Ecosocioeconomies at the Crossroad of the Anthropocene. A Systemic-Transdisciplinary Perspective

Abstract

Focusing on the contemporary evidence about the worsening of the global crisis in the Anthropocene, this essay deals in a critical way with the epistemological and ethical foundations of the neoliberal worldview. To guide this assessment, the authors assume a transdisciplinary version of contemporary systems thinking and rescue the fertility of the ecosocioeconomy concept that emerged during the 1970's in the midst of the ecopolitical debates around the ecodevelopment approach. Furthermore, they sketch a prospective scenario that hightights the urgent need of a new civilizatory project, in line with an ecocentric worldview and with a post-development perspective. The concluding remarks include references to experiments with a new, transgressive style of planetary ecopedagogy. Even though there is an unequal correlation of ongoing political-economic and sociocultural forces, we find this improbable but possible path of symbiotic reconnection between man and nature. Then it is reinterpreted eco-social-economic and eco-political principles, which begin to generate postdevelopmental emancipatory processes, gaining sharper contours.