Abstract

D'AMICO, Paula  and  AGOGLIA, Ofelia. The controversial issue of the environment: hegemonic environmentalism and the critical environmental movement. Readings from and for Latin America. Rev. colomb. soc. [online]. 2019, vol.42, n.1, pp.97-116. ISSN 0120-159X.  https://doi.org/10.15446/rcs.v42n1.73247.

The article analyzes the issue of the environment as a controversial issue and field characterized by the convergence of contradictory interests and meanings, especially regarding the causes of ecological problems. As an exercise in analytical reflection focused on theoretical aspects, it employs a qualitative methodology that emphasizes bibliographic revision. Over fifty years after the emergence of environmental issues, the challenge of minimizing the progress of ecological degradation is still a pressing issue. In this sense, the main thesis of the article is that the tensions that characterize the environmental issue are part of its socio-historical formation and its contemporary expressions. We have a type of hegemonic environmentalism that acknowledges and manages the ecological crisis through a solid institutional network (mainly, the United Nations system), which fosters the instrumentalization of economic mechanisms. This conceals the fact that the degradation of nature, which is being mitigated using a market logic, is, paradoxically, the cause of damage to the natural environment. Thus, the green initiatives that arise in the heart of capitalist domination only end up aggravating the environmental crisis. On the contrary, the critical environmental movement shows the contradictions between capital and nature, and, consequently, reveals the power relations and the political-ideological components implicit in the links between society and nature. According to this perspective, damages to the natural environment are part of the destructive capacity of the logic capitalism, which, in expanding, subsumes its two sources of wealth: labor and nature. In the midst of this broad and diverse field of thought, we highlight the relevance of Latin American political ecology for understanding the specificities but also the common matrixes shared by the region's socio-environmental realities. The construction of a locus of enunciation of the Latin American leads to the visibilization of contemporary -but also historical- experiences of struggle against the commodification of life.

Keywords : critical environmental movement; environmental crisis; environmental degradation; hegemonic environmentalism; Latin America; Latin American political ecology.

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