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In Latin America, the land has been an important issue in driving political and social change since the end of the 15th century, when European conquistadores began their colonial rule, to the present. The purpose of this study is to examine the changing meaning of land, by looking at cases of the Latin America's most representative rural social movements, i.e. EZLN in Mexico and MST in Brazil. In particular, this study distinguishes two currents of environmentalism in Latin America: elitist environmentalism and grassroots environmentalism. The former understands nature as a natural resource that can be developed or nature that needs to be preserved from a human-centric point of view, based on the ‘modern Western view of nature.’The latter understands the environment from the perspective of 'socio-nature', which is not simply a nature that is used and appreciated by human beings, but a more-than-human ecological space, that is, a space where humans and nature coexist. In this context, the meaning of land demanded by Mexico's EZLN and Brazil's MST can be better understood from the perspective of grassroots environmentalism. Both the EZLN and the MST call for land reform, which is not limited to the sense that land is arable land in the economic and social sense that must be secured for capitalist production in the process of agricultural modernisation or under a globalised system of agricultural production. Rather, their demand for land is closely related to the demand for productive justice that can sustain a human life through alternative modes of production, rather than the current mainstream model of development, and the demand for recognition of the political space(territory) that can determine these alternative modes of production and ways of life. Thus, land in these movements can be understood as territory as a political and ecological space for alternative development, beyond the meaning of economic and social arable land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]