Eco-Social Devastations: Political Ecology and Critical Latin American Perspectives✽

Andrea Lehner, Lina Álvarez Villareal, and Nicolas Lema Habash

Received: September 19, 2024 | Accepted: October 28, 2024 | Modified: November 18, 2024

https://doi.org/10.7440/res91.2025.01

Abstract | This introductory a rticle to the special issue underscores the urgent need to address eco-social devastation through the social sciences, adopting a critical-political perspective that has been foundational to political ecology since its emergence. It argues that the Latin American perspective not only contributes significantly to this field by proposing transformative alternatives grounded in the everyday practices of historically marginalized communities, but also by forging connections between community-based practices and academia. Moreover, it is fostering a new epistemology and rationality centered on the Earth rather than on humankind. Following a brief contextualization of the central tenets of political ecology as a framework for understanding the interplay between environment and society, the article highlights the most significant contributions of Latin American political ecology. It examines how this perspective uniquely frames and interprets the eco-social devastations currently afflicting the region. Lastly, it introduces the specific contributions of the articles included in the dossier, emphasizing their anti-anthropocentric approach and the shared concept of critique that binds them together.

Keywords | Latin American political ecology; political ecology; political ontologies; post-extractivism; rooted Latin American feminisms

Devastaciones ecosociales: ecología política y perspectivas críticas latinoamericanas

Resumen | Este artículo introductorio al número temático defiende la necesidad de abordar las devastaciones ecosociales desde las ciencias sociales a partir de una perspectiva crítico-política, como aquella que ha sido paradigmática de la ecología política desde su surgimiento. Se argumenta que la perspectiva latinoamericana no solo aporta significativamente a este campo, al proponer alternativas transformadoras que se han venido materializando en las prácticas cotidianas de los pueblos históricamente excluidos y al establecer vínculos entre prácticas comunitarias y la academia, sino que también está generando una nueva episteme y racionalidad centrada en la Tierra y no en el Hombre. Tras una breve contextualización de los compromisos centrales de la ecología política como enfoque específico para comprender las relaciones entre ambiente y sociedad, en el texto se destacan los aportes que se consideran más significativos de la ecología política latinoamericana y su forma diferencial de enmarcar y pensar las devastaciones ecosociales que afectan a la región actualmente. Por último, se presentan los aportes específicos de los artículos recogidos en el dossier, al enfocarse particularmente en la perspectiva anti-antropocéntrica y el concepto de crítica que los une.

Palabras clave | ecología política; ecología política latinoamericana; feminismos enraizados latinoamericanos; ontologías políticas; posextractivismos

Devastações ecossociais: ecologia política e perspectivas críticas latino-americanas

Resumo | Neste artigo introdutório ao número temático, defende-se a necessidade de abordar as devastações ecossociais a partir das ciências sociais em uma perspectiva crítico-política, como a que tem sido paradigmática da ecologia política desde seu surgimento. Argumenta-se que a perspectiva latino-americana não apenas contribui significativamente para esse campo ao propor alternativas transformadoras que vêm se materializando nas práticas cotidianas de povos historicamente excluídos e ao estabelecer vínculos entre as práticas comunitárias e a academia, mas também está gerando uma episteme e racionalidade centradas na Terra e não no Homem. Após uma breve contextualização dos compromissos centrais da ecologia política como uma abordagem específica para compreender as relações entre o meio ambiente e a sociedade, no texto, destacam-se as contribuições mais significativas da ecologia política latino-americana e sua forma diferenciada de enquadrar e pensar sobre as devastações ecossociais que afetam a região atualmente. Por fim, são apresentadas as contribuições específicas dos artigos reunidos no dossiê, com foco especial na perspectiva antiantropocêntrica e no conceito de crítica que os une.

Palavras-chave | ecologia política; ecologia política latino-americana; feminismos enraizados latino-americanos; ontologias políticas; pós-extrativismos

Introduction

Many voices have been pointing this out for decades, and it is now becoming increasingly difficult to refute: the current global order, anchored in an economic and political system oriented toward capital accumulation, is the primary cause of today’s planetary ecosocial devastation. This order operates through a cumulative dynamic that must constantly relaunch new forms of colonialism and violent tactics of frontier expansion. Only thus can it continue to operate. These tactics enable the appropriation of new “natural resources” and energy sources. Its mode of operation is self-destructive, as it comprises within itself a contradiction that undermines the very ecological conditions it needs to sustain itself over time. Its devastating impacts are not recent, nor are they experienced in the same way across bodies or regions of the world. They are increasingly intensified by the deep political inertia, which has failed to halt the machinery of ecosocial destruction and injustice. In the midst of this complex global situation, the agendas of many States, social movements, and even academia have prioritized the search for possible ways out of the current order, which today faces an uncertain future in various regions of the world. Social sciences are no exception.

While certain branches of the social sciences—particularly cultural geography, environmental history, agrarian and peasant studies within sociology, and environmental anthropology—have long focused on what is often referred to as environment-society relations, the task of understanding the complex, multicausal, and multi-scalar dynamics between societies and their natural surroundings has become central to the social sciences. Indeed, over the past forty years, social science research has increasingly brought into focus more-than-human entities that were once considered marginal: water systems, viruses, parasites, greenhouse gases, toxic substances, minerals, energy, and others.

Where many approaches once overlooked the interplay between the social and the natural, it has now become nearly impossible to think about the social dimension without also considering how it is shaped by environmental factors. Likewise, environmental, climate, or geological issues cannot be addressed without acknowledging the human imprint—especially that of certain societies—as a key force in reshaping and destabilizing ecological processes and conditions at local, regional, and global scales. The traditional division of labor between the natural sciences and the human and social sciences has had to be reconsidered in order to grasp the systemic global crises we now face with greater nuance, and to open space for dialogue across diverse perspectives.

The vital role of environmental and Earth system sciences1 in providing data, informing evidence-based decision-making, and proposing effective solutions is undeniable. However, the current eco-social devastation cannot be fully framed or understood through the lens of a positivist science that rests on the premise of political neutrality. These devastations are inherently political. Who benefits from them, and who bears their costs? How do certain environmental solutions become dominant over others? How can subaltern or oppressed groups build alternatives to these practices and centers of power? In what ways does the reconfiguration of access to natural resources generate new forms of eco-social conflict? What kinds of nature-society relationships are imposed as certain raw materials enter global markets?

Ignoring these questions leads to solutions that overlook the historical and material roots of eco-social devastation and fail to address the persistent inequalities that shape it. This lack of political analysis, common in forms of apolitical environmentalism that refrain from challenging the current global economic and political order, ultimately reproduces the same colonial, patriarchal, and geopolitically asymmetric dynamics. Market-based ‘green’ solutions often perpetuate deeply unjust distributions of social and environmental costs and benefits across hemispheres, regions, nations, and generations—patterns that have persisted for the past 500 years. Any alternative to the prevailing model that does not take into account the political dimension of today’s eco-social crises will fall short of being structural and will continue to perpetuate the destructive dynamics that have brought the planet to its current state of ecological and climatic instability and insecurity.

Even within the social sciences, there is a tendency to address the ecological and planetary crisis without examining the power relations that have sustained and perpetuated the machinery of destruction underpinning the current global order. These approaches often overlook structural material causes or fail to engage with the (neo)colonial, patriarchal, and class-based dimension of today’s planetary crisis. Disregarding these dimensions leads to interpretations of eco-social devastation that treat climate vulnerability, unequal exposure to its effects and so-called natural disasters as if they were the result of chance, rather than the product of the historical configuration of the global political economy. This uncritical orientation toward environmental problems has deeply depoliticizing effects, which results in an inability to propose structural, critical, and emancipatory solutions.

What follows is a defense of the need for a critical and political approach, which defines the orientation of this special issue on eco-social devastation. Our aim is to highlight why the critical perspective emerging from Latin America offers a vital contribution to understanding these challenges.

A Brief Contextualization of Political Ecology

This special issue is situated within the interdisciplinary field of political ecology, a domain that continues to expand and diversify. Political ecology emerged in the 1970s, although it draws on much older intellectual lineages. It developed in response to the ways environmental sciences at the time understood ecological problems. Amid growing ecological awareness and recognition of the destructive effects of industrial societies on ecosystems, environmental sciences adopted functionalist and adaptive frameworks in their approaches to environmental management and natural resource use.

At the same time, other strands of environmentalism were modelling neo-Malthusian scenarios that predicted resource scarcity if exponential demographic and material growth were not curbed. These projections warned that scarcity would worsen due to population growth in developing countries, which were portrayed as placing increasing pressure on resources and ecosystems (Commoner 1971; Ehrlich and Ehrlich 1970, 1972; Hardin 1968; Meadows et al. 1972). This form of environmentalism identified several key culprits: industrial techno-scientific modernization, which generated pollutants and emissions that degraded ecosystems, contributed to global warming and harmed human health; overpopulation in specific regions of the world; and the overexploitation of land and natural resources to sustain industrial development, often attributed to a lack of ecological awareness.

Many geographers, cultural ecologists, and environmental anthropologists have criticized these interpretive frameworks for their overly simplistic analyses. By presenting ecological devastation in largely apolitical—or cautiously political—terms, such approaches failed to consider the deep interconnections between economics and ecology, the so-called twin sciences of the oikos. Crucially, they overlooked the historical legacy of colonial capitalist accumulation and the production relations that emerged as peripheral states were integrated into the global market system. Without acknowledging this history, these perspectives were ill-equipped to analyze how environmental crises are embedded in the structure of the modern world-system (Wallerstein 1974), which is marked by a highly unequal global division of labor. This configuration entrenched sharp asymmetries between core, semi-peripheral, and peripheral states, with the former maintaining economic and political dominance. In response, dependency theorists such as Amin (1976), Cardoso and Faletto (1970) and Frank (1966, 1967) rejected the modernization theories that underpinned postwar development policy.

Emerging largely from Anglo-American geography departments, the canonical corpus of political ecology grew out of this fertile terrain of critique, offering more radical frameworks for understanding environmental problems. A foundational work in this tradition is Silent Violence (1983) by Michael J. Watts, which explores the links between drought and famine in West Africa. Drawing on Marxist political economy and agrarian studies, Watts examines how patterns of social inequality—combined with climatic disruptions—shape the ways different classes of peasants manage environmental risk. His analysis reveals that famines are less a consequence of nature than of the internal dynamics of society, political economy, and global markets. Equally influential are the works of Piers Blaikie (1985) and his collaboration with Harold Brookfield (1987) on development policy and land degradation, as well as the research of Susanna Hecht and Alexander Cockburn (1989) on deforestation in Brazil.

Geographers set out to develop a form of Marxism rooted in spatial analysis, enriching their frameworks with insights from dependency theory, uneven development, and unequal exchanges within global commodity chains. This geographic Marxism became a cornerstone of political ecology’s theoretical foundation. Their analyses revealed how globalization and market forces were tearing apart specific regions, reshaping class and social relations in developing countries. These same forces were also driving ecological degradation—including soil erosion, deforestation, and the loss of food sovereignty.

Building on Marx’s insights, these scholars advanced the notion of the second contradiction of capitalism, which refers to capitalism’s tendency to undermine its own conditions of production—namely, nature and human labor (O’Connor 2001). Through a dialectical lens, they exposed how capitalism erodes both human autonomy and ecological balance by subordinating human needs to market demands and by operating as a system that relentlessly exceeds all limits in pursuit of profit (Gorz 1994). Their work also traced the rapid transformation of social relations as capital expanded into new territories within a postcolonial context.

While early political ecology was clearly rooted in a Marxist political economy, it gradually began to draw on alternative ways of producing knowledge, such as feminist and postcolonial epistemologies. Feminist political ecology, in particular, emphasized that power relations operate across multiple axes and categories of social difference, resulting in differentiated experiences of environmental costs and benefits. Although initially focused on gender, this body of work expanded to engage more broadly with how identities shape the relationship between society and the environment.

Political ecology is best understood not as a single discipline, but as an approach to studying environment–society relations that brings together multiple fields and perspectives. Its most significant contribution lies in its ability to challenge and expand dominant frameworks for understanding how societies relate to their environments. Central to this approach is the effort to develop alternative, counter-hegemonic explanations of these relationships, grounded in political-economic analysis and the recognition that they are shaped by power relations operating at multiple scales (Perreault, Bridge, and McCarthy 2015). By emphasizing the political dimensions of these dynamics and the asymmetries of power that structure them, political ecology focuses on the many socio-environmental struggles and conflicts that arise around access to livelihoods and resources. It also critically examines how the commodification of nature affects the ways in which people engage with the natural world. Conflicts emerge from divergent ways of inhabiting, conceptualizing, accessing, and reshaping what the environment provides—conflicts that, in turn, produce far-reaching environmental consequences.

Political ecology also takes a clear stance in support of those who are marginalized or dispossessed in struggles over access to and control of so-called natural resources (Perreault, Bridge, and McCarthy 2015). This explicit political commitment distinguishes political ecology from more conventional approaches, which often remain tied to the ideal of an objective and neutral science.

Among the core commitments of contemporary political ecology is its emphasis on lived practices and on the ways people think, feel and relate to the natural environment. It recognizes that these struggles and power configurations are best understood through direct engagement with the vital and spiritual conditions being threatened. Equally important is its insistence on making explicit the standpoint from which one speaks. That is, the epistemic situatedness that shapes how nature-society relations are framed and enacted.

In recent decades, political ecology has begun to question its own canon (Sultana 2021), placing greater emphasis on alternative forms of knowledge that offer a reversed lens on the political ecology developed in the Global North. This shift seeks to dismantle entrenched habits of thought and dominant ways of framing ecological problems. The fact that the canon was established in the North reflects the broader power dynamics that shape academic production—dynamics that mirror the same unequal relations governing production between the Global South and North. This has led to a diversification of political ecology, encouraging a critical reassessment of its biases and, more importantly, an acknowledgment that it cannot be fully understood without addressing the colonial dimension of the modern world-system, which continues to shape contemporary realities.

Latin American political ecology has played a vital role in broadening the field and contributing to its diversification. One major contribution lies in its grounding in the region’s social struggles, which has fostered the production of knowledge committed to confronting environmental injustices. This approach extends beyond academic and disciplinary boundaries, recognizing the transformative power of reexistence practices among local communities and affirming their full status as epistemic and political agents. It emphasizes the importance of thinking both from and with these communities (Martínez-Alier 2004). Another defining feature is its deliberate rejection of any pretense of neutrality. Instead, it openly locates its standpoint within a layered geo-historical context shaped by a plurality of worlds—and rooted in what Alimonda (2017, 41) describes as the “catastrophic trauma of conquest and the integration into the international system in a subordinate and colonial position.”2 From this Latin American perspective, and drawing on the diversity of its peoples and geographies, critical ecopolitical thought interrogates the dynamics of ecosocial devastation across regional, national, and international scales. Crucially, it also puts forward viable alternatives, alternatives that are not speculative, but grounded in historical and ongoing experiences across Latin America. The following section explores this distinctive approach and highlights some of its most important contributions.

Rooted Political Ecologies: The Latin American Option

Across Latin America, responses to socioecological devastation have been diverse, emerging from a wide range of epistemic actors. These include Indigenous peoples, Black communities, peasant movements, and women’s groups, all of whom have shaped distinct identities and demands. These groups have also forged alliances—sometimes marked by tension and contradiction—both among themselves and with academia, in a collective effort to resist the destructive forces that unravel the fabric of life and threaten the material and symbolic conditions of their existence.

One of the most striking features of Latin American political ecology is its political- existential dimension. Its demands and strategies—both theoretical and political—are not aimed at something external to human life that is simply worth protecting3. Instead, they are rooted in an urgent concern to defend what is lived, felt, and constructed through everyday practices as part of one’s own being. This defense is intimately tied to the identity and autonomy of communities and their members. This is why terms like territorio- cuerpo-tierra (territory-body-earth) and sentipensar (feeling-thinking) are frequently used in these perspectives. They express a profound sense of interdependence and continuity between human beings and the other entities of the cosmos that make up a community.

These struggles are deeply shaped by Latin America’s history and by the ways in which these historical actors have embodied and critically reflected on that history from their own territories and lived experiences. Any account of the region’s contributions to addressing the current ecosocial crisis must therefore acknowledge the long-standing structures of capitalist, colonial and patriarchal domination. These structures have defined Latin America through the extraction without retribution of its resources, goods, and knowledge, but also through creative forms of resistance.

This history begins with the European incursion in 1492 and continues into the present, despite independence movements and the formation of republics. The fiction of race remains a powerful organizing force. It operates as a mechanism of power that assigns social roles and types of labor to populations based on origin or skin color and seeks to naturalize the exploitation of their labor and territories (Quijano 2000a, 2000b).

In this context, Latin American political ecology reorients the analytical frame—or in Frantz Fanon’s (2002) terms, slightly stretches the frame—of the northern, critical-Marxist tradition of political ecology (Foster 1999; Gorz 1980; O’Connor 2001). Its central concern is not only capitalism, but coloniality as the system of domination that made capitalism possible and sustains its destructive regime. This regime draws on and entangles multiple, heterogeneous modes of production.

Drawing on a vigilant memory (Eboussi Boulaga 1977)—one that recalls the long history of violence and reexistence in Abya Yala—Latin American critical thought makes explicit the continuity between past and present mechanisms of domination. It also acknowledges shifts in the intensity of exploitation and the emergence of new actors and power structures that complicate the political landscape. Through this lens, it challenges the assumptions embedded in certain uncritical ecological discourses, particularly the idea that today’s ecological crisis is a problem of humanity considered as a homogeneous entity (as suggested by the much-contested concept of the Anthropocene).

The history of modernity-coloniality reveals that the root of the problem lies in the dominant or hegemonic modern project (excepting alternative, critical modernities), a project grounded in domination (Adorno and Horkheimer 1947; Alimonda 2017), death (Merchant 1980; Mies 1986), and the coloniality of nature (Escobar 2007). This history cannot be told without reference to the enslavement of racialized peoples, such as those forced to work in the plantation monocultures of the Caribbean and Brazil from the seventeenth century onward, or to the exploitation of Indigenous populations in the extraction of quinine, rubber, guano, gold, and silver across the Americas.

This history, still unfolding in the present, reveals that although ecological devastation affects the entire planet, its effects are not felt equally everywhere. Nor does it operate through the same mechanisms of power or pursue the same objectives. In Latin America, socioecological destruction unfolds through extreme forms of violence. These include the objectification, torture, and murder of women’s bodies and those of sexual dissidents (Cabnal 2019; Segato 2016); the assassination of environmental leaders; the forced displacement of entire communities from their territories; and the poisoning and diversion of water sources vital to their survival, all in service of agribusiness and extractive interests. In short, these are practices of extreme cruelty that give rise to what Oslender (2008) describes as geographies of terror. Such mechanisms not only ravage the more-than-human world but also threaten the survival of peoples whose relational ways of life stand in direct opposition to the historical project of capital accumulation (Segato 2021).

Latin American critical thought, in rooting present-day struggles in those of the past, does not dwell solely on the region’s legacy of domination and extermination. On the contrary, and this is perhaps its most important dimension, it critically draws on the threads of its own histories and traditions to collectively propose alternative ways of life. These alternatives include other modes of production, decision-making, and knowledge creation that aim enable regeneration. In Colombia’s Black communities, for example, the term ancestrality refers to the mandate passed down from earlier generations and preserved in the memory of elders—“to live by another model of life, another worldview” (Escobar 2014, 74). This creative and productive dimension is what gives Latin American ecosocial thought its transformative power. The alternatives it puts forward do not emerge from abstract reasoning or utopian visions, but from grounded practices that have existed in the past amid conditions similar to those of today, or that persist in the present. By making these practices visible, they can enter the realm of what is believable and desirable, demonstrating that another world is indeed possible, because it has already existed or is being realized (Escobar 2018). What we see, then, is a rich array of creative proposals that revive long-standing knowledge around food sovereignty, water care and harvesting, forest regeneration, and more.

In distancing itself from a strictly Marxist political ecology, Latin American critical thought offers a more layered reading of social struggles across the region. This shift not only reconfigures how these movements are understood locally, but also opens up new pathways for interpreting similar dynamics elsewhere, including the broader ecological crisis we face today. A powerful example of this reorientation is the concept of territory as world, a notion deeply rooted in the demands of Indigenous and Black communities throughout the continent. Authors such as Carlos Porto-Gonçalves and Arturo Escobar have clearly understood this worldview. According to them, these struggles reflect a unique relationship with place, one that cannot be reduced to a mere struggle for land as a means of material subsistence.

While acknowledging that material dimension, these communities emphasize a symbolic understanding of territory, one infused with political, spiritual, and ethical meanings. Their ties to place are shaped through daily practices of reciprocity between humans and other beings, forming collectivities that conceive their identities as inseparable from the territory they inhabit. This is why Porto-Gonçalves (2001) argues that, when referring to these collectivities, it is more accurate to speak of defense of territory rather than a struggle for land (as a means of subsistence). As Marisol de la Cadena (2015, 97) explains, territory in this context refers to a “place of existence, actively shaped and made meaningful through material and symbolic practices of care—not exploitation.”

Because these struggles carry an existential dimension that extends beyond the human, Escobar (2014, 75) contends that Latin American communities are not only resisting capital and asserting their rights—they are defending life itself. This layer of struggle has been described by scholars like Mario Blaser (2014), Marisol de la Cadena (2015), and Escobar (2014) as ontological. It is this ontological dimension—focused not solely on the human but on broader worlds of being—that stands as one of Latin America’s most important contributions to political ecology, as will be discussed later.

We want to highlight the contributions of three key strands of Latin American thought: post-extractivism, political ontology, and rooted Latin American feminisms. These perspectives stand out not only for the ecological and political relevance of their proposals, but also for the way they have been shaped from the vantage point of the condemned. They emerge through relational dialogues that connect grassroots territorial struggles with some of the most critical theoretical debates taking place within academia (Escobar 2014, 2017; Gutiérrez Aguilar 2017; Segato 2013)4.

Together, these lines of thought have carved out space for a new episteme and a different kind of social rationality. This rationality is no longer centered on the figure of Man or the authority of the expert (Escobar 2014, 2017; Foucault 1968). Instead, it is grounded in the land as a relational field of life and in everyday forms of knowledge that sustain and regenerate life itself.

Post-extractivisms

Extractivism in Latin America has undergone significant shifts since the 1990s. To understand its current form, it must be situated within the broader context of the region’s development strategies, which were shaped during the post-Second World War period commonly referred to as the era of development. This era is often traced back to Point Four of the program announced by Harry Truman in his 1949 inaugural address: “We must embark on a bold new program for making the benefits of our scientific advances and industrial progress available for the improvement and growth of underdeveloped areas” (Esteva 2001, 68). By labeling half of the world’s population as underdeveloped, this agenda established a global classification system that divided the world into developed (wealthy) and underdeveloped (poor) nations. It legitimized a project in which countries with industrial progress and scientific advancement were held up as the model to emulate for those considered behind. Although framed as a path to development, this project was in fact a modern reworking of the colonial enterprise. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, it was repackaged as the era of globalization (Sachs 2019). Its prevailing idea of development promoted a prescriptive notion of material and social progress as a linear trajectory from a less advanced state to a more advanced one. Countries seen as leaders in this march of progress were those that had reached a certain level of technical and economic development. This implied that there was only one valid path for so-called lagging nations to follow.

Through policies like foreign debt and the push to attract international investment, Latin America was steered toward extractivism as a pathway out of underdevelopment. This shift was framed as part of a broader imperative for countries in the Global South to catch up during the development era. In the 1990s, in their bid to bring in foreign capital, many states—regardless of whether they were neoliberal or progressive—entered the extractive boom, also known as the commodities consensus (Gudynas 2015). This dynamic reinforced a new international division of labor in which developed nations relocated the early, most damaging phases of extractive activity beyond their own borders (Svampa 2011, 2). While prioritizing environmental protection at home, they outsourced high-impact operations to peripheral regions.

The result was a re-primarization of Latin American economies (Gudynas 2015), accompanied by widespread deregulation of environmental and labor standards, as well as violations of constitutional and democratic rights to benefit transnational corporations. Most states accepted these trade-offs, aligning with a vision of development equated with economic growth. Sacrifices at the local level were framed as unfortunate but necessary costs for the supposed greater good.

Since the 1990s, Latin America has faced enormous challenges tied to the rapid exploitation and extraction of natural resources. These have ranged from fossil fuels like gas, oil, and coal, to lithium and other minerals, as well as agro-industrial, forestry, and fishing products. The intensification of extractive violence has led to a surge in socio-environmental conflicts across the region. In Colombia alone, by 2022, there were more than 160 active socio-environmental conflicts linked to large-scale mining, energy, agriculture, and infrastructure projects (González Perafán 2022). That same year, nearly nine out of ten killings of environmental defenders worldwide occurred in Latin America, with Colombia recording the highest number of cases, according to the NGO Global Witness (2023). A significant portion of this violence is directly connected to the socio-ecological tensions generated by both legal and illegal forms of extractivism.

The exponential rise in extractive violence and the many socio-ecological injustices it leaves in its wake have sparked important reflections within Latin American political ecology. These reflections unpack the paradoxes of extractivism in the region and reveal how its promises of progress and development have failed to materialize. One of the key contributions of Latin American political ecology has been to expose the undeniable failures of extractive policies, opening the door to the possibility of a post-extractivist future.

It is worth outlining some of what Acosta (2016) identifies as the main pathologies of extractivism. One major issue is the weakening of local productive systems, as economies have become overly dependent on a handful of mineral enclaves. At the same time, large-scale extractive projects have radically reshaped territories, stripping communities of their territorial claims and imposing market-driven views of nature that these communities do not share. In the process of granting licenses to these megaprojects, human rights and democratic principles, such as the right to prior consultation, are often violated. Meanwhile, the promises of development remain unfulfilled. The communities most severely affected by extractivism have seen few, if any, economic or material benefits. Instead, wealth tends to concentrate in the hands of local elites or transnational corporations. This model of maldevelopment (Svampa and Viale 2014) has also failed to improve social indicators. On the contrary, it has contributed to what Acosta (2016, 269) describes as “the expansion and consolidation of the global capitalist system,” primarily benefiting capitalist centers through what Harvey (2005) calls accumulation by dispossession—a process of enriching a small global elite by seizing the resources of others.

Today, new forms of extractivism are emerging across the region, this time aligned with the push for green and inclusive growth promoted by revamped versions of sustainable development. This new wave of extractivism is tied to the energy transition and its demand for fresh mineral resources (Bringel and Svampa 2023). As a result, there has been a surge in demand for lithium, copper, and even for balsa wood, which is used in wind turbine blades. We are also witnessing the rise of mechanisms such as voluntary carbon markets, driven by initiatives like REDD+ (the UN program for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation). All of these are emerging forms of extractivism justified by the energy transition, which seeks to decarbonize economies without challenging the deeper logic of economic growth itself.

What has come to be known as post-extractivism in the region refers to a vision that fundamentally challenges the core assumptions of the development paradigm rooted in economic growth. Closely tied to post-development thinking, post-extractivism not only exposes the failures and harmful effects of the development era, it also opens the door to alternatives. It emphasizes the range of livelihoods that have long existed in the region, offering ways out of the current crisis of maldevelopment. At its core, post-extractivism asserts that today’s global ecological and social devastation cannot be addressed using the same market-driven dynamics that created it. We are facing a structural crisis that demands a deep reordering of how we relate to one another, across regions, and with the more-than-human world. As the editors of the Post-Development Dictionary point out, Latin American post-extractivism resonates with alternative efforts emerging around the globe, where “people are experimenting with how to meet their needs in ways that assert the rights and dignity of Earth and its precarious inhabitants” (Kothari et al. 2019, xxiii). These practices carve out spaces for critical and emancipatory possibilities: forms of re-existence in the midst of ecological collapse, land grabs, resource wars, and extractive violence. All of these dispossession strategies point to the same conclusion: the development model must be abandoned. It has only led to the erosion of rural livelihoods, rising urban poverty, and growing alienation and displacement (Kothari et al. 2019).

Across all continents today, grassroots resistance movements are imagining post- development and post-extractivist futures. These alternatives are not about reform; they aim for radical transformation. At their core is a rejection of the very notion of economic growth that reduces life to natural capital and essential economic assets, fueling the commodification of every dimension of existence. They also seek to dismantle the patriarchal and racialized logic underpinning capitalism. In Latin America, proposals such as buen vivir—a plural concept with various interpretations that has even been enshrined in the constitutions of Bolivia and Ecuador—illustrate this shift. Other visions include the defense of commons and food sovereignty. These are bold efforts to forge new ways of living and relating to the Earth, with profound transformative potential and the power to challenge the extractivist development paradigm.

Political Ontology

Emerging from what has been called the ontological turn of the 1980s, political ontology challenges the nature-culture divide and the multiculturalist notion that there is a single, shared nature experienced through multiple cultural lenses. Developed by thinkers such as Mario Blaser (Argentina), Marisol de la Cadena (Peru), and Arturo Escobar (Colombia), political ontology explores socioecological conflicts not simply as disputes over resources or power, but as struggles over the very constitution of worlds—a dimension that earlier strands of political ecology had largely overlooked. Rather than assuming a single, universal reality interpreted in different ways, political ontology posits that material and symbolic practices generate multiple realities or worlds. Understanding these worlds—and the power relations through which they are historically and geographically shaped—is essential to fully grasp the nature of socioecological conflict.

To do this, political ontology examines three constitutive levels of a world. The first concerns what a group considers to be an existing entity. For instance, in modern societies, the individual and the laws of the market are regarded as real entities. By contrast, for many Indigenous, peasant, and Black communities, the human being is not seen as a discrete and individual entity, but as part of a living community imbued with an energetic or spiritual dimension.

The second level refers to the concrete, everyday practices through which groups enact the existence—or nonexistence—of entities. Take, for example, how modern societies engage in a series of economic practices that treat nature as an object or resource to be exploited—such as companies that extract gold intensively from mines, or monoculture plantations. This stands in contrast to Andean Indigenous communities, who regularly feed the earth because they view it as a living being on which their lives depend.

The third level involves the symbolic narratives that generate and sustain the perceived existence of certain entities. In liberal societies, for example, a foundational myth is Hobbes’s Leviathan, grounded in an anthropology of atomized individuals and the fiction of the social contract. In contrast, in societies not fully captured by hegemonic modernity, there are stories that trace the origin of human beings to water or other natural sources—understood as sentient and rational beings.

Political ontology suggests that the creation of a world—or of what is considered real—within any group is always shaped by power dynamics. These tensions do not just arise between different worlds (inter-worlds); they also exist within a given world (intra-worlds). When different ontologies or world-making practices come into contact, they often clash—not merely because of disagreement, but because each is trying to sustain its own way of being against the presence of others.

In this view, social and ecological conflicts are not just about competing interests or perspectives—they are about the coexistence of different ways of knowing and being that give rise to entirely distinct realities. Rather than assuming one shared world interpreted through various cultural lenses (as a more epistemological approach might suggest), these scholars argue that multiple worlds are constantly being created. These worlds are brought into being through daily practices and stories that define who and what exists, and how those beings should relate to one another.

Political ontology, then, operates on at least two levels. First, it rejects the idea that social groups or struggles are grounded in some fixed, ahistorical essence. Instead, drawing on poststructuralist thinking, it views reality as fluid—shaped and reshaped through power relations. Second, it is political in that it does not pretend to be neutral. Its aim is to critically expose how certain ontologies can be profoundly destructive, giving rise to violent and life-threatening practices—especially for specific geographies and communities. At the same time, it seeks to open space for alternative ways of relating, pointing toward what the Zapatistas have called a pluriverse: a world made of many worlds.

In contemporary societies, scholars identify two broad types of political ontologies. The first are relational ontologies, grounded in the idea that nothing exists prior to the relationships that bring it into being. Life, in this view, is marked by radical interdependence, where the modern divide between nature and culture simply does not apply. The second is the dualist ontology of modernity, which assumes that entities exist independently of their relations. Relational ontologies open the door to a pluriverse—a world of many worlds—where transformation is not only possible but imaginable. Dualist ontology, by contrast, imposes a single world (Law 2015), built through occupation, exclusion, and the erasure of relational worlds. More insidiously, it also undermines the very ability to perceive other ways of living beyond the dominant one—what Escobar calls de-futuring (desfuturización). This ongoing clash between ontologies means that those committed to relational worlds are often forced to develop strategies of re-existence (Albán Achinte 2006) in the face of extreme violence.

Rooted Latin American Feminisms

In the face of ecosocial devastation, Latin American feminisms offer some of the most refined and radical proposals today. They frame problems, analyze social realities, and propose solutions from a sphere historically excluded from academic discourse: the realm of life’s ‘regeneration,’ built and sustained daily in both rural and urban spaces. While Latin America is home to a plurality of critical feminist perspectives, they all share a common point of departure—the long histories of women from historically racialized groups, including Black women, Indigenous women, and impoverished peasant women. From this standpoint, they not only expose the violent systems of domination to which these women have been subjected, but also highlight their capacity to preserve, renew, and collectively create technologies of sociability (Segato 2018) that can inspire new pathways for liberation and for nurturing the fabric of life (Álvarez Villarreal 2023).

For example, Adriana Guzmán and Julieta Paredes (2014) describe community feminism as a social theory that seeks to explain the root causes of the crises confronting humanity and to propose viable alternatives for overcoming them. Similarly, Segato emphasizes that gender is an entry point for reading society as a whole, insisting that “we women are offering a proposal to the world, to the history of humanity—and not just to women […] it is a universal project, a radical shift in direction” (Segato, Karamanos and Montero 2023).

This shift in direction calls for placing the symbolic and material conditions for regenerating life—both human and more-than-human—at the center. It means rethinking how we relate to others and reshaping the way we feel, act, and connect across those relationships. Rather than relying on utopias grounded in abstract reason or waiting for a new societal model to replace the current one—both common approaches within some leftist traditions, whether rooted in technological progress or nineteenth-century revolutionary ideals—feminist thinking points us elsewhere. It suggests returning to everyday practices of rural and urban communities, past and present, as a way to unsettle (Gutiérrez 2016) dominant structures and create space for different ways of organizing society (Segato 2021).

Indigenous feminists, in turn, have emphasized that violence against women functions as a mechanism of power and domination directed not only at women but at the broader communal fabric and at life itself. The reverse is also true: violence against territory—such as extractivism—directly harms or disrupts entire communities, affecting women, children, and men alike. In this context, the concepts of terricide and territory-body-earth represent major contributions to political thought. They open possibilities for rethinking and transforming the very foundations of modern law. Both frameworks make clear that patriarchal-colonial violence is intrinsically linked to violence against the land and against the living spaces of its victims.

Indigenous community feminisms develop their analyses from the perspective of women’s bodies, and more profoundly, from what Maya Xinca feminist Lorena Cabnal has termed territory-body-earth. This concept refers to a living, relational entity: the body, shaped through the everyday practices rooted in a specific place—a territory—historically marked and constructed. That territory, in turn, is part of a cosmos that precedes and sustains it materially, symbolically, and spiritually—not only for survival, but for living well: the Earth5. From this ontological idea stems an epistemological claim: that to understand history, one must walk the territory, learn to read the landscape, and recognize that our bodies carry the marks of that landscape. The relationship to territory is thus an expression of a relational political ontology (Escobar 2014), shaped through the history of these communities, who have come to understand themselves as part of the fabric of life. This ontological claim carries strong epistemological and political implications: it is through lived, embodied experience that one can read history—an experience that is not solely individual but reveals and gives access to a “web of historical-structural oppressions” (Cabnal 2019, 113).

Extractivist economies that poison rivers, pollute the air, degrade soils, and destroy forests are understood as practices that also poison, sicken, and destroy human bodies. This is because the human body is not merely dependent on earth—it is earth. At the same time, violations against women’s bodies are direct assaults on the land and territories, as they unravel the communal fabric and disrupt the transmission of traditional knowledge. Defending the body and earth, then, becomes a multidimensional struggle. Within this struggle, the defense and recovery of the territory-body-earth is essential for healing the wounds of violence inscribed in bodily memory. The daily practices of honoring feeling, reconstructing ancestral memory, and creating safe spaces for strengthening bonds among women—and between women and the environment—are fundamental strategies of emancipation (Cabnal 2019). At the same time, the concept of territory-body-earth, as developed by Indigenous feminisms, seeks to place at the center a political responsibility to transform the deep causes of domination—one that goes beyond the human realm and becomes a “cosmogonic responsibility” (Cabnal 2019, 114), that is, a responsibility to the web of life in its entirety.

By grounding their perspective, Latin American feminisms echo the concerns of Northern critical feminisms (Haraway 1988), which emphasize the value of situated knowledge as a path to greater objectivity—one that should not be mistaken for the illusion of neutrality. But there is something distinct about critical feminisms in Latin America: their situatedness is rooted in geohistorical struggles against both racial and patriarchal oppression, while also anchored in a living territory understood as more-than-human—capable of shaping and guiding social practices.

The notion of terricide, in turn, designates as a crime those acts committed against the earth by states in alliance with private corporations. Moira Millán (2020) explains that such acts destroy the territories where Indigenous peoples live and affect three vital dimensions of their existence. The first is the material dimension, encompassing the environment—rivers, mountains, and people—harmed by extractive industries. The second involves perception, referring to the energetic forces that underlie life and are disrupted when sacred places are occupied or destroyed. The third is cultural, as the dispossession of land severs communities from the ability to maintain and pass down their knowledge. Terricide introduces a non-anthropocentric legal category in which the Earth, and not only human beings, is recognized as a victim. It also expands legal responsibility beyond states to include political and economic actors, particularly transnational corporations. Rooted in Indigenous worldviews, this concept holds potential for global application in confronting the current crisis of socio-environmental destruction.

To conclude, it is worth summarizing some of the most compelling contributions of Latin American political ecology highlighted in this section. One key contribution is its critique of the colonial-capitalist model as a force that dismantles social systems organized around, and sustained through, interdependent relationships with the regeneration of the land. Equally important is its effort to connect local and regional issues to global dynamics of domination. Its critical tradition also foregrounds the persistence of colonial structures of power well into the era of development. Its approach to the relationship between center and periphery creates space for thinking through interconnection, differentiated impacts, and the role of economic systems in environmental destruction—while also recognizing differentiated responsibilities without falling into simplistic binaries. Finally, this body of thought has proven fertile ground for conceptual innovation: these are not simply new terms, but expressions of alternative epistemologies, grammars, and discursive regimes that destabilize the foundations of the dominant system and begin to open paths toward other possible worlds.

Cross-cutting Themes Emerging in the Dossier

The articles gathered in this special issue of the Revista de Estudios Sociales reflect the range of conceptual threads embedded in its title: “Ecosocial Devastations: Critical Perspectives from Latin America.” Two of the central notions emphasized in this dossier—ecosocial devastation and Latin American critique—do not have fixed or uniform meanings. Instead, the contributions in this issue collectively present a diverse array of approaches through which these concepts are explored and developed.

The concept of ecosocial devastation encompasses a range of perspectives and diagnoses. The various forms that extractivism has taken across Latin America have produced brutal modes of devastation throughout the region, with different expressions depending on the specific territory. From a theoretical perspective particularly suited to addressing these issues, Parra-Ayala (in this dossier) engages in a fruitful dialogue with European critical theory, outlining a philosophical background that helps explain how the advance of extractivism stems from a framework that conceptualizes nature-body and the human being not merely as separate entities, but as situated within a relationship of domination.

Elsewhere in this dossier, Nova-Laverde, Piñeros Fuentes, and Rojas Mora show how the logic of extractivism manifests in the creation of sacrifice zones on the peripheries of Latin American cities—spaces where the possibility of a dignified life is sacrificed in the name of supposed benefits for the urban population as a whole. Roa García et al. analyze how extractivist practices also take the form of environmental degradation in territories where the exploitation of soil and subsoil resources is left in the hands of powerful national and international corporations that override the rights and voices of the communities who inhabit those areas. Similarly, Martínez Suárez explores how such corporations often negotiate with select community actors or representatives, disregarding the resistance and collective agency of the broader population. Ortiz Robles et al. demonstrate how the extractivist logic also unfolds through more subtle mechanisms—such as real estate speculation, green tourism, and even environmental conservation itself. While each article documents and critiques distinct forms of ecosocial devastation linked to different modes of environmental extractivism, one unifying concept that emerges from these analyses is that of violence. In this dossier, violence appears both explicitly (Villegas and Castrillón Gallego) and implicitly, as a conceptual thread running through the idea of ecosocial devastation itself. It emphasizes the entanglement of the natural and the social, and draws attention to the suffering inflicted upon the populations inhabiting these territories.

If the concept of ecosocial devastation encompasses a wide range of perspectives and diagnoses—many of them linked to the violence of extractivism—the second key idea in this context, the Latin American critical perspective, also takes multiple forms. This critical perspective can be understood as the counterpart to the idea of inseparability or interconnection between the natural and the social embedded in the concept of ecosocial devastation. What emerges, whether implicitly or explicitly, is not only a critique or diagnosis, but also a move away from analyses concerned solely with human life. The focus shifts toward a relational approach to understanding ecosocial problems. This non-anthropocentric orientation opens up diverse ways of interpreting what critique entails and how it reshapes the relationship between the human-social and the natural world.

From a theoretical standpoint, the various perspectives taken up by the articles emphasize the production of situated knowledge from Latin America. They highlight key contributions from Latin American relational ontology—often grounded in work with local communities in specific territories (Ortiz Robles et al.; Villegas and Castrillón Gallego, both in this dossier)—as well as from political ecology developed within the region (Nova-Laverde, Piñeros Fuentes, and Rojas Mora; Ortiz Robles et al., , both in this dossier), and from various strands of Latin American feminist thought (Martínez Suárez, in this dossier). In several cases—such as the studies on sacrifice zones in Bogotá (Nova-Laverde, Piñeros Fuentes, and Rojas Mora, in this dossier); on water saturation problems caused by tourism and green speculation in Patagonia (Ortiz Robles et al., in this dossier); and on the destruction of community knowledge systems in La Guajira due to soil and subsoil exploitation (Roa García et al., in this dossier)—the conceptual approach adopted not only highlights the mechanisms of devastation, but also the forms of resistance enacted by local communities. These include the emergence of counter-knowledges and practices of anti-violence that confront extractivist violence. Across these works, a relational methodology offers a way out of an anthropocentric and instrumental logic in which nature is treated merely as something to be exploited for human ends.

Similarly, in some cases—still grounded in theoretical inquiry, but always drawing from knowledges embedded in the communal fabrics of populations affected by devastation—what is proposed is not only the application of knowledge produced on the continent, but also a critical examination of its very processes of theoretical production. One example is Colombia’s Truth Commission’s recent Final Report, which is considered a contribution to Latin American critical thought. It offers a framework for rearticulating the relationship between nature and society through the lens of violence, and for responding to the current climate catastrophe (Villegas and Castrillón Gallego, in this dossier). Likewise, this method gives rise to a form of immanent critique of European critical theory—specifically, by bringing Raquel Gutiérrez’s work into dialogue with that of Theodor Adorno. The comparison highlights how the Mexican theorist complements and corrects certain blind spots in Adorno’s thought by materially articulating what might be described as a differentiation without domination between the human-social and the natural (Parra-Ayala, in this dossier).

While all these critical contributions from a Latin American perspective engage with the application, use, and generation of knowledge developed within the region, one of the key insights that emerges from this special issue is that critique is not merely a matter of theoretical reflection. Rather, it involves a practice of community-based action grounded in ancestral knowledges that are continuously and actively renewed in everyday life.

In this light, the perspectives that emerge from everyday Indigenous practices of eating and living well in the Misak territory (Montano Morales, in this dossier); from women’s activism in the Ecuadorian Amazon that confronts both ancestral patriarchy and capitalist extractivism (Martínez Suárez, in this dossier); from the practices of fishing communities in the Quilombola territory of Degredo, Brazil (Lins and Mozine, in this dossier); and from the self-organized production of campesino knowledge within a sacrifice zone in Bogotá (Nova-Laverde, Piñeros Fuentes, and Rojas Mora, in this dossier), all point to the fact that a Latin American critical and ecopolitical perspective is rooted in the perseverance and reexistence embedded in the everyday lives of diverse communities across the continent.

Here, critique is not understood as a detached body of knowledge or as a moment that stands apart from or interrupts daily life. On the contrary, critique is grounded in forms of knowledge that—almost as the reverse of devastation—are anchored in everyday practices that challenge violence.

If, as noted earlier, a non-anthropocentric perspective underpins the theoretical and critical reflections presented in this special issue, then a form of critique grounded in everyday dynamics—as these contributions show—makes it clear that the critique of anthropocentrism is not just conceptual, but rooted in lived practice. Indeed, if violence serves as a kind of shared lexicon for expressing the drama of ecosocial devastation, then every form of resistance to that devastation also becomes a rejection of violence in its many forms—starting, perhaps, with the most fundamental: the severing of human life from the natural world.

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✽ This article was written specifically for this dossier and did not receive any funding. All three authors participated in writing the article. The article was translated with funding from the Office of the Vice President for Research and Creation at Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). It was originally published in Spanish in the issue 91 of the Revista de Estudios Sociales.

1 This broad term refers to a range of quantitatively oriented sciences—such as ecology, geology, climate science, and conservation biology—that analyze environmental problems by modeling their effects and assessing potential mitigation strategies.

2 All citation are free translation by the translator, unless stated otherwise.

3 For example, nature has often been conceived as external to the human being, as seen in conservationist currents—particularly those from the early twentieth century.

4 One can trace the influence of Latin American critical thought from the 1960s and 1970s—whether explicitly or implicitly—through participatory action research (Fals Borda 1987), liberation theology and its preferential option for the poor (Gutiérrez 1972), and the linkage it draws between a suffering Earth and impoverished social classes (Boff 2011).

5 Consider, for example, that water, air, and food—the elements that sustain the body—come from the Earth, and that access to them depends on the collective creation and transmission of knowledge systems such as agriculture, forestry, and water care.

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Andrea Lehner

Ph.D. in Philosophy, Université Paris Nanterre (France). Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). Her research areas are philosophies of nature, environmental and climate philosophy and political ecology. Recent publications: “Nihilism Lost and Found: Brassier, Jonas, and Nishitani on Embracing and/or Overcoming Nihilism” (co-authored), Open Philosophy 6 (1): 20220241, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2022-0241; and “Hans Jonas’s Ethics of Responsibility in an Age of Pervasive Technology”, in Applying Jewish Ethics: Beyond the Rabbinic Tradition, edited by Jennifer A. Thompson and Allison B. Wolf, 141-158 (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2023). https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7554-0368 | a.lehner69@uniandes.edu.co

Lina Álvarez Villareal

Ph.D in Philosophy, Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). Assistant Professor at the Department of Political Science and Global Studies at the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). Her research topics revolve around southern feminisms, political ecology and the decolonial turn. Recent publications: “Rooted-South Feminisms: Disobedient Epistemologies and Transformative Politics”, Capitalism Nature Socialism 35 (2): 116-137, 2023, https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2023.2259507; and Affamés au paradis. Une lecture décoloniale de la physiocratien (Brussels: Peter Lang Verlag, 2023). lm.alvarez82@uniandes.edu.co

Nicolas Lema Habash

Ph.D. in Philosophy, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne (France). Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the Universidad de los Andes (Colombia). He specializes in the history of modern philosophy, especially in the work of Spinoza. He is the author of the book Duratio vitalis. Figures et variations de la vie dans la philosophie de Spinoza (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2022). https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1912-8234 | n.lemahabash@uniandes.edu.co