Environmental leadership: an essential practice

With all this, it is worth asking why there are people who should dedicate themselves to defending something that fundamentally and constitutionally should be provided to all of us. Although for each region the situations and therefore their causes and consequences are very specific, it is possible to speak of patterns on a global scale. On the one hand, the way of thinking that began to take shape since Modernity has had an almost exclusively productive and economically efficient focus. In this sense, the priorities of governments and institutions have not focused on comprehensive support or on the promotion and preservation of natural and cultural diversity that is reflected in different areas, such as the scarce comprehensive state presence in peripheral territories and rural areas or in the inadequate implementation of regulations that fail to welcome and protect minorities and peripheral social groups.

Environmental leadership on the front lines

One of the least heard forms of leadership and environmental defense, to which little attention is paid, and one of the most dangerous and lethal is that of the front-line leaders: those people who seek to defend and preserve their territories and lands. . They are the most direct shield against harmful activities for the surrounding populations and communities and for the environment and they risk not giving in to land grabbing and territorial control by different actors who often go over their heads. communities violating and violating their rights, destroying and degrading vital virgin territories for climate regulation and the preservation of biodiversity.

The projects that are most involved in this situation at a global level are part of the hydrocarbons, mining, agro-industry or extensive agriculture, livestock and hydroelectric projects that do not carry out due diligence to comprehensively study the territory and all the factions that converge there. According to Global Witness, a non-profit organization that studies and follows the steps of environmental leaders around the world, confirms that the vast majority of these extractivist projects are promoted and executed without taking into account the multiple problems and intrinsic damage in the environmental and social systems where they are affected, from the symbolic to the most tangible, the groups that are supplied and live in it.

You have to understand that the territory is more than the space where you live. The territory, which in each geography is particular and incomparable, is a fundamental element for the creation of culture, which is also singular. The territory defines customs, worldviews, the purposes of existing and living. It is then understood as a root, a place where communities can take root, grow, inhabit and build their identity. So then, changing the use of their soils, modifying the landscape, replacing geographic attributes, fauna and flora and adding other values ​​and purposes, is also modifying the identity of the populations that are directly dependent, from the spiritual to the economic , of the lands in which they live and their surroundings.

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