It is for this reason that the primary concern of “political ecology”, as Gorz (1994) points out, has to do with the generation of a balance between human needs and the normative elements that establish the limits to actions and behaviors towards nature since the participatory and democratic perspective.
Within the focus of political ecology, professor Martínez (2002) speaks of “ecological re-distributive conflicts”. He understands by ecological distribution the various social, spatial and temporal patterns of access to the obtainable benefits from natural resources and services provided by the environment as a life support system. This way, ecological distribution links the processes of nature extraction with the growth of the metabolism of industrialized societies that consume more and more natural goods and energy because of asymmetries or social, spatial or temporal inequalities and the reduction of natural resources as well as the increase of pollution loads.
We are of the idea that environmental conflict essentially has to do with disputes between societies and States, on access, extraction, use, appropriation, transformation, production, control, commerce, consumption, destruction, pollution and waste the elements of the environment (natural and cultural). However, reality is that it has more to do with several or many human beings pretending to appropriate the elements that belong to other human groups and communities, generating reactions from others to guarantee their care and access, under other legal norms in which their cultural forms have been previously established (Mesa Cuadros, 2015b).
Following Escobar (2011), these disputes over defense and environmental protection occur mainly because for many communities in ecosystems and their cultural practices is their direct source of subsistence. Such conflicts exist in the context of different economies, cultures and forms of knowledge, along with ecosystems in which local societies engage in struggles against translocal forces to defend their territoriality.
This is because, with the current advances of globalized and transnational capitalism, the pressures to intensify the extraction of environmental goods have been increased and eliminate or erode the juridical limits that societies had established for access to nature. However, as these pressures increase, social resistance also increases, especially from traditional and local community sectors (rural and urban), all of which is reflected in the existence of unresolved environmental problems and conflicts, on the occasion of misappropriation or unjustified of Nature by the new actors in those territories and cultures.
As Inglehart (1977) and other authors point out, some of the keys to defining and understanding the emergence of ecological conflicts in European and North American countries are found in the increasing competition and scarcity of natural resources in the South and the emergence of ecological values in the North. There, various actors are in dispute for controlling and accessing scarce resources along with the change of values in contemporary societies, which are more focused on ideas of self-realization and participation (i.e., post-materialism), than in exclusive concerns of economic security (materialism).
However, we prefer the expression “environmental conflicts” rather than the expression “ecological conflicts”, as we consider the first expression to be more comprehensive and inclusive, by understanding within its analysis the natural, cultural, and spiritual ecosystemic aspects. It emphasizes the different relations between cultures, nature and other societies, and not only in the relations of a society with the ecosystems.
As said earlier, from this conceptualization it is argued that environmental conflicts arise from unjustified appropriations of the environment or violating the rights of some, many or all in a society, by a few. Therefore, environmental conflicts involve, above all, the interests of all subjects of law, not only human beings, but also non-human beings such as forests, mountains, rivers or wild animals.
Just as environmental conflict can be conceptualized in different ways, it can also be categorized. Martínez’s (2008) classification of this type of conflict seems pertinent, since it considers the different points in the production chain. For example, in the areas of material extraction and energy (i.e. mining, hydrocarbons, or biopiracy,), manufacturing and transportation processes (oil spills, waterways) or final disposal (such as generation of waste and pollution by toxic waste like fumigations to illicit crops, which is evident in the Colombian case because of the failed international fight against drugs).
In the last twenty years, and on the occasion of the predominance of the neo-extractivist postulates based on appropriation by dispossession (Harvey, 2003), the neoliberal version of capitalism has promoted in Colombia and Latin America a way to take advantage of the comparative and competitive benefits of producing raw materials. In the idea that greater exchange will generate more progress and development, developing countries allow developed States to transform the raw materials and then sell the final products to developing countries.
This vision significantly increased the number of natural elements extracted in our territories: minerals, hydrocarbons, biological diversity, water, soils that generates negative environmental impacts. This translates into a reduction of diversity, erosion, pollution inadequate disposition of materials and waste, exaggerated and useless transportation, production of disposables and the increase of consumerism.
Some legal bases for the resolution of the environmental conflict in Colombia and Latin America
From our perspective, we consider that there is an environmental vision that is an essential part of the conflict, in the sense that there is a binding interaction of social and natural elements. Therefore, we should not focus exclusively on the forms of appropriation, domination and transformation of nature, but also on the various political, social and cultural factors that occur among cultures that, in multiple circumstances, try to impose their lifestyles against other peoples and societies.
Given the emergence and development of environmental conflict, environmental law and justice should guide a re-distributive approach as one of the possibilities of handling environmental conflicts. From the perspective of political environmentalism, a concept that we have built from the idea of mobilization in defense of the ecosystems and the cultures that inhabit them, we seek to defend the environment for present and future generations of human beings and other beings of nature.
Political environmentalism has in “popular environmentalism” one of its main expressions of action in defense of nature and cultures. It is the set of legal actions and social and cultural policies that enable ethnic groups, communities and societies to defend against the attacks and negative impacts that projects by national and transnational companies with the support of their States cause to their lives, territories, resources and the environment in general.
From our point of view, these affected societies and communities are victims of environmental injustices and attacks on the sources of material and spiritual sustenance due to the misappropriation of their environment by other cultures. Therefore, they develop resistance movements in the defense of their environment, its territory and its culture associated with its own way of living.
Generally, in Latin America and particularly in Colombia the main projects or activities that originate the environmental conflict have to do with extraction of minerals and hydrocarbons for the domestic and global market. For example, we have coal extraction in Cerrejón, Guajira by Intercor Inc.; nickel in Cerromatoso, Córdoba by BHP Billiton; gold in Santurbán and in La Colosa by Eco Gold Co. and Anglo Gold Ashanti; and oil in Boyacá, Santander, Putumayo, Meta, Casanare or Arauca by Occidental Inc. or BP. In addition, there are also infrastructure works for the access and transportation of new raw materials and goods for national and global markets, such as roads and highways, airports and ports, hydroelectric and thermoelectric projects such as Urrá, El Quimbo, Hidrosogamoso or Hidroituango. These projects respond to the new demands of increasingly urbanized and industrialized societies, generating the exaggerated decline and destruction of biological diversity for agrofuel projects, access to genetic resources or fumigation to illicit crops; water and soil appropriation and forest destruction for agroindustrial monocultures of oil palm, soybean, sugar cane, cotton or livestock for export meat.
For all the above, we are in favor of a conceptualization