In just a few years, Political Ecology in Latin America and the Caribbean has acquired, while simultaneously asserting its legitimate presence within Latin American academia, remarkable relevance in the demands and struggles for the defense of the commons from territories in the Global South. This clearly accompanies the growing conflict surrounding environmental issues in the region and the world. Latin American Political Ecology is now “a distinct field of thought with international relevance.” It is a pluralistic field of analysis, critique, and discourse that has been formed through the establishment of Latin American academic networks, situated in continuity with regional traditions of critical thought and with the complex issue of identity construction in our societies. This Political Ecology is indebted to Latin American history and critical thought, based on the approach to society-nature relations under an interdisciplinary theoretical perspective built at the intersection of environmental and political history, political economy, critical geography, cultural studies, Latin American indigenism and Southern environmental thought, seeking to settle accounts with the past, expanding the present and designing alternatives to the capitalist-modern-Western-patriarchal pattern. 

 At the same time, Latin American Political Ecology, since its emergence, has been developing an active relationship of constant exchange and feedback with the diverse movements and struggles that are at the forefront of conflicts at different scales and in different circumstances, gathering critiques of hegemonic development models and outlining other possible futures. From this perspective, with struggles from below, from the left, and with the Earth (Escobar, 2017), the research and action paradigm has become an urgent and necessary tool for combating the rising far-right extremism on the continent, particularly in Brazil, for the defense of democracy through common and de-hierarchical forms, in decolonization, and with the territories. Below, we present the most important axes of problematization of Political Ecology on our continent in recent times: Extractivism, conflicts, and socio-environmental struggles in a context of civilizational crisis

In a context of civilizational crisis—exacerbated by the ecological crisis, climate change denial, the economic crisis, and new forms of fascism—the theoretical and practical field of Political Ecology is growing amidst tensions, rebellions, insurgencies, and revolutions, as an intrinsic expression of the metabolic rupture between society and nature. Since the Industrial Revolution, the world has been governed “metabolically” by an urban techno-scientific rationale that deepens the tension between the modernization and colonization of the rural world and the rhythms of local communities in the face of a “single model of power.” Faced with “systemic chaos” and an acute epistemic crisis, Political Ecology is giving rise to new bastions of resistance or re-existence, incorporating new horizons of meaning against the invader.

 —Political and economic crisis, with the emergence of authoritarianism

 Political ecology contributes to understanding the different dynamics and dimensions of violence (Navas, 2018) associated with the dispossession of territories. In recent years, Latin America has witnessed a growing increase in the murders of grassroots environmentalists, community leaders, Indigenous people, and peasants. A more interdisciplinary and holistic understanding of this conflict is both necessary and urgent. Meanwhile, Latin American political ecology has developed in dialogue with concrete struggles and has sought to understand socio-ecological violence, and its civilizational dimension, in a broad sense, from genocide and ethnocide to violence against life systems. According to a report by the international NGO Global Witness, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador are among the most violent Latin American countries in the world. At least 120 people were murdered in Honduras between 2010 and 2017 for their environmental activism. Therefore, in addition to murders, torture, and forced expulsions, the criminalization of activists has increased. In 2017, of the deaths recorded by Global Witness worldwide, 36% were in Central America and 32% in South America; two-thirds of the murders worldwide. (Butt et al, 2019).

Understanding the cosmopolitical and ontological struggles over the materialities of disputed resources is a contribution of Latin American Political Ecology. This not only contributes to understanding conflicts but also to advancing rights and equality.   

 Ecofeminisms and women's struggles against extractivism: 

In this extractive offensive marked by dispossession and violence, the leading and increasingly visible role of women in defending threatened and affected territories has been notable. This protagonism is making visible and audible the differentiated impacts on their bodies and territories, revealing the link between capitalism and patriarchy through a series of mechanisms of domination that corporations and governments organize to disrupt the fabric of life. Furthermore, a multitude of political, spiritual, physical, and emotional knowledge and capacities are emerging and being updated by women in struggle to defend and rebuild conditions for dignified living within their ecosystems.

 They fight not only for the physical conservation of their forests, rivers, mountains, fauna, and flora, but also for their ancestral legacy in harmony with the cosmos, with Mother Earth. They propose an epistemology that challenges the model that objectified both nature and human beings. Spirituality connects this symbolic and cosmovisional universe of ancestral knowledge from our diverse peoples. Both ancestral knowledge and spiritualities are recognized as vehicles for healing, liberation, and legitimization in the face of the logic of dominant cultures. 

 Community feminism in Abya Yala, from Indigenous leaders in Guatemala to leaders of African descent, offers us a lesson through the network of women healers: “Women in defense of the territory-body-land” (Cabnal, Lorena, 2015). This network re-evaluates how women have been constructed from a patriarchal perspective and how they relate to nature and the cosmos. From this experience, women have not only identified the dispossession, exploitation, and harm done to the territory-land of which they are a part, but also the logics of domination over their own bodies in their physical, emotional, and spiritual dimensions, discovering that nothing is separate (Critical Perspectives on Territory from Feminism Collective, 2017). The body is not isolated or wandering in a void, but rather situated and interconnected with the fabric of life. Thus, the defense of life is understood as also a struggle to care for, heal, recover and reclaim the body-territory while recognizing the marks of colonialism, patriarchy and capitalism.

It is precisely women who, in a differentiated way, due to their relationship with the livelihood economies, receive the impacts of oil spills, land grabbing, pollution of land, air and water sources in their territories, interpersonal domestic and sexual violence, violence associated with militarization by energy megaprojects and the expansion of the frontiers of agro-industrial, mining and oil extractivism. 

 Energy Transition and Climate Injustice in Latin America and the Caribbean

 While “Climate Summits” are held between world leaders from the North and the South, the voices and practices of the peoples of the Global South, who defend real alternatives to: 

a) Climate and ecological justice: recognition of the responsibility of corporations and States, b) Energy justice: leaving 80% of fossil fuels underground and in the sea, c) Food justice: access to and control of communities over their ancestral practices and territories, and d) Gender justice: equity in the processes of participation in decision-making. 

 A whole variety of false “green” solutions are emerging from financial and industrial corporations associated with the extractive industry to legitimize their predatory practices, which include carbon markets, biofuels, REDD clean development programs, geo-engineering with climate modification technologies, and carbon capture and storage (CCS) technologies.  

 The remarkable expansion of energy and material consumption has led governments and even companies to recognize the unviability of societal projects based on fossil fuel consumption and to consider reducing their use in favor of renewable energies. However, these actors—and even much of academia—still understand the energy transition as simply a change in the primary energy mix, in which renewable energies such as solar, wind, and tidal power increase their share at the expense of hydrocarbons, without addressing issues such as energy poverty or the need to democratize decisions related to energy production, distribution, and consumption, and to do so in a way that does not reproduce ecological and distributive inequalities. This project incorporates a vision of the energy transition from the theoretical perspective of Political Ecology.

 Movements for Environmental Justice, Water Justice in Latin America and the Caribbean 

 Given that extractivism manifests itself in multiple forms of production beyond mining (and hydrocarbons) or soy production, and affects the population in diverse ways, we will address, from the perspective of movements for water justice, the various ways in which local communities are affected. We will also analyze how different local actors, such as rural producers, political parties, environmental groups, and ethnic communities, try to survive (by building alternatives) while resisting the multiple water injustices they experience daily. 

 Taking into account Southern thought, we seek to address the hydro-geographies expressed in the ways of inhabiting the Caribbean. The geo-poetics of inhabiting the being of Earth and Water as a water-based dwelling, from an amphibious hydro-culture that expresses Caribbean culture, where water has a greater presence and acquires greater strength, the Earth-Water relationship, Terri/Mari/tory that emerges from the exuberance of water where rivers and seas meet in rhythms, cadences and tonalities that will be read, danced and narrated in forms of hydro-poetics of a territory that resists the extractive model and environmental racism.

Audiovisual Call for Submissions, Audiovisual Forum: Eco-films 

Through audiovisual language, exploratory paths are being forged to contribute—from transdisciplinary perspectives—a vision as critical observers and committed social actors, as an expression of a paradigm shift in the system of relationships with nature, understanding it as a cultural and ideological value. Historical modes of land occupation, the self-serving uses of its soils and resources, and the industrial and tourism impacts through forms of colonial organization and dependency dictated by services to an international market with high risks to the health of productive areas—and to the rest of the world—have created a field of visual reflection to discern the impactful changes in the ecosystem amidst a growing and contradictory, globalized and challenging modernity, threatened by climate change, which adds to the panorama of irreversible impacts on the territories of Latin America and the Caribbean.

Political Ecology(ies) from the Global South

We want to strengthen ties with networks of Political Ecology Researchers from Asia and Africa. In the context of a global ecological crisis, strengthening South-South networks is essential to address the Geopolitics of Energy Security.

Since 2000, the Political Ecology Working Group has been building a field of theoretical-practical knowledge based on the dialogue of knowledge of more than 200 academics and researchers from diverse disciplines and located in different countries of Central America, the Caribbean and South America, and a variety of collective subjects who are defending their means of livelihood against the advance of all kinds of projects of commodification, privatization and capitalist enclosure.

Unlike perspectives that identify society and nature as two separate entities that interact in specific ways throughout history, Political Ecology aims to understand the complex processes of co-management of life in both human and non-human nature (Machado, 2015), based on the premise that societies are nature and cannot exist outside of it. From this perspective, Political Ecology seeks to transcend disciplinary boundaries and become inextricably linked to the processes of struggle and resistance for the just distribution of ecological goods (Alimonda, 2011). In this sense, it seeks to understand the roots, logics, and dynamics of socio-environmental conflicts, which have multiplied in the last two decades due to the implementation of a series of policies and megaprojects by capital and the State aimed at controlling, accessing, and managing those territories and means of subsistence that are not fully commodified and are therefore crucial in the valuation of value.

Given the civilizational challenges we currently face, we are interested in continuing to cultivate a theoretical and practical dialogue among the diverse bodies of knowledge and practices that are being developed to understand the complexities of our realities and to envision alternatives to plunder, dispossession, and socio-environmental devastation. In this sense, we believe that an essential task is to build bridges and co-produce knowledge with territorial resistance movements and other movements against dispossession and socio-environmental devastation throughout the Global South and Abya Yala. 

The Political Ecologies from the South/Abya Yala Working Group will focus its efforts on the following areas:

- To deepen our understanding of what we have been conceptualizing as the Political Ecology of Extractivism. Given the ecological crisis we face and the current historical and political context, extractivism is not a recent or circumstantial phenomenon, but rather a long-standing structural problem. It is a form of capitalist accumulation (Acosta, 2012) that dates back to the times of the conquest and plunder of Abya Yala, but which has clearly intensified in all Latin American countries over the last two decades with the so-called Commodities Consensus (Svampa, 2013), further deepening the continent's colonial, peripheral, dependent, and subordinate position within the world system (Machado, 2016, 26). From this perspective, it is relevant to contribute to a common understanding of extractivist regimes, while also considering the particularities of each territory, and to delve into the relationship between extractivism and underdevelopment within the framework of an international division of labor in world ecology.

- To analyze socio-ecological conflict and give visibility to the struggle in defense of life of diverse human groups, indigenous and non-indigenous, in rural and urban contexts, who strive daily and in extraordinary ways to guarantee the material and symbolic conditions of their own (re)production and that of the ecosystems in which they are situated.

Within this context of conflict, we pay particular attention to the Environmental Justice and Water Justice movements from the Southern Caribbean. We draw upon the Caribbean decolonial tradition to identify the processes of subalternization of bodies and territories (hydraulic cultures) associated with the processes of colonialism/extractivism of nature, in order to redefine the processes between modes of perception and experiences that determine social, political, and economic relations characterized by the ways in which knowledge, bodies, territories, and nature are used and appropriated.

The phenomenon of climate change has repercussions on the social, cultural, political, and economic activities of communities and territories, primarily in the insular and continental Caribbean. The adverse consequences of extractive development projects, as well as the challenges posed by climate change in the region, are felt most acutely by local communities and their inhabitants, generating socio-territorial conflicts. These groups have engaged in long-standing struggles for the survival of traditional ways of life that are more in harmony with the environment. In this context, it is useful to present the alternative visions of environmental justice offered by the most vulnerable Afro-descendant, Indigenous, and Raizal communities.

 - To analyze and give visibility to the leading and increasingly visible role that women are playing in the defense of threatened and affected territories; making audible the impacts and violence with which extractivism affects them in a differentiated way; and promoting collective efforts to persist in the sustenance, defense, and care of life. We are interested in delving deeper into the relationship between extractivism and patriarchal violence, that is, how the logic of violence is imposed and reiterated on territories threatened and affected by extractivism, and in particular, how women experience and confront these impacts. In this area, we are interested in tracing the emergence of a political force led by women who are recovering and resonating from their own practices with the contributions of ecofeminism.  

 - To identify and analyze the debates surrounding post-extractivism and eco-civilizational transitions, and in particular the energy transition and climate injustice in Latin America and the Caribbean. We begin with the understanding that the energy transition is not simply a change in the primary energy mix, in which renewable energies such as solar, wind, and tidal power increase their share at the expense of hydrocarbons. It is essential to address issues such as energy poverty, or the need to democratize decisions related to energy production, distribution, and consumption, and to do so in a way that does not reproduce ecological and distributive inequalities. This project incorporates a vision of the energy transition from the theoretical perspective provided by Political Ecology.

Through the Collective of Researchers in Higher Environmental Education in Latin America and the Caribbean (CIEASALyC), efforts will be made to influence the training of future professionals with environmental awareness, in a context of extreme gravity where the medium- and long-term sustainability of life on the planet is at risk. Reflective debate and constructive criticism, as well as agreements for establishing minimum common standards for the positioning of Higher Education in the field of Environmental Education, are essential given the social role that universities play.

And finally, audiovisual production, as well as other means of communication and narrative and artistic expression, is added as an exploratory path of other languages ​​to inform and communicate about the contents of Political Ecology.