Amazonia Center of the World: Telling Stories of Socioenvironmentalism as Struggles for a Planet of Many Worlds
- Cristina Yumie Aoki Inoue
- Thais Lemos Ribeiro
- Veronica Korber Gonçalves
- Juliana Schiel
- Vinícius Mendes
- João Elbio de Oliveira Aquino Sequeira
- Juliana Lins
2025-07-10
Considered a regional entity of the Earth system, Amazonia is close to its ecological tipping point. Nonetheless, over the last decades, socioenvironmental alliances have emerged in Brazilian Amazonia from battles for rights and forest protection, grounded in grassroots resistance movements, local Amazonian ontologies, scientific knowledge, and links with transnational environmental organizations. In this article, we take an ontological turn and ask, what if Amazonia is at the center of global environmental politics (GEP)? Political ontology is a heuristic device that challenges the one-world world and invites us to look closer into Amazonian worlds. We bring stories of socioenvironmentalism, evidencing resistance to the predatory development model imposed on the region and, above all, struggles for entangled ways of being and complex webs among spirits, the living and nonliving. We argue that these stories reveal ontological alliances that inspire ways of worlding GEP from the forest that are more attuned to the challenges of our time-places.