Defending the Commons: New Frontiers in Latin American Perspectives on Environmental Justice

Abstract

Environmental Justice scholarship and action have different histories and genealogies. In this article, we combine our interdisciplinary formations in philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and feminist political ecology to examine three case studies that show how place-based communities understand, enact, and embody their struggle for environmental justice. We draw from Latin American and Caribbean scholarship on these issues and our experience in the field in Argentina, Chile, and Colombia. Our cases reveal that environmental-driven grassroots organizing has a territorial inscription articulated around the defense of the commons and life itself [the right to existence, as many communities frame it]. The cases reflect communities' complex histories of colonial occupation, capitalism, and development. At the same time, they shed light on the transformations people envision. Thus, while some of the communities' actions enact decolonial practices, others inhabit a more fluid space of political contestation.Latin American and Caribbean scholarship on environmental justice (EJ) has flourished in the last decades. In this article, we analyze critical concepts in its trajectory and how they have influenced the theoretical and methodological standpoints we employ in our research. We met in the Working Group on Political Ecology from the South, Abya/Yala, from the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO). As a fruitful site of scholarship production and political action, this group has generated two edited collections on Latin American Political Ecology, several political statements denouncing and analyzing environmental injustices across territories, and hundreds of articles and pieces of public scholarship. Thus, in the following pages, we engage specifically with the particular perspectives developed in this group and other influences in our academic and activist praxis.Feminist scholars have shown that extractivism is a gendered-raced regime of capital accumulation, exploitation, and destruction, intensified in Latin America and other territories in the Global South (