The metabolic-social assessment guided by the ecopolitical principle of environmental justice compels us to transcend the reductionism of market criteria and logic, and the disastrous planetary environmental consequences that have led to the ecological crisis of fossil fuel civilization in the Anthropocene. This crisis doubly impacts the region, its constituent countries, and their populations, both because they have failed to develop a comprehensive metabolic process that allows for the addition of transformative human value to local nature, and because they are subjected to the consequences of global environmental changes caused especially by capitalist economies that have industrialized by "parasitizing" the Latin American and Caribbean region.

Latin American extractivism, which is carried out against the inherent capacities of the Genius Loci of each locality, is associated with the following regional disruptions:

Mineral extraction has generally produced direct and indirect environmental impacts on biodiversity: vegetation loss; acid mine drainage; high concentrations of metals in rivers, soils, and food chains; and habitat fragmentation. Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) accounts for 45% of global copper production and 50% of silver production, representing 25% of global mining investment (UNEP 2016a). Between 2001 and 2013, approximately 1.680 km² of tropical rainforest habitat in South America were lost to mining. The most affected areas with critical biodiversity are the Magdalena Valley montane forest and Magdalena-Urabá rainforest biomes (9%); the Tapajós-Xingú rainforest (11%); the southwestern Amazon rainforest (28%); and the Guiana Shield rainforest (41%) (UNEP-WCMC 2016). Of particular alarm is the fact that the Venezuelan government launched the Orinoco Mining Arc (AMO) megaproject in 2016, covering an area of ​​approximately 111,844 km² of forest. We will delve deeper into this matter in the section dedicated to Venezuela.

The impacts of oil extraction on biodiversity tend to be particularly alarming in the Andean-Amazonian regions of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, where protected natural areas such as Yasuní National Park in Ecuador and the Isiboro Sécure Indigenous Territory and National Park (TIPNIS) have been affected. Both are ecological hotspots on the planet, inhabited by Indigenous communities threatened by the ecological and cultural impacts of oil and gas extraction. Among the most concerning problems are deforestation and habitat fragmentation caused by the 12-km-wide seismic lines used for oil exploration prior to exploitation; in other words, oil activity has an impact even during the planning phase. In the Peruvian Amazon alone, more than 104.000 km of these lines were cleared between 1970 and 2010 (Harfoot et al. 2016).

The loss of natural vegetation, both primary and secondary, is directly related to the loss of linguistic diversity, particularly of Indigenous languages, and impacts the loss of traditional knowledge transmitted maternally. According to IPBES (2018), 60% of pre-European Indigenous languages ​​have been lost throughout the Americas. It is important to note that, given the significance of the Andean subregion in this matter, Indigenous peoples such as the Quechua and Aymara, among others, are subjected to the transculturation of their traditional knowledge due to the intervention in, and even dispossession of, the local ecosystems that have sustained them for millennia.

The appropriation of indigenous and peasant lands in the region has significant implications for the local economy, as it affects the right to work and vital production for communities. For example, it should be noted that 16,5 million family farming units have been identified, 56% of which are located in South America and 34% in Mexico and Central American countries (ECLAC, FAO, IICA, 2014). Traditional foods are primarily produced in these units. They account for 51% of the corn, 77% of the beans, and 61% of the potatoes consumed in the region. Countries like Mexico are above average in production of corn and beans, where family farming represents 70% and 60%, respectively, of the total area dedicated to these crops. In Colombia's profile as a coffee-producing country, coffee constitutes approximately 22% of the agricultural GDP. Plantations of five hectares or less represent 96% of coffee producers and 62,2% of the total cultivated area of ​​this product. In the case of animal agriculture, small rural producers generate more than 60% of the total production of beef, poultry, and pork, and more than 99% of the meat of other species more closely linked to the rural diet: rabbits, goats, sheep, South American camelids, guinea pigs, as well as dairy products (Escobar 2016).

Extractive activities, which demand large quantities of water, are carried out in countries with drought and desertification problems. The problem is especially worrying in Argentina, where mild to severe drought affects 75% of the national territory, but where, despite pressure from local communities, gold mining has not been prohibited in glacial areas, which constitute the country's most important freshwater reservoirs. In Chile, the world's leading copper producer, chronic water scarcity affects 62% of the national territory. In other countries with a strong mining and hydrocarbon extraction profile, such as Colombia, drought-affected lands total 48% of the territory. In Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia, drought affects between 27% and 43% of the land area. In Uruguay, a major global producer of agricultural raw materials, it is estimated that more than 80% of the country's productive land suffers from varying degrees of drought.

On the other hand, despite the climate emergency, there is a strengthening of extractivism associated with fossil fuels. Investments in hydrocarbon extraction have not decreased; on the contrary, they are on the rise. Likewise, there is a push for extractivism linked to renewable energies. The dominant policy, at least rhetorically, posits the need to decarbonize economies through an energy transition. This requires critical metals and minerals such as lithium, copper, cobalt, nickel, and vanadium, in a context of declining resources and socially conflictive conditions.

In these countries, as in the rest of Latin America, there are serious water supply problems, especially in rural areas (De Lisio, 2013).

In this context, extractive activities appear as one of the main causes of persistent social conflict, violence, and the repatriarchalization of the affected territories. In 2020, of the ten countries with the highest number of identified lethal attacks, seven were Latin American: Colombia (65 murders), Mexico (30 murders), Brazil (20 murders), Honduras (17 murders), Guatemala (13 murders), Nicaragua (12 murders), and Peru (6 murders). Regarding the repatriarchalization of these territories, it has been documented how, in areas affected by extractive activities, decision-making becomes masculinized, labor structures are reinforced, deepening sexist stereotypes that relegate women to unpaid work, and gender-based violence increases in both public and domestic spaces.

Historically, the Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region has been characterized by a socially exclusionary, ecologically predatory, and politically violent primary export model, organized around extraction enclaves that value nature (minerals, energy, agricultural goods) based on their transaction possibilities in the international market; while nullifying and destroying the biocultural particularities of the different extraction sites.

In commercial terms, Latin American commodities are destined to satisfy the consumption of core economies such as the European Union, the United States, and China. It should be noted that the latter has become increasingly central to the region's exports, with a 22-fold increase in the last two decades. This trade is generating enormous ecological and social liabilities. This situation results in a negative balance of such magnitude that one can now speak of the existence of an "ecological Prebisch." Within the framework of conventional economics, the loss of intergenerational socio-natural heritage suffered by each locality due to the destructive short-sightedness of extractivism is not considered. To illustrate, the region has lost almost 50 million hectares of forest in the last 40 years, representing some of the highest levels of deforestation in the world.

From an environmental and social perspective, the continuity of extractive activities is in question. Resource depletion, the (in)capacity of ecosystems to absorb waste, and increased social opposition to their projects are among the limitations that call into question the sustainability of extractive companies. In the search for alternatives, the CLACSO Working Group 2019-2022 revived and revalued the concept of social metabolism, in the sense adopted by Karl Marx, which refers to the relationship or interaction between human beings and nature mediated through labor. Karl Marx was the first to introduce the concept of social metabolism into the fields of economics and history. 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 full human development.

Among those who have rescued the notion of metabolism in Latin America is Víctor Toledo (2013), who establishes that metabolic-social processes can be understood within the framework of the chain of the different phases of the use of nature carried out by human societies: appropriation (A), transformation (T), distribution (D), consumption (C) and excretion (E).

From our perspective, if these five phases are carried out with justice as the ecological-political principle, we would have a framework to implement production-consumption processes that overcome the economic-technical instrumentalism that underpinned metabolism studies based on Flow Material Accounting (FMA), which emerged especially in the late 70s (Fisher-Kolwasky 1998, Fisher-Kolwasky and Hútter, 1999).

It is therefore a matter of politicizing analyses of social metabolism, understanding that nature, its appropriation, and use are not neutral. As David Harvey (2007) points out, in countries like those in Latin America, capitalism feeds on dispossession, generally the deterritorialization of those who are expelled from their localities to favor transnational business promoted by national governments to maintain the dependence of Latin American economies on the external sector, where extractive enclaves are privileged, including mining and energy, as well as agricultural, tourism, and even urban areas.

The Social Metabolism and Environmental Justice Working Group aims to be a catalyst for counter-hegemonic, bottom-up development, epistemologically articulating natural and cultural diversity. We seek to offer a counter-hegemonic proposal to the patriarchal, centralist, and global primary export model. We make it clear that the extraction of natural resources (minerals, energy, agricultural products), valued solely in terms of their transactability in the international market, negates the diversity of the various extraction sites. It doesn't matter, for example, whether it's oil in the Amazon rainforest or offshore in the Atlantic or the Caribbean, nor the social conditions of the local communities associated with those extraction sites; what matters is the barrel of oil valued as a resource ("commodity"). The same applies to mineral and agricultural commodities, such as soybeans, a crop that can be cultivated in the Bolivian highlands, the Argentine and Uruguayan pampas, the Brazilian Cerrado, or the Colombian-Venezuelan plains. Thus, extractive activities transform biodiverse territories into enclaves projected outward, to the detriment of local production and consumption circuits, thereby fostering the fragmentation of societies, economies, territories, and culture. In decisions made by national governments, communities are generally excluded from decisions regarding the use of their ecological support systems.

Thinking about a metabolism geared towards overcoming environmental, social, political, economic, and cultural injustices is vital. The link between social metabolism and environmental justice is fundamental to many Latin American social movements, and it allows us to recover the political character that Marx and Engels intended when they formulated the concept. With a more political and sociological approach, based on notions such as cognitive capital, alienation, and territorial dispossession, we aim to identify, first and foremost, who wins and who loses in the phases that are linked from Appropriation (A) to Consumption (C) and that are reinforced, positively or negatively, by Excretion (E).

The social metabolism for environmental justice is embedded in a unique proposal that, by combining economic materialism with the demand for political change from the local level, strengthens the demands for an alternative, bottom-up development model. Starting from local realities, this model seeks to articulate actions that aim to influence the national and subregional spheres. We are convinced that this integrated vision of economy, ecology, society, and politics helps to empower the transformative praxis demanded by grassroots communities, their recognized local leaders, and the workers and entrepreneurs of local economies, who are tired of being excluded from the "development" plans formulated by central governments.

In the recent past, the Commodity Consensus was treated with leniency (Svampa, 2013), even among sectors that consider themselves progressive. Furthermore, the primary export model deepened during the last commodity boom (2004-2014) and intensified under ultraconservative governments such as those of Sebastián Piñera and Álvaro Uribe, as well as leftist governments like those of Bachelet and Correa.

These coincidences in the inertia, if not the obstacle, to the change that communities are demanding in the defense of their territories and to avoid falling further into impoverishment, force us to seek an alternative political leadership beyond the ossified traditional parties of both the right and the left in the region, one that embraces the transformation towards a regional economy based on the coupling of the ecosystem functions of biodiversity and the enhancement of the creative genius loci of Latin America, the fundamental supports for regional self-development.