The crises in Mexico is a particular, peculiar and bloody case of what is happening on a global scale. Its tragedy, stagnation/inactivity and deterioration are the expression in this piece of the planet of a major crisis of civilization. This is the central thesis that gives meaning to this work.
The world is reaching its limit. It is not only the human species that is at a crossroad,but the whole vital web and the delicate balance of the planet. The explosive increase of the human population, with 7,000 million individuals, has added to the expansion of modern civilisation with its industrial model and its unbridled will to accumulate wealth. This dominate civilisation is based on a formula that combines industry and techno science with capital plus oil and other fossil fuels, and is the deep, hidden and main cause of the social inequality that controls the contemporary world, as well as the greater threat to survival, biological, ecological, cultural, and finally, human survival.
This civilizational model, which today reaches the maximum historical concentration of capital, not only orders and directs the world economy under the domination of giant corporations,including banks and financial firms, but it influences much of the national and international policy through the control and co-opting of Governments and institutions, as well as on the mass media, scientific and technological innovation and cultural patterns.
This civilizational model has been built on various dogmas such as the principles of neoclassical economics; A unique idea of development and progress; a techno-cyclical optimism; the supremacy of individualism and competition; the supposed inferiority of the traditional cultures, and the subjection of the nature, to which it is conceived as a system that must be studied in detailed, analysed and exploited. Unveiled in its true essence by the critical thinking, unmasked its predatory mechanisms, modern and industrial civilization is questioned because in the background it is focused on a double exploitation: of nature and human.
It is not humanity, man, or human species that has created a society at permanent risk, but a fraction that is so minuscule that it probably only corresponds to 1%. This elite fulfills a parasitic function, and with its ideology, its decisions and actions have endangered the survival not only of human life but of all living things.
In a globalised world, every nation presents a unique and
particular meeting ground for the tensions between, on one hand, the forces that aim to impose a globalised model of civilization, and, on the other, the forces that resist and seek alternative models and formulas. Mexico does not escape this clash of projects. On the contrary, the country is staging the most bloody conflicts and contradictions that are the result of various peculiarities, among which a neoliberal policy of cut applied increasingly strong during the last thirty years; The vicinity to the greatest industrial, capitalist, modern power of the planet; the presence of broad social sectors coming from a cultural past represented by the Mesoamerican civilization, and a tradition of social struggle that has been almost permanent for 200 years. Therefore, what happens, what has happened and what will happen in the country is as relevant to Mexicans as it is to the rest of the world’s citizens, and vice versa, the world events equally affect the inhabitants of this country.
From a novel perspective, this book addresses the current Mexican reality both in terms of conflicts of an ecological nature as well as the strict social contradictions, which means that it carries out a combining analysis of social and environmental conflict or, in other words, it is situated in the new field of political ecology.
From the collection of numerous evidences, the book shows how the enormous insecurity, injustice and violence that the country suffers today which places it as one of the societies with the highest risk indexes in the world, is the result of a set of projects that under the Ideology of modernity sow destruction in nature and the environment almost automatically.
Not only does Mexican society experience with deep concern and indignation the death or disappearance of thousands of citizens, it also witnesses the destruction of its ecosystem:extinction of water sources, derailing of natural equilibrium, decrease or disappearance of species, vegetation and landscapes, poisonings of air,springs, soils, food and of the same human bodies.
It is then a matter of observing a process of destruction that is multiple or multidimensional. It is then a matter of confronting a set of death projects that threaten the very existence of organisms, of vital elements such as the water, soils, air, seeds, genes and, of course, human beings: their cultures, their environments, their Landscapes, their territories and their balances or stability with the natural world. It is, in the end, areal battle for life. The book presents a proposal to stop this movement towards a catastrophe, collapse or chaos, based on citizen empowerment and the forced construction, through a set of actions of all kinds, of social power.
