The Crisis of the Life System. Reflections towards a Political Ecology of Hope

Abstract

In this essay we use the current health crisis to better understand the modern crisis, its values, its structures, emphasizing the way in which the current pandemic is an expression of other crises that surround it, and have a greater explanatory capacity to both understand it and face it: the environmental crisis, the crisis of society, the crisis of Western civilization and the crisis of the life system. Only as an ensemble can they be fully understood and used to imagine alternative worlds of justice, of coexistence in solidarity between humans and non-humans, as is the case of what we call Political Ecology of Hope. We review, problematize and critique contemporary thinkers who have pondered the current crisis to build our own proposal and think about the crisis and its possible outlets. The originality and the main findings of this text lie in the fact that a moment of crisis, like the one we now are experiencing, opens up possibilities to build alternative futures.