Note: this article begins with a description of violence

She looks like an outdoorsy kind of granny: cropped white hair, thin-rimmed glasses; light slacks and sensible trainers, as though dressed for a picnic or a hike. In other photos she sports an easy, open smile; but in this picture she lies face down in the slick mud, bleeding out into the red earth.

This is Sister Dorothy Stang, known to her countless friends as Dot. Her story is a sobering reminder that creation care is not a nice-to-have add-on to Christian practice, but a battle between goodness and its enemies. It’s also a battle in which ordinary people - those of us sitting at home reading this in comfort - can find ourselves, however inadvertently, colluding.

Born during the Great Depression of the 1930s, Sister Dorothy felt an early calling to devote her life to God. After several years spent teaching children in the US, she moved to Brazil, where she worked with some of its poorest people in the forested region of Parà. By the end of her life, in a realisation that was  in part the cause of her death, she understood that her ministry was to the forest itself, people and trees together.

During the 1970s, the Brazilian government encouraged landless people from the north-east and far south of the country to migrate into Amazonia.  The idea was to copy the profitable history of the US, with its westward movement of European settlers in the nineteenth century.

Just as in the US, this movement brought human and ecological tragedy, exterminating indigenous people and razing the forest for wood, gold, minerals and cattle farming.

The tragedy was that the settlers were no better off in the forests than they had been back home. Promises of land ownership quickly evaporated and the new arrivals found themselves working in conditions of near-slavery for large businessmen in league with corrupt politicians.

Even where they did manage to control their own plots, the settlers could not grow anything. After a couple of seasons of intensively producing a single crop, the cleared land was exhausted and no longer yielded food.

Sister Dorothy lived amongst these people for many years, teaching, encouraging, and advocating on their behalf. She was stubborn, faithful, always hopeful of her good God. She had an inexhaustible sense of fun: biking in the dirt, painting T-shirts and laughing often. She also made many enemies amongst the powerful.

It was during a sabbatical to the US in 1991-2 that Sister Dorothy suddenly came to realise that her ministry to humans was also a ministry to the forest itself. Neither in scientific terms, nor in spiritual terms, could their wellbeing be separated.

It was what Pope Francis later described as the ‘ecological conversion’ that everyone needs.

Returning to Parà, Sister Dorothy threw herself into a scheme which focused on both people and land. The PDS system gave landless migrants a small plot of land, of which 80% was retained as wild forest, and the other 20% farmed using sustainable practices. 

Agricultural technicians worked alongside Dorothy to help the settlers understand and produce local fruits instead of cutting down trees for temporary crops. Together, they fundraised for a small, cooperative fruit processing unit.

The land, however, was under ever-increasing pressure, with new mega-projects, better roads and better networked finance. The corruption was worse than ever, and PDS participants were chased by gunmen off the land they had been promised. Their simple settlements were burned to the ground.

In acknowledgement of this darker turn, Dorothy’s hand-painted T-shirts now bore the slogan ‘The death of the forest is the death of us all’. Her enemies included not just the corrupt and the wealthy, but even some of the landless settlers, desperate to believe the lies they were told.

It was one of these impoverished men who accepted fifty dollars to shoot her dead.

Fifty dollars was nothing to the businessmen behind the contract. It was also worthless money for the shooter himself, quickly sacrificed to the legal system in place of the crime’s ultimate sponsors. It was, in fact, another unsustainable action within the forest. In its cheap execution it echoed the downing of a mahogany tree for an apparent profit whose true deficit is seen only later. And, like the felling of a mighty and beautiful tree, it was accomplished only through the quashing of the instinct of compassion.

Sister Dorothy’s violent death can seem far away to those of us in the Global North. But environmental scholars treat her story as an outcome of what they call ‘slow violence’. Rob Nixon, who coined the term, defined slow violence as

In the book of Acts (7:58), Saul (later the apostle Paul) holds the coats of those who stone to death the first Christian martyr, Stephen. Although Saul did not raise his own hand, his tacit approval was a classic act of slow violence. Reflecting later in his life (Acts 26), Paul confessed that his belief system had facilitated and encouraged the violent actions of others.

When the world’s wealthy believe it is their right to consume Amazonia’s resources without asking where they came from, or with what effect, they participate in a similar belief system, a system of slow violence. 

Sister Dorothy’s martyrdom is a sober reminder that our adherence to the belief system of consumption implicates us in her murder. Greening churchyards and improving the energy efficiency of our worship spaces are good things to do, but they do not purchase guiltlessness. Such actions must be grounded, first, in realisation and  repentance.