Abstract:Building social alternatives is necessary to resist the destructive impacts of the capitalist organization on well-being, social organization, and the planet. This paper offers an analysis of the ways in which peoples are mobilizing to build organizations and to define social movements to move beyond current crises. The lines for constructing an ecologically sound and social-solidarity society require mechanisms for mutual cooperation based on alternative systems of decision making, as well as for doing work and assuring well-being to every member of the community. These depend on forging a process of solidarity among the members of a society as well as building alliances among communities; to assure the satisfaction of basic needs while also attending the most pressing requirements for physical, social and environmental infrastructure and to assure the conservation and rehabilitation of their ecosystems.
Policymakers face a dilemma in highly diverse societies with many ecosystems: how to implement national policies that allow for serious consideration of these differences. In connection with the attempts to advance towards sustainability in forest systems, Mexico is confronting this problem with difficulty. Although it has committed to implementing policies consistent with REDD+, there are competing pressures for supporting commercial development of plantations on the one hand, and community based management systems that involve multiple objectives in complex proposals on the other. We trace the implications for environmental justice of the choices being made by indigenous communities in the highlands of Oaxaca for promoting sustainable programmes that assure adequate living standards and environmental protection. The analysis shows that this alternative approach offers an interesting set of outcomes that the standard paradigm of the green economy has difficulty achieving.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations鈥揷itations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.