Life & Mortality Quote by Dorothy Stang

A line like this refuses the comfort of metaphor. Dorothy Stang isn’t praising “nature” in the abstract; she’s issuing a blunt causal claim, the kind meant to land in a room where people are deciding whether trees or profits get to live. “The death of the forest” sounds ecological, even poetic, but she yokes it to “our life” with a moral insistence: there is no separate sphere where humans get to thrive while the land is treated as expendable.

Stang’s intent is both pastoral and prosecutorial. As a nun working in Brazil’s Amazon with landless farmers, she saw deforestation not as an unfortunate side effect of progress but as a deliberate system: illegal logging, cattle expansion, land grabs, and the violence used to enforce them. The subtext is accountability. “Our” doesn’t just mean humanity in the vague, climate-poster sense; it implicates the readers, consumers, officials, and investors whose choices turn forests into commodities. It also includes the communities whose lives are already shortened first: displaced families, threatened activists, Indigenous peoples.

The sentence works because it compresses environmental collapse into a personal deadline. It bypasses the usual split between “saving the planet” (lofty, distant) and “economic reality” (urgent, local) by declaring the forest as infrastructure for life itself: rainfall, soil, carbon, food, health, and peace. Coming from someone later murdered for her activism, it reads less like rhetoric than a warning stamped with consequence.