This article discusses the issue of the environment under the conditions of extreme destruction of the planet as a result of sociocultural evolution, and the crisis of knowledge that derives from man’s non-adaptation to nature. Consequently, it poses some theoretical reflections in order to achieve an integral transformation that is both social and individual, on the path to a civilizational transition that requires overcoming the fundamental concepts of current socio-environmental reality. It therefore proposes some strategies for the construction of an environmental epistemology in that direction, which entails restructuring educational processes from a perspective based on diversity and, through the production of new social knowledge, surpassing a solitary view of reality in order to achieve one that is shared.
The objective is to study mega-mining in Mexico, based on its contribution to domestic economic development with ecosocial impacts, along with the treatment of human rights that it generates in the communities. From political ecology and ecological economics, it is pertinent to analyze the territorial dispossession that causes conflicts between transnational private capital companies and communities for the right to natural commons gradually converted into merchandise. The question is: How does the process of attention to human rights originate in the mining industry and how does this phenomenon manifest itself? The hypothesis states that mega-mining practiced in Mexico by transnational private capital during the neoliberal development model, has generated supplies for other branches of the national economy, in exchange of violating human rights, and the involvement of Mexican communities surrounding mining megaprojects. Preliminary results indicate that mega-mining in Mexico is configured as a postcolonial enclave economy, where the extractive capital involved under the figure of Socially Responsible and Sustainable Enterprise is validated by a State policy of territorial dispossession that sacrificed half of the Mexican land and violated human rights.
The article analyzes the contribution of large cities to climate change in the context of the global energy transition. This requires moving towards a post-fossil era of the economy and society, all of which implies qualitative transformations of these with respect to the natural and human-social environment; and, of course, implies new territorial (urban-rural) sustainable configurations. The characteristics of urbanization processes, present in the megalopolis of Mexico City, are discussed as an expression of the dominant global economic model and their respective socioenvironmental predatory practices. Likewise, the aggravating factors of global warming are studied, which could be reduced from the cities (in this case the city of Mexico and its metropolitan area), and strategies and actions are proposed to reduce the carbon footprint in those cities. It is concluded that, without the restructuring of the megalopolis, it will be impossible to move towards urban sustainability; what is required to go beyond mitigation and adaptation actions in facing climate change.
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