The following Covenant, adopted from the Saguaro-Juniper Covenant, applies to CCA’s hermitage land, but not to CCA’s Baicatcan land. (Note: This shortened version of the Covenant covers items relevant to visiting sojourners. See the end of this page for a link to the full text.)
In acquiring private governance of land, we agree to cherish its earth, waters, plants, and animals in a way that promotes the health, stability, and diversity of the whole community. This entails attentive stillness to meet and know the land as an active presence. It entails study, observation, shared reflection, and cumulative corporate experience to increase and bequeath our understanding of ecosystem health, stability, and diversity. It entails symbiotic naturalization into the land community – a communion of actual nurture and shelter. As elaborated by these entailments, fully accountable governance – stewardship – is the distinctively human way of bonding into one society with all who share in the land’s life, which is the foundation for instituting a biocentric ethic among humankind.
1. The land has a right to be free of human activity that accelerates erosion.
2. Native plants and animals on the land have a right to life with a minimum of human disturbance.
3. The land has the right to evolve its own character from its own elements without scarring from construction or the importation of foreign objects dominating the scene.
4. The land has a pre-eminent right to the preservation of its unique and rare constituents and features.
5. The land, its water, rocks, and minerals, its plants and animals, and their fruits and harvest have a right never to be rented, sold, extracted, or exported as mere commodities.
