For decades, Latin America has played an important role in shaping global culture, often without receiving full recognition. Today, globalization has slowly opened a door for Latin excellence to no longer be filtered, softened, or translated into something more “palatable.” It has arrived on the global stage in its most authentic form.
Benito Antonio Ocasio Martinez, also known by his stage name, Bad Bunny, is at the crux of this shift. When he opened the Super Bowl LX halftime show last February, he did not ease the audience in gently. He declared, "Que rico es ser Latino", translating to “how great it is to be Latino”. For over thirteen minutes, he sang exclusively in Spanish and brought Puerto Rican aesthetics, politics, and pride to one of the most-watched cultural events in the world.
As an ecology and impact consulting firm, we invite you to now think about what Latin American voices have been saying about ecology for the past 60 years.
Long before climate change was a mainstream headline in Europe or North America, Latin American thinkers were speaking about ecological devastation, not as an abstract future threat, but as a lived reality. One of the most powerful voices among them was Eduardo Galeano.
Born in Montevideo, Uruguay in 1940, Galeano began his career as a journalist and editor of Marcha, an influential weekly journal. When Uruguay's military coup forced him into exile in 1973, he continued writing. First in Argentina, then in Spain, always in Spanish. In time, Galeano became, among other things, "a literary giant of the Latin American left".
His 1971 book Open Veins of Latin America is known as one of the most widely read and cited works of twentieth-century Latin American resistance literature. In it, Galeano traces five centuries of the systematic extraction of Latin America's natural resources, such as gold, silver, rubber, oil, copper, and shows how the pillaging of the continent's land and ecosystems was inseparable from the pillaging of its peoples. Galeano presents what academics now call the "extractivist logic", the structural tendency to treat land and nature as an inexhaustible supply depot for the benefit of distant markets. Not as an abstraction but as a lived historical fact, documented mine by mine, river by river.
To date, more than one million copies of Open Veins have been sold worldwide, and it has been translated into numerous languages. It is also widely taught in universities, appearing on course syllabi across disciplines including history, anthropology, economics, and geography. A copy was even offered as a gift by Hugo Chavez to Barack Obama in 2009.
In his later years, Galeano spoke and wrote frequently about the relationship between environmental destruction and cultural impunity. "Our air is poisoned. Our water is poisoned. Our earth is poisoned," he told the radio program Living on Earth. In a message to the 2010 World People's Conference on Climate Change in Bolivia, Galeano declared "The rights of human beings and the rights of nature are two names of the same dignity." He argued that indigenous voices, long known for being dismissed and persecuted, held an ecological knowledge that the industrialized world urgently needed. The European conquest, he wrote, had condemned indigenous peoples for their communion with nature, for "idolatry." What had once been punished with death was now, Galeano suggested, the wisdom the world needed most.
Galeano did not stand alone. He was part of a broader intellectual and activist current that produced, over the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, a distinctive Latin American perspective on ecology. One rooted not in the Romantic tradition of wilderness preservation that shaped much of Northern environmentalism, but in the experience of colonized land, dispossessed peoples, and the indivisibility of social and environmental justice.
This current runs through the work of thinkers like Arturo Escobar, a Colombian anthropologist whose concept of "post-development" challenged the assumption that the Western model of economic growth represented the endpoint of human progress. Escobar's research gave academic grounding to indigenous concepts of well-being, particularly the Andean framework of Sumak Kawsay, or "living well", which positioned human communities as participants in ecosystems rather than managers of them. Where mainstream environmental discourse often frames nature as something to be protected from humans, Sumak Kawsay describes a relationship of mutual belonging.
The tradition also runs through the work of Eduardo Gudynas, a Uruguayan ecologist who developed the concept of "post-extractivism", a framework for thinking about what comes after an economy built on the removal of natural resources. His work has been widely influential in policy discussions across South America, where communities have long lived with the direct consequences of mining, drilling, and deforestation.
Berta Cáceres was a Lenca woman from Honduras who co-founded the Council of Popular and Indigenous Organizations of Honduras (COPINH) at the age of twenty. For years, she led a grassroots campaign against the construction of the Agua Zarca hydroelectric dam on the Gualcarque River, a river considered sacred by the Lenca people, whose communities depended on it. Her campaign combined legal filings, community organizing, and international outreach, and in 2015, she won. The dam project was halted, leading Cáceres to also win the Goldman Environmental Prize, often called the "Nobel Prize" of environmental activism.
Tragically, in 2016, Cáceres was assassinated in her home. Seven men were eventually convicted of her murder and evidence suggested that employees of the company building the dam had planned and paid for the killing. Cáceres's death brought international attention to a pattern that advocates in the region had been documenting for years. According to Global Witness, Latin America accounts for more than half of all recorded killings of land defenders and environmental activists globally. Colombia, Mexico, Brazil, Honduras, Guatemala, and Nicaragua consistently appear at the top of those numbers. The people being killed are disproportionately indigenous, disproportionately women, and disproportionately defending the specific territories where Galeano's "open veins" are still being opened.
The significance of Bad Bunny's halftime performance extended well beyond cultural spectacle. It was a demonstration that Latin American perspectives, expressed on their own terms, in their own language, without translation or apology, could command the attention of the world.
The tradition of Latin American ecological thought has been knocking on that door for decades. The thinkers and activists of the region were not waiting to be discovered; they were writing, organizing, and dying for their ideas long before the global conversation about climate and justice began to shift.
Eduardo Galeano once said he was "a writer obsessed with remembering, with remembering the past of America above all and above all that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to amnesia." What he remembered, and what the tradition he helped shape continues to insist upon, is that the health of the land and the dignity of its people have never been separate questions. They are, as he put it, two names of the same dignity.
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