I couldn't find anything about Mendes by Galeano, but I did find this song by Sepultura about him: https://youtu.be/10OWU-wxuGc?si=vO1LRuJ-dbOR664H
Edit: Galeano wrote an article about Mendes: https://vermelho.org.br/2019/02/13/galeano-explica-chico-mendes-militancia-ecologica-com-luta-social/
Who are some social ecologists from the Global South?
It seems like so much of social ecology is centered around Bookchin. His ideas are certainly useful, and I don't have anything major to take issue with him for. But he is still one guy, and it's pretty inconsistent with a movement growing from anarchism to uphold individual people as heroes. He's also a cis white man from Vermont.
I'd like to know a lot more about the theory, history, actions, etc. of social ecologists in the Global South. I know about Öcalan and Rojava, and their revolutionary implementation of social ecology in the Kurdish context. Modibo Kadalie was from coastal Georgia, but was involved with a lot of Pan-African organizing that included people from the Caribbean, the African continent, etc. And the EZLN, while not explicitly social ecologist, is a closely related movement greatly benefitting Indigenous people in Chiapas. Many indigenous theories like buen vivir and ubuntu are also being put into practice with great success in the regions they come from. And the social ecologist YouTuber Andrewism is from Trinidad.
If anyone else knows about other social ecology or social ecology-adjacent movements in the Global South, please mention them. There's so much more to social ecology than a white person from Vermont. We should be shifting our discourse to reflect that.
I'm trying to shift away from transactional approaches. I don't want to replicate markets and debt in my community, and I worry that asking for a share of the harvest as a "price" for lending out tools could perpetuate that instead of breaking away from it.
How do we encourage people who grow food to share it?
![](https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/7d5d8d9f-015b-42b7-aae8-5672a0114a01.webp?format=webp&thumbnail=128)
![](https://slrpnk.net/pictrs/image/7d5d8d9f-015b-42b7-aae8-5672a0114a01.webp?format=webp)
Don't get me wrong, having a vegetable garden is still a great thing and far better than buying the monoculture produce shipped from halfway around the world at the store, even if your garden is just for your own family. I don't want to knock that. But to break our reliance on extractivist agriculture as a society requires more than just people with the resources to do it building private homesteads on their private property. Communities providing for each other through the commons is a foundational element of a solarpunk society.
How do we encourage this shift in thinking and doing? What would it take to break down the expectations of private property and that something you've grown is just for you, and create community mindsets where something you've grown can feed people who need it?
Where I live, there are a lot of (mostly retired, suburban, well-off) people with gardens, especially in the summer, but most of them are not involved in FNB or anything like it. It's also not common to emphasize native species. We have a wonderful public market, but most of the people even with veggie gardens don't sell there and only buy there on occasion. The way I've been trying to encourage the public market over grocery stores more has mostly been talking about how great the produce is, how many different things they have, and how convenient it is that the bus runs there. It's still a market, but at least it's small, local growers, and a local org recovers what doesn't get sold for our FNB branch to use (and composts what isn't good, for the local community garden to use) instead of throwing it away. But the only way I can think of to get the idea out there that people should share what they grow is to flat-out say, "you should share what you grow", which doesn't seem like it would win many people over.
The lack of attention this issue gets outside of astronomy communities is symptomatic of colonial capitalist state society's othering and exploitation of the natural world. For the vast majority of human history, everyone lived by the stars, to navigate and to plan agricultural, ceremonial, hunting, foraging, and migration cycles. Many indigenous people around the world still do. But if you stop thinking of the stars as living guides who impart their wisdom and start thinking of them as future platinum mines and colonies, you don't pay as much attention to them and you don't notice their disappearance until it's too late. Most settlers see more stars on TV programs about pop sci than actually looking up at them. We are a part of the universe, after all, not some outside observer unaffected by it. We should at least care about that.