Reframing Relationships Between Humans and the Earth: An Ecosystem Approach

Earth’s regeneration and mankind’s regeneration, as faces of the same coin, are addressed simultaneously, in space and time, for their mutual support. The propostal counteracts political and economic systems that endorse the abuse of nature by monopoly companies through devastating wood extraction, mining exploitation, coal, oil, and gas energy projects and industrial chemical production (plastics) and agribusiness (seeds, genetically modified crops, fertilizers, pesticides). Institutional capacity, judicial neutrality, transparent information, opening up of new social spaces for enlightened participation are fundamental for transformative actions, implying public scrutiny, accountability and independent clearance bodies. In this sense, a multidimensional ecosystem approach is posited for diagnosis and prognosis of environmental, cultural, educational, political and economic interrelated problems, encompassing all dimensions of being in the world (intimate, interactive, social and biophysical), as they interact to elicit, maintain or transform the events. Instead of being trapped into pre-established problem-definitions, in the social-cultural learning niches, spaces are opened for allocation of new meanings, heuristic-hermeneutic processes develop a capacity to ask wider questions, reframing the problems, unveiling their dynamic and complex configurations, altering definitions and ways to deal with the issues, encompassing public policies, advocacy, communication, research and teaching programs.