Dialogue on climate justice concludes in Cuba

For two days, representatives of scientific and religious communities from Cuba, the United States, Brazil and other countries met at Havana’s Hotel Nacional to share knowledge about the importance of combating religious fundamentalism and the negative impact of that trend on the peoples.

Brazilian theologian Frei Betto said on Monday that the current environmental crisis results from a social model that is committed to banks and markets over human beings.

We live in a society where people’s properties are more important than people, he said in his lecture ‘Climate justice and current political paradigms’.

He added that it is important to work for a societal project that breaks the dichotomy between the human being and nature, and raises the awareness of ‘we’ over that of the individualist ‘I’ of capitalism.

We must also regard nature as ‘a subject of law’, strengthen social movements, empower the peoples and be on the alert given the fundamentalism that is present in several countries like Brazil and Bolivia, he said.

Betto added that religion and politics serve ‘both to liberate and to repress’.