Brazil can be considered an experiment in colonial ecology. One of the contemporary events that confirms the afterlives of the ancestral catastrophe of colonization and demonstrates the traumatic repetition of environmental catastrophe related to this extractivist model of social construction is the land subsidence of entire neighborhoods in the city of Maceió, capital of the state of Alagoas, in northeastern Brazil. In this eschatological scenario, a Baptist church rooted in the Northeastern tradition of Brazilian Liberation Theology has led efforts to resist, repair, and promote ecological justice in the face of the systemic violence caused by mining.
Analyzing photographic and ethnographic records of the ruins of the catastrophe from an eco-hauntological perspective, this article aims to demonstrate how the struggles for social and environmental justice articulated by Pinheiro's Church dismantle the disciplinary regimes of capitalist temporalities that devastated territories, populations, biodiversity, spiritualities, and ancestral ways of life in Brazil.