In the contemporary world, the historical social inequalities between North and South that have accumulated over centuries are now finding in Global Environmental Change—especially as expressed in climate warming, biodiversity loss, and the disruption of major biogeochemical cycles—a catalyst for changing the prevailing development model, which is socially exclusionary, culturally oppressive, and ecologically predatory. In Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC), trapped by this imposed pattern, we have relegated, undervalued, and jeopardized the intergenerational use of the opportunities inherent in local ecosystems, which could support a unique path toward a shared regional future. Six of the world's most biodiverse countries are located in this region: Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, and Venezuela. To grasp the extent of this wasted and degraded potential, it's important to note that LAC is home to 60% of the planet's terrestrial life. Tropical evergreen lowland forests are the most abundant on the planet in terms of species diversity. The region contains 12% of the world's mangrove forests, covering approximately 22.000 km². Wetlands represent about 20% of the regional area, notably the Gran Pantanal in Brazil (the world's largest wetland, covering approximately 100.000 km²), and those located in the Llanos of Colombia and Venezuela and the Humid Pampas of Argentina and Uruguay. All of these constitute biomes of great biodiversity on a global scale and habitats for endemic species essential for providing water-related ecosystem services: drinking water; water for the agricultural and energy sectors; flood regulation; erosion control; sediment transport; and storm protection. Coral reefs cover approximately 26.000 km², equivalent to 10% of the world's total. Those in the western Atlantic Ocean, particularly in the Caribbean, are especially prominent.

The main evidence of threat

● Forty percent of mangrove species in Central America and the Atlantic Coast are included in the Red List of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). In this land-sea interface, the impact on corals is also a concern, as they are experiencing damage from rising sea temperatures and the combined effects of sedimentation and pollution from land, introduced species, and unsustainable fishing practices. Average coral cover in the Caribbean decreased from 34,8 percent in 1970 to 16,3 percent in 2011 at 88 sampling points. The greatest changes occurred between 1984 and 1998.

● The eight main river basins of the Andean-Amazonian slope, key to the hydrological cycle, show a high risk of species extinction. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) reported in 2014 that between 1970 and 2010, the region's biodiversity declined by 83%.

● Special attention is required for the case of the primary forests of Latin America and the Caribbean, which, according to the FAO, represent 75% of the total regional forest area and 57% of the world's original forests.

● Among the main social problems to be solved by the extractive mining, energy, and agricultural model predominant in the region are: respect for the land rights of Indigenous peoples and peasant communities and curbing the commodification of environmental services. It is particularly important to consider that the use of biodiversity and local ecosystems often relies on ecosystem goods and functions that are part of the communal, if not public, domain of peasant and Indigenous societies, thus transcending private property regimes. Consequently, an ecological-cultural continuity, unmediated by private market relations, is proposed for the various Indigenous peoples and peasant communities that have created a variety of polyculture and agroforestry systems, which have provided them with means of subsistence, food, and health without altering ecosystem integrity. It must be noted that the direct degradation of biodiversity and ecosystems alienates societies from their sense of place, language, and their own ecological knowledge, compromising the eco-cultural diversity of the region as a whole. It should be particularly emphasized that the loss of native languages, evidenced especially in the Andes, Amazon, Central America and Mexico, affects the loss of traditional knowledge transmitted through the maternal line, and the disappearance of ancestral "know-how" in the use of local biodiversity.

In the dialectic between global environmental changes caused by unsustainable global development and the serious regional and local social and environmental consequences, the notion of social metabolism becomes a guiding principle in determining the actions that we in Latin America and the Caribbean must take to change the model. It should be remembered that Karl Marx was the first to introduce the concept of social metabolism into the fields of economics and history, with the intention of studying and evaluating the forms and ways in which societies appropriate and transform natural resources to maintain their existence. Based on the notion of metabolic exchange developed in his time by biology, Marx characterized human labor as the intentional modulation of that metabolism, and on one of the few occasions when he programmatically specified what he understood by socialism, he defined it as the conscious organization of an exchange between human beings and nature “in a form appropriate to the full development of humanity.”

In a dependent region like Latin America and the Caribbean, this relationship is determined by global subordination to the role of raw material supplier, resulting in an imbalance between the tons of mineral, energy, agricultural, and forestry resources produced and the income received, as Raúl Prebisch pointed out in the 60s. Today, thanks to our knowledge, especially in ecology and climatology, we know that the accumulating debts are not only accounted for in terms of undervalued physical supplies as commodities, but also as a loss of ecosystem functions of regulation and natural provisioning. This loss is felt by local communities and manifests in the alteration of the quality of basic natural resources: water, air, and soil, and consequently, in the living conditions of the local population. In other words, we are facing an “ecological Prebisch.”

These processes of deterioration have been due to multiple causes, but centrally, we can highlight, on the one hand, the unchecked exploitation of “natural resources” by national governments, which should be considered, as Indigenous peoples perceive them, as “common goods.” On the other hand, we must emphasize the growth of the urban population at the expense of rural depopulation and its concentration in large cities.

In the first case, we observe: changes in land and forest use for timber exports and monocultures such as oil palm and soy; the social and ecological impact of traditional mining (non-metallic, gold, iron, aluminum, among others) and non-traditional mining (coltan, rare earth elements, lithium, among others), as well as the activities of oil and gas companies. In the second case, we observe urban growth that deforests, pollutes, and destroys ecosystems. The region shows a growing metabolic decoupling between assumed stereotypes of urban life and the archetypal conditions of local habitats where cities are established and expand.

Addressing Global Environmental Change in relation to Local Social Metabolism allows us to highlight the importance of territory, of each locality where we encounter situations that are not generalizable in terms of critical thresholds such as endangered species, endemism, water stress, and climate vulnerability. It also leads to the social value that each society places on components such as the landscape, subject to a unique archetypal valuation that expresses each local experience as unique and unrepeatable. In general terms, the aim is to understand how climate change, the disruption of major biogeochemical cycles, and the loss of biodiversity affect the local social metabolism, the "Eco-Cultural Continuity," of communities that have created a variety of productive systems based especially on local biodiversity.

From a methodological perspective, according to Toledo (2013), metabolic-social processes can be understood within the framework of the chain of the different phases of the use of nature by human societies: appropriation (A), transformation (T), distribution (D), consumption (C) and waste/recycling (R/R), which are briefly explained below: 

Appropriation: Through (A), society obtains all the materials, energy, and services that human beings and their artifacts require (endosomatically and exosomatically) to maintain and reproduce themselves. This process is always carried out by an appropriation unit (P), which can be a company (state-owned or private), a cooperative, a family, a community, or a single individual (for example, a solar energy collector).

Transformation: (T) encompasses all changes made to products extracted from nature, which are no longer consumed in their original form. In its simplest forms, T includes the most basic and labor-intensive methods, such as various artisanal techniques, progressing to processes that are intensive in energy and materials.

Distribution: (D) marks, in diachronic terms, the evolutionary moment when human societies have a surplus to trade, thus inaugurating the exchange of products that we can locate with the very emergence of multiple cities more than 5.000 years ago. Currently, distribution is particularly mediated by transportation and its associated energy and economic costs.

Consumption: (C) becomes the way in which societies satisfy themselves from the upstream linkage of P+T+D and from an energy point of view must account for the expenses incurred in them.

Waste/Recycling: Determines the capacity of societies to recover and reuse solid, liquid, and gaseous waste, preventing its discharge as pollutants into nature.

The responses, taking into account these local metabolic processes, to the disruptions caused by the environmental changes brought about by global capitalism, can be a key factor in activating the material base of the “virtuous circle” of governance, of the self-government necessary for the communities themselves to break with alienation, the accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2007) that favors the interests of large national and transnational companies that compete in the use of natural resources, which are in many cases the only intergenerational, that is, sustainable heritage of the majority of impoverished Latin American communities marginalized if not intentionally excluded from the international market, as happens with biopiracy.

The selection of cases is based on the following criteria:

Representativeness; It allows the selection of cases that capture characteristic situations of the territories of Latin America. 

Significance: Aimed at selecting those cases that allow investigation into the obstacles and possibilities for achieving the research objectives

Impact: Focused on working on cases that are distinctive of the struggle of the communities

Applicability: Leading to the identification of cases that allow the formulation of proposals

Considering social metabolism allows for the evaluation of the options of the archetypal development of each locality within subnational, national, and regional projects. Taking advantage of these opportunities is largely linked to local knowledge, to local cognitive capital, the key to "filling the gaps" that alienating and exclusionary unsustainable development generates by not incorporating the contributions of nature to people, traditional knowledge, secular practices of sustainable agriculture, and forms of association for work and cooperation that exceed the logic of the market. The detection of contradictions between Global Environmental Change and Local Social Metabolism is intended as a way to empower communities to promote alternative sustainable development from the bottom up, articulating natural and cultural diversity.  The aim is to articulate a logic diametrically opposed to that which prevails in the primary export model, based on the extraction of raw materials, especially minerals, energy and agricultural products, valued according to their possibilities of transaction in the international market without taking into account the particularities of the different extraction sites. It doesn't matter if, for example, it's oil in the Amazon rainforest or offshore in the Atlantic or the Caribbean; what matters is the barrel of oil obtained, valued as a common resource ("commodities"), without any particularity, regardless of the geographical area where its deposits are located, nor the social conditions of the local communities associated with those extraction sites. The same applies to the remaining mineral commodities and even agricultural ones, such as soybeans, a crop that can be grown indiscriminately in the Bolivian highlands, the Argentine and Uruguayan pampas, the Brazilian cerrado, or the Colombian-Venezuelan plains. Thus, extractive activities, instead of reflecting the set of territorial particularities, constitute specific enclaves that project themselves outside the territories. In terms of global trade, Latin America appears as a net exporter of water, land and materials, which in general, especially towards the European Union, the USA and to a lesser extent China, although it should be highlighted that the region's exports to this country have increased 22 times in the last two decades. This situation is producing a negative balance of such magnitude that one can speak “today of the existence of an “ecological Prebisch”, where there is an ecologically unequal exchange, where environmental degradation is not simply replaced by good market prices” (Penge, 2015: 68). The region lost almost 50 million hectares of forests, representing the highest levels of deforestation in the world.  Thus, with the metabolic-social evaluation, one is obliged to transcend the reductionism of market criteria and logics and the disastrous planetary environmental consequences that have led to the ecological crisis of the fossil civilization of the Anthropocene. This hits the region, the countries that make it up, and the populations that inhabit them doubly hard; we lose both by failing to articulate a complete metabolic process that allows us to add transformative human value to local nature and by being subjected to the consequences of global environmental changes caused especially by a North that has industrialized by "parasitizing" the South.