LIVING AND PERSISTING IN THE RUINS OF THE ANTHROPOCENE: agroecology and the common in the Southern Pampa

Abstract

This article examines how territorially grounded agroecological practices in the Southern Brazilian Pampa constitute forms of reorganization of life within the ruins of the Anthropocene, understood as a historically situated social phenomenon marked by structural inequalities. It challenges universalizing narratives of environmental collapse by arguing that, for large sectors of the Global South, ecological and social ruin is a long-standing condition linked to colonialism, racism, and capitalism. Methodologically, the study draws on sociological analysis of agroecological experiences, territorial networks, and community-based practices, with particular attention to initiatives centered on common-based management and territorial permanence. The findings demonstrate that agroecology, when practiced as a common, goes beyond technical or productive dimensions and emerges as a politics of living, fostering multispecies relations, alternative temporalities to capitalist time, and collective practices of care for seeds, soil, and water. These experiences articulate a political imagination rooted in the present, oriented not toward technocratic promises of salvation but toward the everyday persistence of life under conditions of crisis. The article concludes that effective responses to climate change are constrained less by a lack of scientific knowledge than by the structural logic of capitalism, and that agroecological practices in the Southern Pampa reveal the concrete viability of alternative futures grounded in the common, socio-environmental justice, and the refusal of collapse as an inevitable horizon.