The Making of the Ecological Front: Radical Methods of How to Welcome the “Ecological” in Territorial Struggles in Latin America

The rising climatic upheaval presents the urgent challenge of turning a material fact (that the insatiable model of capitalism/imperialism is damaging the networks of life on Earth) into a political one (that we must fight to stop it). When asking how to forge the alliances of an ecological front whose political subject has overflowed the human realm as the centre of politics, we can find broadly two political modes of alliance-making: a strategic-rational and attentive way of welcoming the “ecological”. Inspired by contemporary Indigenous mobilisers' ability to use both political modes in their practice, this presentation proposes to explore how the ecological front is crafted in the interaction between these two modes.

For this, firstly, I will briefly present a critical account of the figures of ecology as a comrade (ecomarxist tradition) and ecology as a companion (cosmopolitics tradition). Secondly, I will focus on two fronts that unite indigenous, non-indigenous peoples and more-than-humans in territorial struggles in Latin America, where the struggles for a land, a forest, eventually become the struggle for Earth itself. Through the Peruvian cases of revolutionary land seizures in Cuzco in 1970s, and territorial defence of the Amazon in the 2000s in Amazonas, I will explore how alliances are based on strategic logical reasons of the totality that unites the struggle, but they also are the product of deep learning and attentiveness of the more-than-human, which terms are a potential ground for composing life otherwise, and radically transforming those that fight together.