(led by Prof. Dr. Tomás León)

 

The contemporary environmental crisis originates and expresses itself in different ways, affecting equally the set of ecosystems and the different human groups that in one way or another interact with natural resources.

The cultural notions of technological or social progress, brought to their greatest expression with the capitalist hegemony of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and understood under the general and somewhat ambiguous term of “development”, constitute a common thread to understand the complexity of the processes that are established in the dual way ecosystem-culture or society-nature. The prior knowledge of this problem, especially of the environmental conceptions of modern development, is an indispensable condition to face the growing challenges of economic growth and its environmental effects. It is not about studying the environmentalization of development, but about debating the environmental dimension of the general processes of society in relation to ecosystems.

Therefore, facing the complexity of the environmental debate requires the understanding of a specific language in aspects related to ecosystems as well as to the topics of cultural intervention forms. In this last aspect, it is important to understand the designs of the symbolic structures generated in different societies, the approaches to the knowledge of socioeconomic and political organizations, as well as the debates around the generation, transfer and environmental effects of technology.