The themes of technological innovation, entrepreneurship, and organizing

BUILDING ENVIRONMENTAL RATIONALITY FOR SUSTAINABILITY: CREATIVITY IN THINKING, INNOVATIVE KNOWLEDGE AND SOCIOLOGICAL IMAGINATION

Environmental rationality does not only reorient innovation towards sustainability but re-signifies the concept of production. Ideas have always fed the economy and forged innovations as they entered into the productive processes in what Piero Sraffa (1973) named the “production of commodities by means of commodities”. But even though knowledge has become a commod­ity, the “innovations” of environmental rationality are novelties brought about in the “production of ideas by means of ideas”, of thinking by means of thinking. Following Heidegger (1957/1988), it is only though thinking that we can reflect on what has previously be thought, to bring about what there is still to be thought. If innovation is the process of purposely reorganizing what there is - re-setting reality, rearranging objective reality in the present world, applying available knowledge to produce a practical novelty-, to what extent does thinking that implies an act of no-thing­ness -thinking on Being and Becoming beyond the present reality of things; thinking that guides the deconstruction of the objectified world as to let the Being of nature and of culture be-, can be called an innovation? That is the predicament of environmental rationality, of an idea that reori­ents creativeness, inventiveness and innovation towards sustainability. If environmental decay is caused by the counter-ecological workings of modern rationality, then sustainability cannot be constructed by the self-reflection of modernity over its own rationality. Innovation for sustain­ability demands new thinking that transcends any innovation of knowledge within the paradigms of normal science and leads to the creation of a new rationality.

Environmental rationality as philosophical thinking emerges from a critical point and mo­ment in the evolution of modern civilization: that of an environmental crisis conceived as a turning point in history, triggered by a limiting frontier in the expansion and development of the established rationality. The environmental crisis is conceived as a crisis of knowledge, that is to say, a crisis brought about by the ways of think­ing and the forms of knowledge that guided the constitution ofprevalent economic rationality and the technological developments brought about by scientific and instrumental rationality - together with the ethical principles and values imbedded in such configurations of rationality-, that theorized, legalized and legitimized human actions in the building of an unsustainable world.

As a crisis in knowledge, environmentalism has launched innovative thinking that has impinged in several different domains of philosophy and science. However, environmental rationality is not ecologysed thinking; it goes beyond the articulation of disciplines and the blending of actual current knowledge developed by normal science. As a political philosophy, it goes beyond the simple adoption or application of philosophi­cal traditions or post-modern philosophy to the understanding of present problems and situations in our societies. Environmental rationality does not emerge as “thinking within normal science”, as the reflection of knowledge on social structure, or as the refinement of an already established logic (the reworking of what is at hand in the thinking principles and instruments of modern rationality). Environmental rationality is born from the stand­point of its transcendence of metaphysical think­ing, its externality to logocentrism of science and delinking from hegemonic dominant rationality.

Thus, the construction of sustainability, viewed in the perspective of environmental rationality implies the creation of new ways of thinking. Counter-hegemonic globalization demands the deconstruction ofthe one-dimensional oppressive force against diversity, difference and otherness. The unifying force born from the power of the One, the Universal, the General, theAbsolute Idea, and Systemic Totality, today globalized under the dominance of economic rationality, demands an epistemological decentralization, a Copernican revolution away from logocentric science - the centrality ofthought that insists on placing modern rationality at the center of the universe of human life. This external anchor point is the environment: environment as an epistemological concept. If environmental rationality must be thought of as other to the prevailing social rationality, it cannot emerge from any ontological or epistemological order - a cultural territory-, untouched by the prevalent world order. Environmental rationality is forged in the deconstruction of metaphysical, scientific, and postmodern thought - in the territori - alization of diversity, difference and otherness - on the basis of ecological potentialities and cultural knowledges that inhabit these unknown regions of the Real that are emerging from the South.

Environmental rationality impinges in knowl­edge but is rooted in the field of political ecology and environmental politics. It is expressed in the demands and struggles of peasant and indigenous peoples like the seringueiros (rubber tapers) movement of Chico Mendes and the network of community based river and land extractive reserves of the Amazon region in Brazil; it be­comes the mobilizing force of many indigenous peoples throughout the Latin American region, from the Seris in the Northern arid lands of So­nora, Mexico, to the Mapuches of Argentine and Chile, including the Coordination of Indigenous Peoples Organizations of the Amazonian Basin (COICA) and the Black communities of the Pacific Coast in Colombia, that are reaffirming their identities and reorganizing their productive practices for the management of their natural and cultural heritage, including their forests and genetic resources. These social environmental movements go beyond claims against biopiracy, ecological damages and the distribution ofbenefits from bioprospecting and ecotourism in the new geopolitics of economic-ecologic globalization, to demand their rights to re-establish their liveli­hoods and modes of production with nature (Porto Goncalves, 2001; Leff, 2002; Escobar, 2008).

The field of political ecology is becoming an emancipation force slowly extending to large peasant organizations like the landless move­ment in Brazil and to peaceful unarmed popular movements, as the Zapatistas in Chiapas Mexico and the Green Army of the Indigenous Peoples of the Ecuadorian Amazonia, that struggle for the preservation of their ecosystems and for a sustainable development based on the harmoni­ous coexistence of cultural diversity in a global­ized world. It is a struggle for reappropriation of their patrimony of natural and cultural resources and for the territorialization of an environmental rationality (Leff, 2009a).

From a critical perspective of the oppression and dependence of Latin America and the Third World, in relation to the hegemonic power of the globalized economy as the organizing centre of the world, environmental rationality emerges from a reflection on the Coloniality of Knowledge (Lander, 2000), to the construction of Knowledge from the South (Santos, 2008) as an epistemologi - cal struggle that accompanies social processes of emancipation in the perspectives of constructing alternative sustainable worlds for its peoples. The se reflections stem from a critique to Eurocen - trist ideas (from the foundation of metaphysics in Greek philosophy through postmodern thought), as well as dominant paradigms of scientific knowledge and modern technologies continue to be imposed to our societies, from the times of the colonial period, to the era of globalization. The ideas of Enlightenment that colonized our ways of thinking, our modes of production and our life-worlds, and have led - as a reaction - to the emergence of an emancipatory knowledge and political culture.

Environmental rationality as strategic knowl­edge, in its purpose to liberate the potentialities of nature and culture from the determinations infringed by the relationships of domination, exploitation, extermination, inequality and un­sustainability, turns to the recognition of social imaginaries, alternative forms of knowledge and traditional life-worlds denied and subjugated by dominant paradigms (Leff, 2010). However, this does not necessarily imply the possibility of de­linking and abandoning once and for all Western thinking. In order for the globalized World-system to be deconstructed and for other possible worlds to be constructed, the reconstruction of knowl­edges and of “other rationalities” emerging from “knowledge from the South” - from cultural knowledge and ecological potentials - encounter the established hegemonic economic and epis - temic world order. The emergent environmental rationality is constructed through a dialogue of knowledges with the critical Western thinking now underway in science, philosophy and ethics. Environmental rationality emerges not only from a spirit of emancipation, but from its epistemologi - cal standpoint in the margins and the externality to logocentric knowledge. Above all, it emerges, outside the realm of thought, from the ecological and cultural roots of a social movement for survival and resignification of human life. It is from this situated critical knowledge that Latin American

Environmental Thought contributes an original outlook to sustainability (Leff, 2011).

The epistemological inquiry set forth by that critical concept of the environment sowed a seed that fertilized the field of LatinAmerican environ­mentalism. This led to a new theoretical path that stimulated a critical revision of many of the most important theorists of modernity, from Karl Marx (1965) and Max Weber (1978), to Martin Hei­degger (1927/1951), Emmanuel Levinas (1977) and Jacques Derrida (1989), in order to attract their thoughts and transform them from the roots ofthe ecology and the cultures of Latin American territories. This epistemological odyssey - from eco-Marxism to political ecology and existential ontology rooted in ecology and culture - did not merely imply the influence of European thought on American lands. The theories forged in Europe were transformed from a critical perspective that was born from the sources of ecological potentials and the cultural diversity of our continent, that are fertilizing new fields of political ecology in Latin America. The concept of environment as potential; the concepts of difference and other­ness as cultural diversity rights, are typically Latin American. From this epistemological field, unique proposals about environmental complex­ity arose - beyond complex thought and the sci­ences of complexity - that displaced the critique of interdisciplinary methodologies and systems theories toward the dialogue of knowledge as an epistemological strategy to construct sustainable societies (Leff, 2003, 2006).

The pending debt of environmental rationality is that of building a more plural, direct and close dialogue with the indigenous savoirs and cultural knowledges imbedded in the social imaginaries, habitus and practices of the people of the region. Only by setting this dialogue into practice can a political ethic of difference emerge, one that ori­ents the cultural re-appropriation of the common heritage of humanity; a democratic and participa­tory management of the commons that challenges the totalitarian regime of meaning on nature and the dominance of the World economic order: a political ethics for diverse sustainable societies which neither submits to the merchandizing of nature, nor to an ecological order, nor to a general sense of Being, pretending to unify the views and interests of the people, that are differentiated by nature and culture.

Apart from a hegemonic or dominant rational­ity that forces a consensus in a unified knowledge, the solidarities that must be forged to construct a sustainable future for all peoples in our living planet, must recognize their differences, their ir­reducible otherness to a “common sense”, their being and becoming led by the heterogenesis of a new world order generated by coevolution of biocultural diversity and guided by a new envi­ronmental rationality.