For several decades, political ecology has been developing as a field of convergence and mutual feedback among different disciplines, stemming from a profound critique of the exacerbated bias of scientific and technological knowledge as the sole response to the environmental crisis, and from the proposal of a necessary integration of perspectives to address its objects of study, including those that arise from listening to and supporting the environmental struggles of communities. In this way, political ecology is simultaneously an interdisciplinary perspective on academic knowledge and a transformative political practice.

This field is concerned not only with conflicts over ecological distribution (Martínez-Alier, 2006) but also with exploring, from new perspectives, the power relations that are interwoven between the ways of life of human communities and the globalized world. That is, the political conflict over ecological distribution and the social struggles for the defense of natural resources in their material and symbolic dimensions.

Today we are witnessing a general crisis of global capitalism that is simultaneously a financial, social, economic, and ecological crisis. Therefore, political ecology calls for dialogue across diverse fields of knowledge to create an interdisciplinary and complex vision with the intention of better understanding the multidimensionality of the social conflicts of our time and building alternatives that allow us to reorient our ways of thinking about the world and how we operate within it.

In this context, Latin American political ecology has become a distinct field of thought with international relevance. It is a pluralistic field of analysis, critique, and discourse, built upon the formation of Latin American academic networks that maintain continuity with regional traditions of critical, environmental, Indigenous, feminist, postcolonial, and anti-capitalist thought. It draws on an interdisciplinary theoretical perspective constructed at the intersection of environmental and political history, political economy, critical geography, cultural studies, Latin American Indigenous thought, and environmental thought from the Global South.

The ecology of human societies involves issues of appropriation and the establishment of power relations that allow some actors access to resources and decision-making regarding their use, while excluding others. These power relations have been present in Latin America since the colonial era, and although they have gone through various stages over the centuries, they continue to exhibit colonial forms that have resulted in physical and cultural genocide, mechanisms of expropriation and exclusion from natural resources, as well as the racist destruction or subjugation of identities (Alimonda, 2017). Therefore, political ecology must not overlook the analysis of the role of the State and its policies as a relevant factor in the current configuration of society-nature relations and the disputes that emerge within them.

However, Latin American political ecology is not limited solely to so-called "scientific" knowledge. In recent years, numerous voices working in this field have been incorporating new understandings into the conceptual framework regarding the importance of cultural diversity in the construction of environmentally relevant knowledge. They have shown that the planet's biological diversity is inextricably linked to the management of it by thousands of peoples and local communities throughout history, especially in the Global South (Ulloa, 2011).

The vindication of plural knowledge and the need to construct alternative rationalities (Leff, 2019) is another key point in the theoretical-practical perspective of this field of knowledge. The exercise of power within the logic of accumulation and the market, while fragmenting scientific and technological knowledge and orienting it toward its own needs, has subjugated the vast diversity of popular knowledge about nature. Indigenous knowledge, based on centuries of coexistence, observation, and empirical experimentation within local ecosystems, was discarded from the Conquest onward and throughout a coloniality that persists to this day. For this reason, political ecology also presupposes a political epistemology that extends beyond the interdisciplinary project of knowledge construction to encompass the environmentalization of social struggles (Ulloa, 2017).

Thus, Latin American political ecology has been developing into 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 various circumstances, incorporating critiques of hegemonic development models and outlining alternative possible futures. From this perspective, with struggles from below, by the left, and for the Earth (Escobar, 2017), political ontology and the research-action paradigm become urgent and necessary tools for combating far-right extremism and denouncing the multiple forms of violence generated by the constant expansion of the frontiers of capital and accumulation. This is essential not only for understanding the complexity of these processes but also for supporting struggles in defense of Life through common and de-hierarchical means, within a framework of decolonization and multi-scalar dialogue.

To achieve these goals, nine lines of work are proposed:

- Environmental conflicts, violence, authoritarianism, and struggles in defense of life

- Capitalocene

- Ecofeminisms and women's struggles against extractivism

- Environmental Education in Latin America and the Caribbean

- Energy Transition and Climate Injustices in Latin America and the Caribbean

- Movements for Environmental Justice and Water Justice from the South-Caribbean.

- Cosmopolitics and multispecies political ecologies

- Insular Caribbean

- Art and political ecologies

Furthermore, through various research and outreach projects and activities, we will strengthen ties with other Working Groups with which we have already been collaborating: Territorialities in Dispute and Resistance; Anticapitalisms and Emerging Societies; Indigenous Peoples, Autonomies, and Collective Rights; Borders, Regionalization, and Globalization; Latin American Critical Geographical Thought; Critical Studies of Rural Development; Bodies, Territories, and Feminisms; and Energy and Sustainable Development. We will also begin joint work with the Working Groups on Heritages and Perspectives of Marxism and International Health.

The Political Ecologies Working Group from the South/Abya Yala has been, since 2000, building a field of theoretical-practical knowledge based on the dialogue of knowledge between academics and researchers from diverse disciplines and located in different countries of Central America, the Caribbean and South America, and a variety of communities that defend their means and ways of life, in the face of the advance of projects of commodification, privatization and capitalist enclosure.

Political ecology aims to understand the complex processes of co-management of life in both human and non-human nature (Machado, 2016), based on the premise that societies are nature and cannot exist outside of it. Political ecology seeks to transcend disciplinary boundaries and be 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 recent decades due to the implementation of a series of policies and megaprojects by capital and the state aimed at controlling, accessing, and managing territories and means of subsistence.

Faced with the current civilizational challenge, we are committed to continuing to cultivate dialogue among the diverse knowledge systems and practices that have been developing to understand and act upon the complexities of our realities, and to collaborate in creating alternatives to plunder, dispossession, and socio-environmental devastation. Thus, an essential task is to build bridges and co-produce knowledge with territorial resistance movements and initiatives against extractivism throughout the Global South and Abya Yala (the Americas).

We celebrate the growth of our Working Group, both in the number of members and in the diversity of topics addressed, fueled by the increasing visibility of socio-environmental problems and the commitment of intellectuals in the region to collaborate with communities in resistance in search of alternatives to imposed models.

Therefore, the current proposal continues the themes developed in previous periods, and incorporates new topics:

We propose to continue exploring what we have been conceptualizing as the Political Ecology of Extractivism. Extractivism is not a recent or circumstantial phenomenon, but rather stems from a long-standing structural problem, as 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 recent decades in all Latin American countries, further deepening the continent's colonial, peripheral, dependent, and subordinate position within the world system (Machado, 2016, 26). It is important to contribute to a common understanding of extractivist regimes, while also acknowledging the specific characteristics of each territory.

- We seek to investigate environmental conflicts and give visibility to the struggle in defense of life by diverse social groups, 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 live.

We pay special attention to the Environmental Justice and Water Justice Movements. We draw on the Caribbean decolonial tradition in identifying 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 modes of use and appropriation of knowledge, bodies, territories, and nature.

Likewise, the adverse effects of climate change in the region are felt most acutely by local maritime territories and communities, who have waged long-standing struggles for the survival of traditional ways of life that are more in harmony with the environment. It is useful to present the alternative visions of environmental justice offered by the most vulnerable communities—Afro-descendant, Indigenous, and Raizal. The inclusion of a research line focused on the insular Caribbean contributes to a deeper analysis of these and other problems, as well as a specific study of the impact on these territories.

We highlight and analyze the increasingly visible and leading role that women are playing in defending threatened and affected territories; making audible the violence with which extractivism impacts them in distinct ways, and driving collective efforts to persist in sustaining, defending, and caring for life. We are interested in exploring the relationship between extractivism and patriarchal violence, that is, how the logic of violence particularly impacts women, and how they experience and confront these effects. Defending life is also a struggle to care for, heal, recover, and reclaim the body-territory while acknowledging the marks of colonialism, patriarchy, and capitalism.

The Energy Transition and Climate Injustices in Latin America and the Caribbean are analyzed from a perspective that highlights the need for a socio-ecological transformation of the multiple processes of production and global economic management. We acknowledge that carbon neutrality only permits pollution under penalty of compensation, but does not resolve the causes of the civilizational crisis, and that energy capitalism presents us with false solutions such as renewable energies and the corporate energy transition.

Since the 80s, a field of Environmental Education has been consolidating in Latin America, problematizing the negative effects of a devastating development model and the unsustainable implications of fragmented knowledge. We propose to highlight and analyze how, in our territories, environmental education has been closely linked to sociocultural and ethnic aspects, leading to the construction of a distinct Latin American environmental thought, in conjunction with political ecology.

The analysis of the Capitalocene is incorporated as a specific line of inquiry. It is a diagnostic concept (Svampa, 2019), highlighting the space-time in which capital penetrated the sphere of production and reorganized the labor process according to its logic—a process that mediates, controls, and regulates our metabolic relationship with nature. This relationship is increasingly driven by an expansive and accelerated logic, fueled by the very dynamics of capitalist accumulation. We reflect on and discuss approaches that attempt to render invisible the systems of production and consumption that cause the terminal crisis in which we live, from a historical perspective that draws on the memories of peoples, situating ourselves from our perspective in the Global South as an epistemic and political locus.

We believe it is necessary to recognize that we live in a pluriverse, and therefore we need to construct a shared world when dealing with conflicts between seemingly irreconcilable worldviews. This is what "cosmopolitics" refers to: weaving together amidst heterogeneity. Conflicts between worlds do not occur solely between human beings, but also involve other species, objects, food, infrastructure, and so on. Hence, multispecies political ecology pays special attention to how humans and non-humans suffer the devastating impacts of capitalism, but also become involved in networks of relationships that make alternative modes of existence possible.