Capitalism Nature Socialism

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Extractive Logic of the Coloniality of Nature:

Feeling-Thinking Through Agroecology as a
Decolonial Project

Jhon Jairo Losada Cubillos, Hernán Felipe Trujillo Quintero & Leyson Jimmy
Lugo Perea

To cite this article: Jhon Jairo Losada Cubillos, Hernán Felipe Trujillo Quintero &
Leyson Jimmy Lugo Perea (2022): Extractive Logic of the Coloniality of Nature: Feeling-
Thinking Through Agroecology as a Decolonial Project, Capitalism Nature Socialism, DOI:
10.1080/10455752.2022.2127416

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2127416

Published online: 26 Sep 2022.

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CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM
https://doi.org/10.1080/10455752.2022.2127416

Extractive Logic of the Coloniality of Nature:

Feeling-Thinking Through Agroecology as
a Decolonial Project
a b
Jhon Jairo Losada Cubillos , Hernán Felipe Trujillo Quintero and
c
Leyson Jimmy Lugo Perea
a
Center of Philosophy of Law, Catholic University of Louvain, Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium;
b
Faculty of Economic and Management Sciences, Universidad Católica de Colombia, Bogotá,
Colombia; cDepartment of Interdisciplinary Studies, Universidad del Tolima, Ibagué,
Colombia

ABSTRACT
The following paper intends to discuss the effects of colonial power on nature,
especially on the understanding of agriculture from the dialogue between
decolonial approach and agroecology. It addresses the potential of
agroecology within decolonial activities mainly in three scenarios: (i) the
epistemological, as an alternative to scientific rationality; (ii) the political, as
an alternative to the hegemony imposed by racial and patriarchal criteria;
and (iii) the ontological, as an alternative to the dualist, individualist and
atomizing of modernity. The main thesis is that the notions about “nature”
and “environment”, which are associated with agricultural practices and
capitalist-type practices, are consequences of power relations that are
inscribed in the modernity- coloniality relationship and can be understood as
epistemological and ontological assumptions based on an extractive logic.
Finally, the importance of political work (or defiance) is discussed from the
perspective of relationality and the pluri-verse in which agroecology can be a
transformative option of decoloniality.

ARTICLE HISTORY Received 16 October 2019; Accepted 12 April 2022

KEYWORDS Agroecology; extractivism; coloniality of nature; decoloniality

Introduction
The discussions around “nature” and “environment” in the field of social
sciences are not novel. Several antecedents could be pointed out, such as
environmental studies, ecological economics and in general in socio-ecologi-
cal system frameworks, as it is documented in papers such as Alvarado and
Pineda (2014), Ávila-García (2016), among others. These perspectives have

CONTACT Jhon Jairo Losada Cubillos jhon.losada@uclouvain.be Center of Philosophy of Law,

Catholic University of Louvain, Place Montesquieu 2, SSH/JURI/PJTD - College Thomas More. L2.07.01,
Box 15, Louvain-la-Neuve 1348, Belgium
© 2022 The Center for Political Ecology
2 J. J. LOSADA CUBILLOS ET AL.

been consolidated as interdisciplinary interpretation frameworks for socio-

environmental, socio-territorial, socio-ecological conflicts, environmental
justice, etc., (for instance, the appropriation of natural resources). These
approaches have incorporated economical, ecological, and cultural dimen-
sions to their labor to explain the links between conflicts and degradation
of natural resources with poverty, education, hunger and marginalization
of human groups, inclusion of ethnic minorities, etc. In many cases, their
main task is to look for models of “sustainability” or “eco-friendliness”.
Despite recognizing the importance of the environmental turn that social
sciences have taken in recent years, there are few evidences of a proper ques-
tioning to the constituent matrix of colonial power, namely the coloniality,
which underlies the base of the power relationships in which environmental
conflicts are situated (Tetreault 2008; Alimonda 2011).
This critique not only intends to confront environmental or economic
problems, but also epistemological and ontological problems. There are
some approximations that assume in an articulated way epistemological
and ontological issues, especially those perspectives of the Global South,
which have long incorporated historical, feminist, and what was known in
the 1970s and 1980s as “3rd world”, i.e. peripheral perspectives on the
world-system. These approaches recognize the need to establish an intersec-
tion of categories such as class, race and gender (Davis 1983; Quijano and
Wallerstein 1992; Wynter 2003).
We understand the way in which coloniality of nature operates is through
what we call “extractive logic”: Extractivism is much more than a form of
appropriating “natural resources” or “biotic and abiotic factors”, it concerns
a destructive form of knowing, being and inhabiting the world. Nor should it
be understood as an invariable, singular, and automatically deployable space
of logic, which does not offer any margin for intervention; rather, we under-
stand the meaning of “logic” in the sense of permanent contradiction, as a
heterogeneous, antagonistic space in which many actors coexist and interact
continuously both in a way of domination and resistance.
It is a way of existence (Grosfoguel 2016) as well as a reductionist
approach that ignores the underlying socio-political claims (Levins and
Lewontin 1985). Starting from this, we point out that extractivism is a
power strategy of great strength that establishes its basis in coloniality; there-
fore, it articulates discursive and ontological levels, and maintains latent
domination worldwide strategies, which have been present for 500 years
(Acosta 2011).
One of the most valuable contributions of decolonial thought has been the
creation of a critical perspective that has facilitated an understanding of the
dynamics of colonial power. That is, how it works and what are the effects on
the different standards that give meaning to the current world (Dussel 1992;
Castro-Gómez and Grosfoguel 2007; Maldonado-Torres 2007; Mignolo
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 3

2009). Nevertheless, the task of drawing attention to unfolding coloniality

scenarios is an effort that even today has multiple unresolved challenges.
However, the most important “open questions” in decolonial thought has
to do with rethinking the human-nature relationship and the implications of
colonial power in the establishment of knowledge about environment and
the way humans related to nature, land, and agriculture (Escobar 2014,
2016; Alimonda 2011; Maristella 2011; Tamlit 2014). Since the development
of the decolonial approach, the field of the coloniality of nature has been
added to the coloniality of power, coloniality of knowledge and coloniality
of being (Bohórquez 2012).
This paper intends to settle from the decoloniality approach to discuss the
extractive logic of coloniality of nature, taking agroecology as a framework.
The paper is structured in three parts: The first one, to explain the link
between nature and coloniality on extractive logic. The second part develops
the agricultural project of modern-colonial capitalism. The third part pre-
sents agroecology as a strategic stage of decolonial action in two moments:
(i) The political struggle, decoloniality, and relationality and (ii) the shifting
from agroecology in decolonial transformations.

Nature and Coloniality on Extractive Logic

In the modern western conception of nature, some underlying epistemological
and ontological criteria legitimize the socio-environmental conflicts that cur-
rently threaten the existence of human species. At an ontological level, a rift is
proposed that establishes an essential difference between humankind and any
other living beings. In this regard, the living beings’s world is thought to be
comprised of two radically disjunctive kinds: animal species on one hand,
and humans on the other. Additionally, a particular interpretation of ontologi-
cal dualism is produced that leads to the belief, widespread in the western
world, that there are two existence planes: the material and the spiritual. In
addition, these are in constant opposition (body–soul, rationality-affectivity,
nature-culture, instinct-morality, etc.; all of which place man in opposition
to himself in one way or another). This kind of proposal places humans at
the center of every philosophical, political, and economic reflection thanks
to some sort of “exceptionalism”1 that has allowed them to possess historical
privileges. This has largely contributed to maintaining a dominant environ-
mental rationality that breaks with the diverse life forms and the “ontological
relations” that provide a means to consider alternative ways of being in the
world outside of the rational, modernist colonial order.
At an epistemological level, this lays the foundation for a type of knowl-
edge that increases the expectations of objectivity and scientificity. This
1
To further the debate about the “thesis of the human exceptionality”, we suggest Cf. (Schaeffer 2009).
4 J. J. LOSADA CUBILLOS ET AL.

comes from the assumption that the observer (res cogitans) is not part of the
observed (res extensa); thus, the objects of interest are pre-arranged to be
apprehended through a meta-discursive operation that represents reality,
providing an “illusion of transcendence”. Based on this mirage, it is believed
that knowledge can be separated from the conditions (either historical or
geographical) that made it possible and can be built on this standard of
abstraction, regardless of the social and natural base that lies beneath the
cognitive operation. This logocentrism is presented as an absolute starting
point, where the subject (rational, scientific, and modern) erases all the
knowledge learnt through cultural tradition and belief, becoming a tabula
rasa for objective, universal, and necessary facts (Castro-Gómez 2005).
Both ontological and epistemological axes configure what Dussel (1992)
refers to as the mythological character of modernity. They are interwoven
and intend to maintain the colonial hierarchies of power in the “modern
world.” It is worth adding that colonial power is a field of heterogeneous
forces that has strengthened hegemonically since the conquest of America.
This is a constitutive, dividing, and antagonistic power, which is neither
reduced nor limited to the ontic level, that is to say the political, military,
and economic effects of the colonial framework. In this train of thought, colo-
nial power goes further than the rates of poverty, illiteracy, malnourishment,
or unemployment. Nor is it diminished by constructing subjectivities, identi-
ties, and schemas of cultural representation (poor, underdeveloped, excluded,
etc.). Instead, it creates a violent picture (racist, sexist, and extractive), which
upholds its domain by making its operations invisible. Such a grammar of
power is not empirically traceable; it is constitutive, and in this sense, it oper-
ates at the level of being (the lived experience of a colonized subject), gender
(patriarchal relationships), and nature (extractive relationships).
At the core of the tensions produced by these ontological and epistemo-
logical issues, the concept of a coloniality of nature emerges (Romero 2015;
Losada and Trujillo 2017). This dimension of coloniality (different from
knowledge, power, and being) refers to an appropriation of the ancient
relationships among human beings, plants, and animals, as well as the elim-
ination of the spiritual and ancestral worlds. In fact, the coloniality of nature
has tried to exclude the rationality that is the basis for life, cosmology, and
thought within many indigenous and afro-descendant communities
(Walsh 2007; Escobar 2008).
This concept of coloniality evidences the urgent need to activate and think
about the environmental turn of decoloniality, assuming it as an ethical and
political need (Maristella 2011; Parra-Romero 2016). Additionally, this turn
implies an actual alternative to the current hegemonic state of extractivism
and developmentalist domination through social, political, and environ-
mental intervention projects (e.g. agroecology). These projects occupy
spaces of power where struggles arise against the sexist and racist practices
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 5

promoted by the colonial matrix of power. The word “turn” intends to

neither recognize nor legitimize a kind of “new trend” in decolonial
approaches. On the contrary, the “turn” warns about discussions regarding
the material reconfigurations and the current colonial power dynamics,
especially the ones related to development and nature.
In the Colombian case, the reduction of the forest frontier in the Andes
and the Amazon has been a “conscious” State strategy. The underlying
rationality behind it has been the political and economic institutions,
which throughout the last four centuries have promoted the occupation of
tropical rainforests and the high Andean forests, which has great water
reserves, transforming them into pastures, mainly dominated by extensive
livestock farming. In the capitalist conception or chrematistic vision (Martí-
nez and Roca 2000), dominated by the idea of the massive sales of products
derived from agricultural work that guarantees a surplus, forests are deemed
to be priceless, so they are deforested at high speeds (between 2001 and 2018,
4.07 million hectares were lost)2 and replaced by crops and cattle, mostly
non-native species, all of which further degrade the soil and negatively
affect the natural water cycle.
Thus, market incentives allow rural territories to be very valuable when it
is deforested, disregarding the wealth of its inherent biodiversity. The
Amazon rainforest, of which about 40 million hectares falls within the terri-
tory of Colombia, is being replaced at a rate of 150 thousand hectares
annually, further fueling local and national socio-environmental conflicts
(Losada and Trujillo 2017).

The Agricultural Project of Modern/Colonial Capitalism

The global economy is usurping traditional agriculture. Ancestral agricul-
tural knowledge does not align with the interest associated with a free
market economy. This can be attributed to the fact that their processes are
not suitable for mass production nor are products guaranteed to be repro-
duced rapidly within large quantities to maintain increasing economic
growth. As a result, the extractive logic of capital becomes the blueprint
for society’s decisions, which in terms of Shiva (2012) represents a war
economy. This can be seen where the extractive logic of capital functions
as a weapon of mass destruction to obtain production technologies that
promote the appropriation of vital and living resources of the planet. For
example, patented seeds, which millions of farmers are forced to use, gener-
ates unequal access to genetic products that affect the social fabric, especially
in the global South (Shiva 2005).
2
The data were obtained from the portal Global Forest Watch, that provides data for forest monitoring,
here: https://bit.ly/3QGaAJJ.
6 J. J. LOSADA CUBILLOS ET AL.

Globalization, as a colonial power structure, maintains capital as its most

effective weapon. This is best illustrated in terms of how the growth of wealth
and privileges are exclusively measured through the Gross Domestic Product
(GDP). More importantly, capital serves as a guarantee of protection as it is
used to finance military spending, which in turn guarantees order.
The insatiable need for wealth, privileges, and order has afforded capital
an unprecedented importance, allowing it to occupy spaces that serve its
interest and unhindered expansion. Juxtaposed to this, free access to
resources limits the growth of capital, making it necessary to define and
defend property rights and everything required to guarantee the unrest-
rained growth of capital, in defiance of non-human life, water, genetics,
and knowledge, necessary to guarantee the sustainable growth of capital.
Thus, for example, knowledge is not aimed at finding cheaper and more
efficient ways to solve significant human problems, instead it threatens the
“good” life of society with the development of weapons, fossil hydrocarbon
extraction techniques or polluting vehicles, among others. Provided that
these inventions are engineered with apparent neutrality, where a reduction-
ist perspective avoids questioning scientific production with ideological
biases. However, reductionism will ignore the fact that, deep down,
science also has socio-political pretensions that favor capital and lead knowl-
edge towards proletarianization (Levins and Lewontin 1985).
Similarly, capital has a broad capacity for adaptation and reinvention. The
last 30 years have witnessed the ability of capital to generate high social con-
sensus through an emphasis on “green businesses” or “sustainable agricul-
ture”, all within the framework of the so-called “sustainable development”.
However, O’Connor (1993), has already pointed out in the short term the
inverse relationship between ecological sustainability and profitability. As a
result, it ceases to be a simple ecological and/or economic problem, but
instead becomes a political or ideological issue, the domain in which the
most destructive predation of capital remains.
It can be noted that modern agriculture appears because of the industri-
alization of life that capitalism promotes. This has prompted the develop-
ment of modern representations of progress and well-being, guided by a
scientific and technical knowledge that has promised to improve human
living conditions and guaranteed the Earth’s health, unaware of the profound
environmental crisis that modern western dualism has caused. Conse-
quently, it is a practice promoted by extractive agro-capitalism, supported
by political projects to increase production and optimize profitability, such
as those of the “green revolution.” This type of agriculture is characterized
by (1) being highly dependent on chemically synthesized supplies; (2) occu-
pying large extensions of land; (3) monocultures; (4) the use of high-cost and
high-energy technologies; (5) being guided by corporate thinking; (6) being
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 7

linked to the market and the industry paradigm. After all, these factors deter-
mine what must be produced, in which amounts, and for which markets.
It should be noted, as well, that the most powerful analytical key to under-
standing the effects and reaches of the environmental crisis is the way agri-
culture has been positioned within industrial matrices given by the colonial
power. As a result, agriculture has been reduced to a commodity according to
capitalist market logic. Subsequently, agriculture has been downgraded to a
simplistic extractive activity, guided by corporate knowledge, which is opti-
mized by technological solutions whereas environmental and cultural effects
have become catastrophic. On the other hand, following the line of thought
of modern logic, said corporate knowledge set millenary knowledge aside for
being pure intuitions that would contribute little or nothing to the modern-
ization of agriculture. This explains the emergence of agroecology as a criti-
cal field that would be configured in three different ways: as knowledge, as a
lifestyle and as a social movement.
One of the issues, or in Escobar’s words, “fables” (1995), that introduced
agriculture in the framework of the industrial matrix and plunged it into the
tensions of the coloniality of nature can be traced back to the western dis-
course of hunger. In the sixties, this caused the green revolution, among
other surges, which was presented as one of the main strategies to “free
humankind from the scourge of hunger employing the application of the
latest scientific and technological discoveries in biology and agronomy.”
(Escobar 1995, 171). This means that hunger became the leitmotif during
that time, which promoted practices such as the industrialization of agricul-
ture, because only then performance could be optimized and production
increased to relieve hunger through the exclusive use of technology. This
encouraged the emergence of the so-called green revolution – and its
broad influence both in agriculture and the curricula – while its disastrous
effects persist today. Escobar added that hunger is constituted by all the dis-
courses that refer to it. This amongst others can be seen through using grand
strategies that, in their appearance, create the illusion of progress and
change.
The subjectivities and technical-scientific knowledge that develop around
this imaginary have shaped agriculture within the dynamics of capitalist
market. Thus, disciplines such as agronomy have turned out to be ideal
mechanisms of knowledge to cover the context of agricultural production
since the mid-20th century: “A typical agricultural engineer from that time
came to have the almost absolute role of bringing ‘progress’ to rural areas;
in other words, transforming traditional agriculture by adopting the
materials and techniques of industrial origin” (Ceccon 2008, 23).
This was how the “hegemonic” power over agricultural production was
forged. This made a greater difference and contrasted with “overdue” and
traditional agriculture, by displacing it from the hegemonic agro-capitalist
8 J. J. LOSADA CUBILLOS ET AL.

precept. The colonial power objectifies agriculture and inserts it in the indus-
trial matrix, supported in a technical protocol constituted by a large number
of agrochemicals. Furthermore, it placed agronomy on a pedestal to establish
universal truths around corporate agricultural knowledge that “channeled”
the green revolution as the central technical argument for productivity.
After all, for the colonial power, agriculture matters if and only if it is
competitive.
In this logic, the features of the Colombian Amazon Region, specifically,
those related to extractive activities, are contrasted with the “hegemonic”
models promoted by the National Government program (through the
Visión Amazonía -Amazon Vision-)3 or economic associations, such as the
National Federation of Ranchers “FEDEGAN”.4 They promote productive
reconversion projects to reduce pressure on the Amazonian forests by the
cattle activity, seeking to go from extensive cattle raising to silvo-pastoral
systems, increasing the efficiency of cattle production per unit area.
However, contrary to the initial purpose, between 2016 and 2017 the
number of cattle went from 1,078,074 to 1,244,526,5 an increase of 15.5
percent.
In this same sense, there are reconversion projects aimed at plantations of
timber trees that are conceived as favorable to recover the connectivity of
forests, but that are becoming in monocultures that reduce the biological
diversity of the region, as in the case of Curillo, Caquetá, where there are
150 hectares cultivated with ivory tree to the detriment of other tree
species with which it competes for water, nutrients, and radiation.

Agroecology as a Strategic Stage of Decolonial Action

In consensus, agroecologists suggest that agroecology emerged in the second
half of the 20th century, as a critical field that questioned and problematized
the hegemony of economic rationality, which caused an environmental crisis
that made its failure evident as a political and historical project. In more
specific terms, the emergence of agroecology is due to the “confinement”
applied by the agro-capitalist power to agriculture, by inscribing it in a rig-
orous industrial matrix. This matrix, largely supported by the presupposi-
tions of the green revolution, promotes a supposed agrarian
3
The “Vision Amazon Program” (Visión Amazonía) develops actions in Colombian municipalities in the
Amazon region with the highest deforestation and prioritizes actions to reduce deforestation in the
Amazon Biome. The complete information of the program can be consulted in the following link:
https://visionamazonia.minambiente.gov.co/.
4
Farmers are trained in silvo-pastoral systems as “environmentally friendly models” with guides such as
those found in the following link: https://www.fedegan.org.co/modulo-sistemas-silvopastoriles.
5
Data obtained from the Bovine Inventory of ICA, public institution (Inventario Bovino). Those found in
the following link: https://www.ica.gov.co/areas/pecuaria/servicios/epidemiologia-veterinaria/censos-
2016/censo-2018.aspx.
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 9

modernization. In the long run, this would operate in a degrading and devas-
tating logic, since “technological knowledge supplanted empirical knowledge
determined by the experience of the farmer [who happened to] employ a set
of unprecedented technical innovations, including agrochemicals (…)”
(Ceccon 2008, 22). Hence, agriculture has been reduced to a simple extrac-
tive activity, guided by corporate knowledge, which had to be optimized by
technological packages. The ecological, environmental, and cultural effects
were catastrophic; and, the market vision, following extractive logic, rele-
gated the ancient knowledge (or “traditional practices”) which has been
deemed too overdue with little or no contributions applied to the modern-
ization of agriculture.
In contrast, agroecology emerges as a new perspective, that in addition to
questioning these aspects, it has come to propose a profound transformation
of conventional agrarian praxis. Moreover, it sets out to contribute to the
mitigation of the environmental crisis, which is why it is deployed in three
directions: as a social movement, a science, and a lifestyle.
The first one constitutes a stance that activists and intellectuals carry out
to confront “the postulates of the green revolution and the ideas of classical
development” (León 2014), as well as the socio-environmental problems and
conflicts that arise from the established interest that the agro-industrial logic
inserted in agriculture. The second aspect refers to the commitment of a par-
ticular group of academics to make of agroecology a scientific paradigm that
initiates “(…) from epistemological bases, which are quite different from
those of conventional science, to effectively face the environmental problems
resulting from industrial agriculture” (Gómez, Ríos, and Eschenhagen 2015,
680). However, what makes agroecology epistemically distinctive is the
emphasis on ancestral knowledge as a blueprint for the pairing of agriculture
with the ecosystem and cultural dynamics of the territories. Finally, agroecol-
ogy as a lifestyle refers precisely to knowledge and practices that farmers and
indigenous women and men have accumulated over the millennia (Tonolli,
Sarandón, and Greco 2019).
In summary, agroecology has dealt with the ecological, political, and
environmental effects of industrial agriculture, against which it has validated
a wide range of proposals that not only contradict the viability of the indus-
trial model but also counteract its effects. However, for the purpose of
showing agroecology as a part of the ongoing struggle for decolonization,
we will refer to the non-western place of agroecology which is referred as
a place of counter-hegemonic enunciation, while re-affirming knowledge,
local practices, and experiences that have been “outside” of western hegemo-
nic rationality.
10 J. J. LOSADA CUBILLOS ET AL.

Political Struggle, Decoloniality and Relationality

The main issue that concerns us, is related to the processes of transformation
and construction of subjectivities, both capable of committing to political
and ontological issues, that is, of experiencing the necessary decentralization
in relation to the forms of colonial imposition. The central argument is the
subjectivation of ways of life capable of addressing relational experiences that
detach them from imposed identities. Fanon (1952) insisted on the need to
involve self-experiences and integrate projects to reconnect with reality.
However, the transition to the decentralization of subjectivities that Fanon
identifies in his time (like a sociogenetic work) does not open spontaneously.
On the contrary, the fissure that makes possible his liberation can be closed,
contained, or repressed in favor of confinement in the repetition of the domi-
nant ideals. These include the universal soul, the exceptionalism of man and
his superiority as a thinking being, the resistant humanism, among others. It
is necessary to look for a significant that is subtracted to such dominant
ideals.
Arturo Escobar identifies this signifier with the Earth, hence his formu-
lation of “Thinking-Feeling with the Earth” (Escobar 2014). It is about oper-
ating a decentralization for a sort of reason focused on the domination and
control of the dualistic ideal that prevails in modern colonial rationality; but
above all, it consists of finding a step towards what escapes us. In other
words, with earth’s diversity is born, since it carries and generates a multi-
plicity of existences, a situation of “pluri-verse” and not uni-verse (Escobar
2018).
Escobar (2008, 2010) has put a particular emphasis on the relational
ontologies idea (which is directly connected with postulates such as those
provided by Levins and Lewontin (1985) from dialectical materialism). If
the “domination ontology” categorizes, frames and separates, the relational
ontologies de-categorize, displace, and link. In a relational ontology, no
entity is constituted as self-sufficient and closed in itself as distinct and,
therefore, as something for appropriating and exploiting, an entity is never
a closed element, but rather a point of passage, an intermediary.
Escobar explains that non-dualistic relational ontologies are those in
which the relationships that constitute it do not pre-exist. In these ontolo-
gies, life is entirely interrelated and interdependent. But it is because there
is diversity that life is constituted according to these fundamental tones: rela-
tionality and the common. Diversity opens the gateway to multiple forms of
intra and extra-specific relationships while establishing a common environ-
ment for all these relationships. In this situation, multiple entities are
uprooted from their inertia, come into the relationship, and acquire
meaning and value a process known as “cultural”. In fact, it is simply this
common value that entities acquire through their connection. These
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 11

“collective configurations” form a “materially settled history” (Escobar 2008)

to territoriality that defines them. However, even if these ontologies existed
long before the European colonial world and were still present in various
communities and social groups, indigenous peoples and afro-descendants,
the question that arises is to know how to activate the relationality. More
specifically in scenarios where the ontological dualist matrix of the dominant
power inherited from colonialist modernity still prevail.
We can say that this concerns a form of political defiance or ontological
disobedience (Burman 2017), which implies theorizing and exercising the
constituent relationality of all that is real of the worlds it constitutes (that
cannot be reduced to the appreciation of capital or the principles of liberal
philosophy). The key concepts here are “ontology”, “relationality” and “the
multiverse”. In this perspective, ontology refers to the premises that the
various social groups maintain about the entities that really “exist” in the
world. It must be emphasized that relational ontologies are those in which
the biophysical, human, and supernatural worlds are not considered separate
entities, but rather are links of continuity established between them (Escobar
2008). In other words, in many non-western or non-modern societies, there
is no division between nature and culture, as we know it, and even less
between the individual and the community; there the territories are vital
spaces and moments of interrelation with the natural world (Thinking-
Feeling).
At the same time, the political activation of relationality implies limiting
the power of the idea of an autonomous and depoliticized subject, and
instead focuses on the relationship and radical idea of community, in
which people exist in relation to each other, in a broad sense, the land, the
natural beings, etc. Striving to activate the relationality politically, is to
fight for the “pluriverse” (pluriversality), as the primary form of political
action. For Escobar, this “activation” work can already be seen in what
happens within areas such as environmental activism and food sovereignty
and also, in certain trends in higher education and professional settings
with new conceptions of “trade” and alternative economies, digital technol-
ogies, specific varieties of urban ecology and green technologies, as well as in
emerging transitional frameworks in the Global North and alternatives to
development and Well-Living (Buen vivir) in the countries of the Global
South (Escobar 2017, 185).

Shifting the Role of Agroecology in Decolonial Transformations

The term “agroecology” gained credibility in the 1960s and 1970s, a tumul-
tuous period in which significant revolutions emerged as expressions of
rejection and dissatisfaction with the controlling and devastating structures
of global power (Lugo and Rodríguez 2018). In the wake of these movements,
12 J. J. LOSADA CUBILLOS ET AL.

agroecology emerged as a critical and counter-hegemonic field confronting

the colonial project and, for the purpose of this paper, challenging the
power relations where agriculture is subsumed. In addition to this, agroecol-
ogy emerged as the answer to a profound environmental crisis, understood
as a consequence of the dominant civilizing model, i.e. the hegemonic life-
style widely supported by the controlling and devastating structures that
result from modern ideas of progress and well-being (Noguera 2004).
Agroecology impacts and has become valuable for the decolonial struggle.
For this reason, we intend to show the potential of agroecology within deco-
lonial actions, mainly in three scenarios: the epistemological (dialogue of
knowledges), as an alternative to scientific rationality; the political (resistance
and strategy), as an alternative to the hegemonic and depoliticized order
imposed by racial and patriarchal criteria; and the ontological (relationality)
seen as an alternative to the dualist, particularist and atomizing ontology of
modernity.
Regarding the first scenario, it is worth mentioning that the agroecological
literature is well known for recognizing the considerable importance of
knowledge gathered by farmers, natives and afro-descendants, in terms of
its potential to redirect the agricultural practices to harmonize with
nature. As stated by Altieri, this knowledge usually turns into multidimen-
sional strategies of production (for instance, diversified ecosystems with
multiple species). Thus, traditional knowledge is made visible and noticeable
in the epistemic constitution of agroecology since agriculture must be guided
by this knowledge (1991).
Traditional and local knowledge refers to a complex set of inherited ways
of doing, or wisdom (not only technical but spiritual) accumulated by
farmers, from immemorial times, through the various agricultural practices
that allowed them to maintain, protect, inhabit, and transform their multiple
realities. Agroecology places itself in relation to this knowledge not only to
strengthen its epistemological foundations, but also to comprehend the
inter-existence or dependence relationships between the human and the
non-human, particularly between farmers and the “natural resources” that
constitute their world. This relationship creates an overlapping knowledge
system which guides their ways of existing based on agroecosystems, to
borrow a term from agroecology.
In this manner, agroecology takes local knowledge into account to shape
agricultural time, and, in turn, agricultural practices shape local knowledge.
For millennia, farmers have validated their own explanatory frameworks,
reflected in taxonomies and physiological cycles of plants and animals, as
well as in their interpretations of time, climate cycles, meteorological
phenomena, etc. All of this is the result of continuous observation and
praxis derived from their closed bonds and connection to their natural rea-
lities. There is an inherited knowledge derived from those experiences “that
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 13

allows them to support their practices of occupying space within their life in
the countryside”. Local knowledge is basically “millenary human creations
that allow us to comprehend the reality, or the multiple realities, where
different human groups insert themselves” (Lugo, Rodríguez, and García
2017, 67).
The second scenario is the political field. Since it promotes mechanisms of
collective action that lead to forms of resistance in opposition to the modern-
ization of traditions and the defense of life and territory, particularly in
regard to methods of creating and recreating agriculture, Agroecology can
also be understood within the frame of social movements.6 This aspect is
related to the recognition of small-scale producers, farmers, natives
(Toledo 2012) and, above all, communities that have fostered these dynamics
in their local territories. Basically, agroecology as a social movement can be
considered as a critical model to deal with the effects of globalization and the
limits of modernity.
A relevant aspect that should be highlighted for this second field is the fact
that agroecological practices (as social movements) facilitate the prioritiza-
tion of domestic work within its program. While agroecology favors the
use of organic matter (which is mostly produced at home), it occupies
small extensions of land as opposed to industrial-scale production, giving
room for both rural and ancestral knowledge and spirituality. Importantly,
this leads to the satisfaction of family needs rather than those of the capitalist
market. As such, it is a more strategic and favorable scenario to politicize the
direction of an economy that has its roots in domestic work, its influence on
the dynamization of collective struggles, and the importance of women’s
unremunerated labor in the process of capitalist accumulation (Federici
2013).
Thus, when women occupy this fundamental role within the agroecologi-
cal practice, since they have a direct influence on the reproduction and the
fostering of life (not only human life); they establish political interactions
between social movements, domestic work, the defense of territory and of
the communal. The pursuit of an economic and political decolonial imagin-
ary needs to comprehend those specific projects related to economic trans-
formation do not provide guidelines for everyday actions (Gibson-Graham
2011).
Finally, the ontological scenario refers to the agroecological work in terms
of the creation and re-creation of agriculture, the latter being a constituent
act in the rural way of being, doing and knowing. Agroecology can be

6
We understand movements here as “a central actor for social transformation” (Flórez-Flórez 2015, 29),
which then helps to question, among other aspects, the hegemonic modes of control and manipu-
lation over agriculture. The denial of “traditional” ways of being, doing and knowing; as well as the
political decisions that contribute to the relationships of hegemonic control that colonial power
exerts over nature.
14 J. J. LOSADA CUBILLOS ET AL.

understood as a lifestyle that conceives agriculture as the biological basis that

allows us to maintain, inhabit, take care of, coexist and inter-exist with all
other natural subjects (Giraldo 2013). Undoubtedly, this notion of agroecol-
ogy is found in the agriculture displaced by industrial agriculture widely sup-
ported by hegemonic practices such as the green revolution. This displaced
agriculture, besides opposing the hegemonic process of modernization, is
neither standardized nor directed in response to capitalist logics like expor-
tation, intensive use of chemically synthesized products, processing, etc. On
the contrary, it is an agriculture constituted as a way of being that produces
human beings. In other words, agriculture is an expression -and consti-
tution- of agroecological subjectivities in terms of experience, presence,
care, protection and belonging to a place (Giraldo 2013). Thus, the
problem of the dualist ontology of modernity is the dis/re-connection calls
for relationality itself as the solution. In these ontologies, life is interrelation
and interdependence (Escobar 2017).
Therefore, agroecology shows a relevant potential for the activation/con-
nection of relationality via the concept of “agricultural worlds,” understand-
ing them as agricultural patterns formed by a community of relations and
interrelations between humans, plants, and animals, where beliefs, rites
and spirituality mingle. It is about an agricultural relationality based on
inter-existence, coupled to the ecological dynamics of territories where agri-
cultural being, doing and knowing can prevail, and is upheld by caring,
inhabiting and transforming, beyond meeting the demands of the market.
From this position, “the agricultural world” can be discovered in two
different spaces. The first of them contains a microcosm called Finca
[farm]: a spatial totality where an agricultural subject and his or her family
shape agricultural patterns interconnected and interrelated between them-
selves, and a mixed landscape with plants and animals that coexist in one
single connection. This is different from the fragmented one that is categor-
ized into agroecosystems, i.e. subsystems that are part of the greater system,
as suggested in the paradigmatic systems theory proposed by the eurocentric
rationality. The Finca, then, constitutes the field where the agricultural
subject erects agricultural worlds from non-modern symbols as a form of
relational, aesthetic, and poetic configurations for inhabiting a shared
world. Said configurations answer to the sensibility and affection between
the agricultural subjects and their lands in a mutual transformation, co-con-
structing a “bidirectional relation where the Agricultural inhabits their land
while, on the contrary, that land inhabits them through a collection of
symbols, rituals and affects” (Giraldo 2018, 106).
The second space refers to a type of agriculture that, though still inserted
within modern imperatives, constitutes agriculture woven into the areas
between the disciplined and geometric agriculture that is directed by the
rhetoric of modernity. This can be seen, for instance, in some fincas from
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 15

the village Coello-Cocora (Ibague, Tolima), where farmers usually leave

more space between coffee plants to establish an agriculture of resistance –
or as Arturo Escobar prefers, of r(e)xistencias [re-existences] – in fields
under the direction of colonial power structures like the National Federation
of Coffee Growers. This seeks to create an agricultural framework in line with
their subjective achievements, rather than responding to any capitalist logic.
This opens the possibility of recognizing subjective and intersubjective
meeting places in agricultural worlds, where, by means of knowledge and
practice, a complex agroecological multiple reality is built. It is important
to consider that agroecology can be found anywhere: in an old piece of
junk, a flowerpot, an orchard, a wire fence where ivy of no commercial sig-
nificance (but enormous familiar significance) wriggles through the plants
that grow near the house thanks to kitchen scraps (pluriverses). Agricultural
worlds are thus “a net of interrelations where nothing exists in the linear,
determined and fragmented way western reasoning believed it to” (Lugo
and Rodríguez 2018, 100).
A brief example can be seen in Líbano township (Colombia), in rural com-
munities that have been in the process of agroecological transition for several
years. They have achieved the reconversion of their conventional ways of
being, doing and knowing towards other agroecological ones, assuming
agroecology as a world-view that has allowed them to reconfigure their
ways of life. In addition, they have been able to take a counter-hegemonic
stance that gives another meaning to their practices and re-configures
their territories, taking distance from presuppositions and hegemonic ratio-
nales that have historically oriented the “development”.
These farmer families understand, practice, and live their lives through
agroecology. They criticize the ways of doing agriculture associated with
the degrading protocols of modern agriculture and conventional agronomic
technical rationality. This has implied the reconversion of their agrarian
practices by inscribing them in the organic and ecological rationality that
agroecology proposes and promotes. Hence, agroecology has been appro-
priated by farmers as their ways of being in their agricultural worlds, chan-
ging their interrelation with human and non-human beings, with whom they
coexist. These aspects helped to overcome the technical-productive plane,
transforming agricultural practices until conceiving it as a lifestyle that
gives sensitivity, spirituality, emotionality, aesthetics, and tranquility to
farmer existence.
Once the farmers reconfigured their living spaces oriented by that agroe-
cology, they assumed as a life project, they created realities (worlds) that inte-
grate with the biophysical and cultural dynamics of territory. These aspects
allow us to understand that groecology has a broad array of possibilities to
transform the ways of life adjusted to the rigorous and degrading standards
of modern hegemonic rationality. Agroecology allows us to move towards
16 J. J. LOSADA CUBILLOS ET AL.

other logics, rationalities, understanding modes, designs, stories, experi-

ences, and importantly different ways of life more harmoniously coupled
to a natural balance and from which others can learn, disseminate and
replicate.

Conclusion
Coloniality operates in different scenarios, which we have summarized at two
levels: the discursive and the ontological. We have shown that the coloniality
of nature produces an interaction of these two fields of power to function.
Through its operationalization unfolds a series of mechanisms that revitalize
and legitimize the developmental and extractivist model which establishes
the foundations of the contemporary global economy.
As it has been noted, the coloniality of nature implies, firstly, the omission
of traditional knowledge from the scientific order of modernity. It demands a
particular way of bringing together subjects and their objects of interests.
Secondly, it involves a political project of degradation or a denial of life.
Thereafter, extractive developmental activities and its different pathological
manifestations such as violence, ecocide or femicide, become the accepted
norm. Lastly, it encompasses a dualist ontology where a radical and vast dis-
tance between two modes of existence is established, in other words, a divi-
sive hierarchical relationship that prioritizes human actions and the
privileges that accompany the human condition.
The effects of developmental efforts are not simply symbolic imaginaries
or issues for regimes of representation. They have material, political and, of
course, economic implications. It is, ultimately, a degrading political project
that seems to disregard those lives that are not useful to the extractivist logic
of development, but also to depoliticize the economic practices in order to
detach the economy and distance it from the people’s will. For that reason,
as has been proposed an “environmental turn of decoloniality” is required.
A conversion that frames an ethical and political commitment to reach a
transition towards a hegemonic decolonial system.
Nonetheless, for a project of this nature to be introduced as a real alterna-
tive form of resistance and decolonial struggle, as is agroecology in our
opinion, it must achieve some minimum criteria, at least in three settings
of activity: knowledge, politics, and ontology. It must promote a dialogue
of knowledge, where traditional wisdom and spirituality from natives,
farmers and afro-descendants are recovered within the Colombian context.
Furthermore, it must move towards the reproduction and defense of life,
both human and non-human. To do so, it should start with the politicization
of domestic work and the reevaluation of the social movements and their
struggles for the common good, especially through the actions of women
who bring the economic practice to life in everyday settings. Finally, we
 CAPITALISM NATURE SOCIALISM 17

think that relational ontologies must be activated. Although they have been
resisted in ways hidden and shielded from modernity/coloniality, they have
not been prominent within the field of large-scale political decisions. We
think it is not enough to merely raise awareness of “other ways of being in
the world.” It is also necessary to start an ontological/political reconstruction
firmly focused on the “the agricultural worlds”.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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