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Copyright of Ecología Política is the property of Fundacio ENT and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Copyright of Revista de Ciencias Sociales (13159518) is the property of Revista de Ciencias Sociales de la Universidad del Zulia Venezuela and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

On November 5 2015, the Fundão tailings dam, owned by Samarco (Vale sa/bhp Billiton), broke leaving nineteen dead, thousands of people affected, and a trail of destruction along the Doce River basin. This article aims to understand the connection between the dam's collapse and the rise of disaster capitalism in Brazil. Data was collected from primary and secondary sources, and fieldwork. It is concluded that the collapse of the dam allowed the first great experiment of disaster capitalism in Brazil, implemented through three shock therapies. The first one was the rupture of the dam itself, which, although avoidable, occurred abruptly and violently. The second therapy was an ambitious neoliberal, anti-democratic, and unpopular economic program adopted to repair and compensate for the damages and caused. Not being enough, those affected were also subjected to several mechanisms and techniques of collective torture that contributed to reduce social spending, neutralize opposition to economic treatment, and consolidate disaster capitalism in Brazil. All in all, these three shocks allowed the design of a brand-new "normality" --more ailing, brutal, and perverse--, only to benefit a small global corporate elite. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes a necessary review on the degradation of the environment and how it has become relevant over recent decades due to the consequences in our societies. A critical diagnosis is made about the modern reason and its civilizational-occidental history as part of a problem that has been tried to be elucidated in a number of ways but which, ultimately, creates difficulties for the entire globe. This article is committed to a reflection from the social sciences to position guidelines that project a different perspective: A "Political ecology" that attempts to outline the construction of a new environmental rationality and diminish the effects of the cumulative logic of capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The threats that cloud the future of man and the planet respond to disturbingly opaque phenomena. One of the most pressing one -an irreversible environmental crisis-operates on a global scale that masks the causes and the true dimensión of the effects. The perspective of a not too remote end is covered with the denial of a voracious capitalism that leaps forward and does not repair in damages. The complexity and acceleration of the processes challenge critical thinking in search of answers, but the artistic imagination can glimpse configurations still inaccessible to other languages. Art almost by definition makes visible what is not seen but is now moved by a cosmopolitan urgency. What gives to see the art of our time? What does it restore from what is deliberately hidden? How is it renewed in the attempt? A series of recent works by Argentine artists offers some answers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Climate change is increasingly understood as a potential crisis for global financial stability and thus liberal-capitalist hegemony. The primary crisis management strategy is “green capitalism”—renewable energy, carbon markets, natural capital, and so on—that aims to ameliorate the climate crisis while opening new realms of commodification and accumulation. A central obstacle facing this ad hoc strategy is the temporal disjuncture between its decades-long instantiation, the increasing rate of climatic change, and potential for vast climate-driven costs and losses. In this context, I examine solar geoengineering—specifically stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI)—as an emergent tactic. Previously considered an “emergency Plan B” should mitigation efforts fail, leading centers of geoengineering research increasingly frame SAI as a mechanism capable of slowing the rate of climatic change. Examining research at Harvard University, which suggests that—paired with substantial emissions cuts—SAI can potentially “buy time” for mitigation and adaptation, I argue that SAI should be understood as a preemptive spatiotemporal fix for the second contradiction of capitalism. Second contradiction theory contends that capitalist-driven environmental degradation can engender systemic crisis, and climate change is currently its most expressed manifestation. In modifying planetary albedo to expand the atmospheric waste sink and thus decrease the rate of change, SAI can potentially preempt the emergence of the second contradiction. This framework expands connections between spatiotemporal fixes and socioecological crises by focusing on systemic underproduction and argues that SAI should be understood not as an aberrant “emergency” measure but as an increasingly normalized tactic emerging within existing forms of hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

El capitalismo “verde”, como se presenta en las tres Conferencias de las Naciones Unidas sobre el Medio Ambiente y el Desarrollo, se ha propuesto para enfrentar las crisis del medio ambiente (ecológicos) y social (pobreza) que se vive actualmente en todo el mundo. Este "enverdecimiento" es una nueva etapa de acumulación de capital que implica: el uso de mecanismos financieros, como los intercambios de deuda por naturaleza; la licencia de las ongambientales para negociar los recursos de los países endeudados con las grandes corporaciones, el establecimiento de los valores monetarios de los “bienes comunes globales”. Por otro lado, los nuevos trabajadores son mujeres y hombres campesinos e indígenas que han adquirido nuevos papeles como proveedores de servicios en las nuevas industrias, como el llamado turismo ecológico. En este artículo se considera Costa Rica en esta etapa del capitalismo y se hacen las críticas al respecto. ---- Green Capitalism, as presented at the three linked United Nations Conferences on Environment and Development, has been proposed as a means to confront the environmental (ecological) and social (poverty) crises currently being experienced around the world. This “greening” is a new stage of capital accumulation that entails: the use of financial mechanisms, such as debt-for-nature exchanges; the license of environmental ngos to broker the indebted countries’ resources with large corporations, and to establish the monetary values of the ‘global commons’. Meanwhile, the new labourers are peasants and Indigenous women and men who have acquired new roles as service providers in the new industries, such as eco-tourism. This paper considers this stage of capitalism in Costa Rica and the critiques to it.

Green Capitalism, as presented at the three linked United Nations Conferences on Environment and Development, has been proposed as a means to confront the environmental (ecological) and social (poverty) crises currently being experienced around the world. This "greening" is a new stage of capital accumulation that entails: the use of financial mechanisms, such as debt-for-nature exchanges; the license of environmental NGOS to broker the indebted countries' resources with large corporations, and to establish the monetary values of the 'global commons'. Meanwhile, the new labourers are peasants and Indigenous women and men who have acquired new roles as service providers in the new industries, such as eco-tourism. This paper considers this stage of capitalism in Costa Rica and the critiques to it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development has been a dominant trope of global political and economic life since the 1950s. As such it has been inevitably linked to some of the most important social processes of this era: colonialism, globalization, post-colonialism, global ecological crisis, the rise of environmentalism, and more. Consolidation of the contemporary consumer society came, hand in hand, with the certainty that it sustained a way of life that, like collateral damage, included a global ecological crisis. From many parts of the world new voices raised concerns about the costs of globalization and proposed alternatives and solutions; thus, modern eco-criticism was born. This article analyzes the historical process of emergence of eco-critical concepts as well as appropriation, redefinition, and use of these concepts by politicians and economists. Specifically, we reflect on how "development" and "growth" under heavy criticism during the 70s were gradually transformed into "sustainable development" first, and, as this conversion was still raising significant disapproval, to "sustainability" later. Adoption of these new ideological frameworks aimed at legitimizing development allowed Western societies to ignore more critical approaches such us "zero growth" or "degrowth". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to examine the ecological crisis as a structural crisis of the mode of capitalist production and reproduction, while proposing lines of reflection to understand the mode in which this is related to economic crisis. To that end, the categories offered by Marxism, in its ecological current, are presented not only to understand the rise of the crisis based on overproduction but also of the crisis due to underproduction. Thus, the incorporation of the concept of nature subsumed to capital is proposed, in order to characterize the growing process of capitalist appropriation of natural surroundings and the creation of a second nature. Finally, as a corollary to the ecological crisis, there arises an increase in environmental inequality and, therefore, an increase in environmental conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]