastation cannot be separated from histories of colonial domination, extractivist violence, and structural injustice. The reflections of Gustavo Gutiérrez, Jon Sobrino, Ignacio Ellacuría,
Within this horizon, forgiveness can no longer be interpreted merely as individual absolution or subjective reconciliation. Ecological devastation wounds not only landscapes, but also bodies, memories, and communal forms of existence. Forgiveness must therefore be reimagined as an ecological and relational practice capable of reconnecting humanity with territory, history, ancestry, and the living world itself.
An ecological and decolonial hermeneutics of forgiveness does not propose sentimental reconciliation or passive acceptance of violence. Rather, it calls for the preservation of wounded memory, ethical responsibility toward devastated territories, and the reconstruction of relational worlds fractured by ecological destruction. Forgiveness becomes difficult labor of inhabiting damaged worlds without surrendering entirely to resentment, indifference, or despair.
The Anthropocene thus demands a transformation not only of environmental politics, but also of philosophical anthropology, theology, and ethics. If modernity increasingly separated humanity from the earth, contemporary ecological suffering reveals the impossibility of such separation. Bodies remain inseparable from territories. Memory remains inseparable from landscapes. Existence itself remains relational.
Forgiveness, understood ecologically and decolonially, emerges therefore not as the erasure of suffering, but as fragile commitment to the renewal of relational life within a wounded world.
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René Armand Dentz Jr
Pontifical Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Brazil
Department of Philosophy
PhD Université de Fribourg / Switzerland
e-mail: dentz@hotmail.com
ORCID: 0000-0002-4842-0827