The Importance of Environmental Care in Latin America

María Belén López*/Latinoamérica21

Caring for the environment is a political and collective practice carried out across the board by women that combines the reproduction of life with the protection of degraded land. This concept enables the visibility of responses that integrate into the environment as a fundamental dimension of care, historically invisible and unpaid. Its importance is key to understanding the story of Latin American women facing the climate crisis and in areas such as health.

Crisis, health and care in Latin America

The COVID-19 outbreak has highlighted that solving health problems requires addressing many factors. In 2020, we will not meet before a pandemic, let alone before a syndemic. Watch Anthropology Merrill Singer and Barbara Rylko-BauerA syndemic defines a synergy between a virus, other health conditions and social consequences in a group that has a greater impact on the reality of vulnerable social groups. At the same time, as it is documented by CEPALthese people absorbed the greatest burden of devotion to care needs such as women. In the big cities this congestion worked in the crudest way people live in urban marginal situations.

In Latin America there are disproportionately more trainers than horses and specifically over womenpeople devote triple time to these times that varones. El care economy mapis characterized by high work informality and significant intersectional desires, which are exacerbated by a cross-relationship with factors of ethnic origin, edad and socioeconomic level, which especially affects rural and poor women who need resources for the third of these areas.

Even when people work in caregiving jobs, moving into their own homes increases the time and money they have to give back to supporting people with healthy attachments to their families and their neighborhoods. In the matter of prevention, all this precedes the scenarios where nutrition is available, the time that is available to allocate to medical checks, and the recursion with those affected. they are on the run.

Summer crisis guards It worsened in the context of urban fringes and environmental degradation, where the failure of basic infrastructure (such as running water or sanitation) meant that this work would become increasingly taxing and demanding on the work and bodies of carers.

In large urban Latin American conglomerates, economic exclusion has cemented the structural model that critical epidemiology characterizes as “unhealthy”which narrows the area to the health of segregated sectors. Environmental hazards such as water contamination, chronic poverty and poor infrastructure are distributed in the same way in cities and generate many forms of socio-environmental injustice. According to this logic, a degraded environment is not a simple physical scenario; the environmental crisis takes place in the “hearts” of segregated populations and shapes the processes of health, disease and death. The amenazas of the environment are therefore part of the structural violence that defines those who are most ready to affirm and under what conditions they must support life.

A prominent example of environmental injustice is the Reconquista (AR) area of ​​Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina. It is a territory marked by the search for the CEAMSE North III Basal Complex and the Rio Reconquista contaminated area, showing how urban segregation borders on vulnerable sectors surrounding degraded areas. There, many families built their own pigsties on wet land for those who had access to it, clearing it with bushes and grass to raise the ground and avoid flooding, a difficult task given the increased flooding caused by climate change, insufficient drainage of the zanjones land and the memory of the river. The population coexists with the emanation of gases – such as methane – and the strong odors of the basalt, as well as the dampness of the quema cables in the chronic basurals of the neighborhood, which causes specific diseases: chronic respiratory problems such as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (EPOC), diarrhea caused by contaminated water, and severe dermatological lesions in childhood.

Before these scenarios, women are most likely to find out more. If you stay in the neighborhood longer, your exposure to chronic pain and contaminants is greater than that of varanos. On their list of caregivers, they are the first to reveal environmental risks through the health aspects of their caregivers. These are caring activities that women are aware of and act on the effects of the environment on people and their territory, because they too occupy a key place in the face of the current climate crisis.

Caring for the environment: key work, but not invisible

The work of women guards from vulnerable sectors in many forms, such as those of the Reconquista area, is not limited to the walls of their home, nor to the upbringing of their own children: it means a collective action that promotes the good of all in the neighborhood. From the spaces of community care and surrounding tables, they participate, among other things, in the support of popular villages, apoyo training and detention against violence, sanitation of streets, squares and arroyos, campaigns for waste disposal, waste recycling, maintenance of huertas and management for the expansion of basic services.

In these scenarios, the relevance of the scene is clear environmental carenot as environmental care, but as a political and collective practice that combines the reproduction of life with the protection of degraded land. This concept makes visible the responses that, operating according to domestic and community logics, integrate into the environment as a fundamental dimension of care that usually remains invisible and unpaid. Extending care further into the domestic sphere, it recognizes that well-being in the context of segregation depends on a situational agency that articulates to people and territories, which explains women’s knowledge of the climate crisis as central to the activation of collecting initiatives against lack or lack of public policies as it is on paper.

It is about demanding recognition and professionalization of your work, with a decent and decent salary. Likewise, the voices of these collective women demand knowledge dialogue which is valid for expertise located in degraded land management. Before this care for the environment, you will learn that well-being is not a phenomenon associated with local conditions. Ignoring this problem only exacerbates the socio-environmental injustices and obstacles that are the real challenge of the crisis of care, because the sustainability of life outside a healthy and dignified environment for living is not possible.

*Doctor of Social Anthropology for UNSAM. She is co-coordinator of the Investigative Program “Migrantas en Reconquista” (IDAES-UNSAM) and coordinates the Epistemología and Pedagogía group in the international network The Global (De)Centre.