Environmental Inequality and the Socio-territorial Conflicts

Notwithstanding the important contributions that centre the discussion of environmental inequality on the access and use of resources and land or on the unbalanced distribution of the effects of the current climate crisis, in order to grasp the phenomenon in all its complexity, it is necessary to direct the discussion towards its ontological nature. The chapter argues that the most decisive element in the understanding of environmental inequality is identifying and overcoming the hierarchical classification of the multiple forms of being in the world and of interacting with nature. Dismantling this hierarchical classification of ontologies, in which the European one is presented as the ultimate, requires making an anthropology of capitalist modernity and understanding the epistemic and ontological roots in which it fundaments its practices. Moreover, overcoming any type of environmental inequality also demands questioning the possible present manifestations of capitalist modernity that, although echoing on the current ecological crisis, reproduce the annihilating dualism that separates humans from nature and makes of the second a mere instrument of capital accumulation. In that sense, it is necessary to resort to innovative approaches that foster the horizontal interaction between different ontologies. Such is the case of transmodernity and interculturality. The relevance of both concepts in the discussion of environmental inequality resides on the fact that they seek to break any type of monologist pretentions of universalisms and that they both provide some critical elements for the design of dialogues among the ontological difference.