Routledge Handbook of Latin America and the Environment

Beatriz Bustos is an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of Chile. Her research focuses on resources geography and the sociopolitical transformations that exploitation of natural resources produces in rural communities. Her work ranges from examining the geography of commodities such as salmon, copper, wine, agro-industries, coal, lithium and green hydrogen, to rural livelihoods under neoliberal extractive economies. More recently she is researching ideas of rural citizenship. Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro is Professor at the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies of SUNY New Paltz (US), teaching courses on physical and people–environment geography as well as on socialism. He is Senior Editor for Capitalism Nature Socialism and Reviews Editor for Human Geography. He has recently published Socialist States and Environment and, with George Martin, Urban Food Production for Ecosocialism. His research areas include soil contamination and acidification, urban food production, and socialism and the environment. Gustavo García-López is an engaged researcher, educator, and apprentice organizer, from the islands of Puerto Rico. He has experience in transdisciplinary social-environmental studies. His work is situated at the intersection of ecology and the political, postcolonial/decolonial, and Latin American and Caribbean studies. He engages with commons and commoning, autogestion, and environmental and climate justice issues. He is part of the JunteGente collective in Puerto Rico, the Post-Extractive Futures initiative, the Climate Justice Network and the Undisciplined Environments blog. He lives uprooted from his lands but finding home and guiding stars in his daughter Maia. He is held in life by broad networks of care and nourishment, of people, spirits, memories, and ecologies. Felipe Milanez is Assistant Professor at the Institute for Humanities, Arts and Sciences Profesor Milton Santos, at the Federal University of Bahia, Brazil. Author of Memórias Sertanistas: Cem Anos de Indigenismo no Brasil and Guerras da Conquista, with Fabrício Lyro, his work and activism focus on the violence against environmental defenders, the genocide of indigenous peoples and ecocide. More recently, his research dedicates to learn with indigenous art, anti-colonial epistemologies and political ecologies from Abya Yala. Diana Ojeda is Associate Professor at Cider (Center for Interdisciplinary Development Studies) at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia. Her work analyses processes of "green grabbing", dispossession, and state formation from a perspective that combines feminist political ecology and critical agrarian studies. More recently, her research has focused on pesticide use in Colombia.

Part I Introduction

Chapter 1. Suturing the Open Veins of Latin America, Building Epistemic Bridges: Latin-American Environmentalism for the 21st Century

Part II Biophysical Processes and Environmental Histories

Chapter 2. Latin American ecosystems vulnerability in a climate change scenario

Chapter 3. Soil degradation and land cover change in Latin America

Chapter 4. Climate Change Impacts on Caribbean Coastal Ecosystems: Emergent Ecological and Environmental Geography Challenges

Chapter 5. An Environmental History of the ‘Second Conquest’: Agricultural Export Boom and Landscape-Making in Latin America, ca.1850-1930

Chapter 6. Extractivism: The Port-a-cathed Veins of Guatemala

Chapter 7. Environmental Colonialism and Neocolonialism in Latin America

Chapter 8. Water scarcity in Latin America

Part III Latin American Environmental Issues in Political-Economic Context

Chapter 9. The Political Economy of the Environment in Latin America

Chapter 10. Ecological debt and extractivism

Chapter 11. Trajectories of adaptation to climate change in Latin American cities: Climate justice blind spots

Chapter 12. Environmental disasters and critical politics

Chapter 13. Latin America in the Chemical Vortex of Agrarian Capitalism

Chapter 14. Resource Radicalisms

Chapter 15. The fruits of labor or the fruits of nature? Towards a political ecology of labor in Central America

Chapter 16. Transnationals, Dependent Development and the Environment in Latin America in the 21st Century

Chapter 17. Challenging the logic of ‘the open veins’? The geography of resource rents distribution in Peru and Bolivia

Part IV: Environmental Struggles and Resistance

Chapter 18. Resistance of women from "sacrifice zones" to extractivism in Chile. A framework for rethinking a feminist political ecology

Chapter 19. Environmental conflicts and violence in Latin America: Experiences from Peru

Chapter 20. Quilombos and the Fight Against Racism in the Context of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Chapter 21. The "Greening" by Sustainable Development: Stretching Biopiracy

Chapter 22. Territorialization through the Milpa: Zapatismo and Indigenous Autonomy

Chapter 23. Indigenous Autonomies as Alternative Horizons in Latin America: Societal movements and other territorialities in Bolivia and Mexico

Chapter 24. Land occupations and land reform in Brazil

Chapter 25. From Chico Mendes to Berta Cáceres: responses to the murders of environmental defenders

Part V: Environmental Disputes and Policies

Chapter 26. Latin America's Approach in the International Environmental Debate. From Stockholm 72 to Rio + 20. Between "eco-development" and "sustainable development"

Chapter 27. Degrowth and Buen Vivir: perspectives for a great transformation

Chapter 28. Social Cartographies in Latin America

Chapter 29. Rights of Nature and Specialization in Jurisprudence: Moving Forward to Better Protect Our Environment?

Chapter 30. How tenure reform processes can lead to community-based resource management? Experiences from Latin America

Chapter 31. Environmental Policy and Institutional Change: The Consequences of Mobilization

Part VI: Toward Oppression-Free Futures

Chapter 32. Feminist thought and environmental defense in Latin America

Chapter 33. Decolonising time through communalising spatial practices

Chapter 34. Environmental Thought in Movement: Territory, Ecologisms, and Liberation in Latin America

Chapter 35. Agroecology and Food Sovereignty in the Caribbean: Insights from Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Sint Maarten

Chapter 36. Re-existance struggles and socio-ecological alternatives for reproduction of dignified and sustainable life in territories affected by the extractivist offensive in Latin America

Chapter 37. The Dimensions of Life: Environment, Subject, and Amerindian Thought

Chapter 38. Environmental Justice Movements as Movements for Life and Decolonization: Experiences from Puerto Rico

Chapter 39. Community Contributions to a Just Energy Transition

Index