9 January 1959—
Respecting the Dignity of the Indigenous
Although her struggle for justice was famous throughout the rest of the world, Rigoberta Menchú Tum, the K’iche’ Mayan peacemaker from Guatemala, was acknowledged by her own government as a force to be reckoned with only after she won the 1992 Nobel Peace Prize. The Nobel Committee honored Menchú for her advocacy for the rights of Guatemala’s indigenous peoples.
Menchú inherited the struggle for economic equality from her Mayan ancestors. By 1679, the Spanish conquistadores had conquered all of the Mayan kingdoms and established colonial rule throughout Central America. For the next five hundred years, indigenous peoples were peasant slaves to wealthy European settlers, despite several violent attempts to throw off the yoke.
Menchú’s father, Vicente, fell afoul of the law when he tried to cultivate land in the mountains of Guatemala that belonged to wealthy landowners. While he spent time in prison, his family was forced to work on the plantation or finca to earn enough money for his release. His later involvement in the Peasants’ Unity Committee or Comité de Unidad Campesina (CUC), an organization that demanded the overthrow of the repressive Guatemalan government, eventually led to his murder by the Guatemalan army in January 1980. Two of Menchú’s brothers died from malnutrition and the poisonous effects of pesticides used on the fincas, and a third was murdered. Their grieving mother was abducted by Guatemalan soldiers who raped, tortured, and killed her.
Inspired by her father’s example, Menchú began working for the CUC. Her activism forced her into hiding soon after the deaths of her parents. Fleeing to Mexico, she returned to Guatemala in 1981 to continue the work her father started by joining with several groups (among them the Vicente Menchú Revolutionary Christians) as an educator. She traveled to Europe in 1982 as part of a coalition to raise awareness about the plight of indigenous Guatemalans. While there, she met the anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos. Burgos’ interview with Menchú eventually became the book I, Rigoberta, which gained Rigoberta and the indigenous movement of Guatemala international attention when it was published in 1983.
Shortly after being awarded the Nobel Prize, Menchú founded the Rigoberta Menchú Tum Foundation, which continues to advocate tirelessly for the rights of the poor and indigenous Mayan people of Guatemala. Its “Code of Ethics for an Era of Peace” states: “There is no Peace without Justice; No Justice without Equality; No Equality without Development; No Development without Democracy; No Democracy without Respect to the Identity and Dignity of Cultures and Peoples.”
10 January
Henry Scott Holland
27 January 1847—17 March 1918
Society’s Christianization
If Henry Scott Holland’s name is recognized today, it’s most likely because of a one-liner of his, often repeated at funerals, that “death is nothing to us.” The work that he considered his true calling—awakening his fellow Christians to the truth that “duty to God and duty to man are the same thing”—is nearly forgotten. And that’s a shame.
Holland was an intellectual who enjoyed the scholarly life. But he was also an Anglican priest, and he believed it his duty to coax Christians out of their pews and into the unpleasant world of poverty, violence, and despair to which they often closed their eyes. Genuine Christianity, he believed, was much more than a set of creeds. It was the living experience of helping the poor, sick, homeless, imprisoned, and needy, just as Jesus did and just as he commanded his disciples to do. So in 1884, Holland left a comfortable lectureship at Oxford to become a member of the clerical staff at London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral. He wanted a better understanding of England’s social problems.
His experiences in the streets of London, which he described as “reeking with human misery,” led to the publication in 1889 of his most famous book, Lux Mundi. In it, he alarmed the ecclesiastical and political establishment of the day by calling for the “Christianization of the social structure whereby all men live in accordance with the principles of divine justice and human brotherhood.” This was disturbing enough, but Holland’s denunciation of capitalism as the primary obstacle to society’s Christianization, and his recommendation that the state take over and supervise commercial transactions and industrial production in order to protect workers, absolutely scandalized the upper and middle classes.
On the heels of Lux Mundi’s appearance, Holland formed the Christian Social Union to “investigate areas in which moral truth and Christian principles could bring relief to the social and economic disorder of society.” For years the Union published a magazine, Commonwealth, in which the plight of the poor—substandard housing, inadequate medical care, low wages, and so on—was regularly reported. Commonwealth also led the way on several campaigns for social and economic reform, especially in calling for a state-guaranteed minimum wage and unemployment benefits to workers who lose their jobs through no fault of their own.
Holland returned to Oxford in 1910 as the Regius Professor of Divinity to educate a rising generation of clergy in his vision of a Christian’s social duty. The shock of World War I seriously undermined his already fragile health, and his final years were painful. But to the end, he cautioned his students against a smug or otherworldly churchiness by impressing upon them that duty to God and duty to one’s fellow humans coincided.
11 January
Aldo Leopold
11 January 1887—21 April 1948
Making Peace with the Land
Aldo Leopold expressed his passionate love for his wife, Estella, whom he married in 1912, in carefully copied lines of poetry in one of his many notebooks. He expressed his passion for a “land ethic” through a compilation of essays, A Sand County Almanac, published in 1949 and dedicated “to my Estella.” It was a literary achievement that led future generations to view land not just as a commodity, but as a gift to be shared with and nurtured by all creation—a gift deserving the same tender affection we feel for a spouse or lover.
Leopold argued that “land” wasn’t merely “soil.” Land was the foundation and source of nutrition for the plants and animals that make up the biotic community. That community’s natural integrity deserved careful guardianship because “man-made changes have effects more comprehensive than intended or foreseen.” So far as Leopold was concerned, the pesticide DDT had as much potential destructive power as the atomic bomb.
“All history,” wrote Leopold, “consists of successive excursions from a single starting point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values.” He believed that the land was both the means and ultimate end in that scale, the lasting gold standard to which history, both human and animal, must always appeal.
Born in the relative wilds of Burlington, Iowa, Leopold spent his youth roaming his own backyard of prairies and woods and developing astute observational skills. An avid reader, he also began cultivating a vivid literary talent. He attended Yale and received a degree in forestry.
Upon graduation, Leopold was assigned to the Arizona territories by the U.S. Forest Service. In 1924, he was reassigned to the U.S. Forest Products Laboratory in Madison, Wisconsin, and he began teaching at the University of Wisconsin in 1928.
After the 1933 publication of his book Game Management, Leopold was appointed the first chair of the University of Wisconsin’s new Department of Game Management. Two years later, he and his family bought and settled into a worn-out farm that became the laboratory for his “land ethic,” whose main principle was “to stop thinking about decent land use as solely an economic problem. A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
Leopold died from a heart attack in 1948, two hours after trying to fight a brush fire on a neighbor’s farm. His final moments were spent defending the earth he so loved.
12 January
Benny