Over the past two decades, various organizations have promoted cacao agroforestry systems as a tool for biodiversity conservation in the Bribri-Cabécar indigenous territories of Talamanca, Costa Rica. Despite these efforts, cacao production is declining and is being replaced by less diverse systems that have lower biodiversity value. Understanding the factors that influence household land use is essential in order to promote cacao agroforestry systems as a viable livelihood strategy. We incorporate elements of livelihoods analyses and socioeconomic data to examine cacao agroforestry systems as a livelihood strategy compared with other crops in Talamanca. Several factors help to explain the abandonment of cacao agroforestry systems and their conversion to other land uses. These factors include shocks and trends beyond the control of households such as crop disease and population growth and concentration, as well as structures and processes such as the shift from a subsistence to a cash-based economy, relative prices of cacao and other cash crops, and the availability of market and government support for agriculture. We argue that a livelihoods approach provides a useful framework to examine the decline of cacao agroforestry systems and generates insights on how to stem the rate of their conversion to less diverse land uses.
The essay focuses on the notion of ordinary violence in the homiletical and literary corpus of Archbishop Óscar Romero of El Salvador. Focusing especially on the reality of landlessness, I attend to Romero’s characterization of the inability of people to access land and livelihood as itself a form of violence, which he understands to be an attack upon the dignity of those deprived of what they need to survive and to flourish. The essay then turns to the assumptions about the world that make the perception of ordinary violence possible, arguing that such violence assumes and elaborates upon the theological grammar of creation as a common gift. I proceed to sketch the moral and theological landscape opened up by this belief about creation, suggesting some of the possibilities it generates for moral description and agency. For instance, Romero’s understanding of ordinary violence considerably complicates commonplace conceptions of thievery—a complexity especially evident in his claim that some Salvadoran oligarchs are like thieves because they take the land that belongs to all.
This article explores the theme of dignity as it emerges in Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum novarum (1891) and develops within mainstream Catholic social teaching. In expositing the grammar of dignity, I argue that, while the tradition certainly affirms dignity as an equal status pertaining to all people as created in God’s image, dignity is not just a status. In a world damaged by sin, the real drama of dignity is its defense—the practical acknowledgement of dignity and human equality in the midst of our lived experience. Given how conditions in our world so often deny this truth about the human creature, dignity is, therefore, something we must have faith in, as well as constantly fight to make ordinary.
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