Biocultural Ethics and Environmental Resistance: Berta Cáceres’s Legacy for the Defense of Rivers, Territories, and Life

Berta Cáceres’s life and struggle embody a biocultural ethic that conceives rivers as living co-inhabitants whose protection requires ethical commitment, collective organization, and institutional transformation. Her work offers a paradigmatic example of how environmental defense can unite ecological, cultural, gender, and political struggles. As a Lenca Indigenous woman and co-founder of the Civic Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (Consejo Cívico de Organizaciones Populares e Indígenas de Honduras, COPINH), she opposed the Agua Zarca hydroelectric project, which threatened the sacred Gualcarque River. Her advocacy connected local community mobilization with transnational solidarity networks, generating international pressure that contributed to the withdrawal of financial support for the project. Cáceres understood the river not as a mere exploitable natural resource but as a living co-inhabitant embedded in relationships among people, ancestors, spirits, and the wider biosphere. Drawing on my biocultural ethics model, which integrates the biophysical, cultural-linguistic, and sociopolitical dimensions of environmental conflicts, I identify three priorities for advancing environmental justice: (i) making violence against environmental defenders visible; (ii) analyzing such violence through an intersectional lens; and (iii) confronting corporate and state impunity. Research and public policy should recognize that women, particularly Indigenous and peasant women, experience distinctive forms of gendered, racialized, and political violence. Cáceres’s legacy demonstrates that defending rivers also means defending cultural identity, traditional knowledge, collective self-determination, and biodiversity. Her enduring slogan—“Berta did not die; she multiplied”—expresses how individual loss can become collective resistance. Biocultural ethics further directs attention to sustainable alternatives already practiced in diverse communities through care, reciprocity, and co-inhabitation. Accordingly, biocultural justice requires protecting these existing ways of life while rethinking development, law, and politics around the interconnected dignity of Earth and its human and other-than-human co-inhabitants.