Political ecology in Latin America: nature’s social reapropriation and the reinvention of territories

Abstract

The Latin American environmental thinking/action has been growing with/against the fundamentals from the Eurocentric rationality matrix. This tradition has in the present geopolitics the sustainable development as its new colonization/exploration form. With/against it, a creative and critical series of answers corresponds to this matrix, with the protagonism of peasants, indigenous peoples and African Americans, based in their local/regional struggles. In the post 1960 geopolitical context, these peoples obtain conditions to express themselves in an international scale, including the ecological and technological vectors. In the climate-botanical natural domains that, formed since the end of the last glaciation, evolved to our present geographies, the original populations developed a rich estate of knowledge, built in one with and not against the nature relationship that, like the biological megadiversity, is a patrimony of Latin America and mankind that must be taken into account in the public policies. In their new political/theoretical lexicon they speak about decolonization, interculturality, transmodernity; a juristic pluralism that respects the rights of the peoples, consuetudinary, not more only the law based on individual liberal principles and the private property. Besides the struggles involving water, mining and big development projects, a series of rich and original sustainability experiences emerge: Extractive Reservations, the Yasuny National Park; the constitutional Rights of Nature in Bolivia and Ecuador; the Plurinational State; the Buen Vivir, Suma Qamaña and Suma Kausay: ideas for a new political agenda, a rich natural and cultural estate that serve to us as landmarks for the reinvention of our existence. Accordingly, the Territory, Territorialities and Territorialization concepts allow to understand the relationships between nature and society, the kernel of the environmental problematic, revealing that it is the Nature’s social reapropriation that is at stake (Enrique Leff).