There is a happy novelty in the current presidential dispute of Brazil: the presence of two women, Marina Silva and Dilma Rousseff. They are different. Each has her own style, but both have unquestionably solid ethics and an understanding of politics as a tool to serve the common good, and not as a means of conquest and use of power, generally, in the service of one's own vanity or of the elite interests that still dominate the democracy we have inherited.

These two women appeared at a special moment of the history of the country, of humanity and of planet Earth. If we think radically and conclude -- as notable cosmologists and biologists have -- that the principal subject of our actions is not us, in a superficial anthropocentrism, but the Earth herself, understood as a living super organism, filled with purpose, Gaia, Pachamama and Great Mother, then we could say that it is the Earth who is speaking to us through these two women, calling for our attention, and warning us. These women are the very Earth that cries out; the Earth that feels and is seeking a new equilibrium.

This new equilibrium should pass predominantly through women, and not through men. Men, after centuries of arrogance, are more interested in protecting their businesses than in saving life and caring for the planet. International gatherings reveal that men are ill prepared to deal with topics of life and the preservation of the Common Home.  This crucial moment of grave danger calls for those beings who historically have been, and are, by their nature, better equipped to assume tasks and actions linked to conservation, and caring for life.  These are women and their allies, the men who would have incorporated the feminine virtues within themselves.  Evolution profoundly linked women to the processes of generating and caring for life.  Women are the shepherds of life and the guardian angels of the values derived from the dimension of the anima (of the feminine in woman and in man), namely, caring, reverence, the ability to grasp the message and meaning in the smallest signals; aware of spiritual values such as giving, unconditional love, sacrifice in favor of the other, and an openness to the Sacred.

World feminism brought a fundamental critique of patriarchy, that comes down to us from the Neolithic age.  Patriarchy created institutions that even now shape world societies, with the instrumental-analytic reason that divorced human beings from nature, that dominated natural processes in a manner so devastating that it brought about global warming; that created the State and its bureaucracy, organized according to the interests of men; that developed a style of education that reproduces and legitimates patriarchal power; and that organized armies and inaugurated war. It affected other matters, such as religions and churches, whose gods and actors are almost all masculine. The «manifest destiny» of patriarchy is the dominium mundi (domination of the world), with the intent of making us «teachers and owners of nature.» (Descartes)

Presently, men have fallen victim to the «god complex», as the eminent German psychoanalyst, K. Richter, puts it. Men assumed divine chores: to dominate nature and all others, to organize all life, conquer outer space, and remodel humanity. All this has been simply too much. Men feel like a «crumbling god» who falls under its own weigh, especially because he has created a death machine, capable of eliminating him from the face of the Earth.

The saving role of woman is urgent now. We agree with these words, written years ago by the Fund of the United Nations for Population: «The human race has been sacking the Earth in an unsustainable way, and giving women greater decision making power about the future could save the planet from destruction.» Notice that it does not say «giving greater power of participation to women,» something that men allow, but in subordinate manner. Here it affirmed: «decision making power over the future». Women must assume the decision making, also incorporating men, otherwise, we endanger our future.

This is the profound, I would say, providential, meaning of these two women candidates for the presidency of Brazil: Marina Silva and Dilma Rousseff.

- Leonardo Boff, Theologian, Earthcharter Commission

Free translation from the Spanish by Servicios Koinonia, http://www.servicioskoinonia.org.

Done at REFUGIO DEL RIO GRANDE, Texas, EE.UU.