Political Ecology: a Latin American Perspective

Abstract

Political ecology is the field where power strategies are deployed to deconstruct the unsustainable modern rationality and to mobilize social actions in the globalised world for the construction of a sustainable future founded on the potentialities of nature and cultural creativity; in emancipatory thinking and political ethics to renew the meaning and sustainability of life. Political ecology roots theoretical deconstruction in the political arena; beyond recognizing cultural diversity, traditional knowledge and indigenous peoples’ rights, radical environmentalism contests the hegemonic unification power of the market as the ineluctable fate of humanity. Political ecology in Latin America is operating a similar procedure as the one achieved by Marx with Hegelian idealism, turning the philosophy of post-modernity (Heidegger, Levinas, Derrida) on the grounds of a political ontology: territorializing thinking on being, difference and otherness in an environmental rationality, rooted in an ontology of cultural diversity, a politics of difference and an ethics of otherness. Decolonizing knowledge and legitimizing other knowledges-savoirs-wisdoms liberate alternative ways of understanding reality, nature, human life and social relations opening up different paths to reconstruct human life in the planet.