Jorge Rojas Hernández

By Jorge Rojas Hernández and Javier Lastra Bravo

The quality of life in the South is coping with several problems and tensions that require solution: poverty, socio-territorial and climatic inequalities, lack of scientific and technological development, corruption, migration, lack of access to services, obsolescence of public institutions, and low citizen’s participation in the social affairs. There is a global crisis of the Anthropocene’s development model. Currently, this context explains multiple mobilizations such as social, environmental, gender, ethnic, working class, and student ones in the South, especially in Latin America. The mobilizations tend to deepen to the extent that the underlying problems are not solved with due urgency, depth, and focus on the human dignity. However, most people and communities value, practice, and aspire to improve their levels of quality of life. This is based on experiences and traditions—such as Living Well—that they have cultivated, beyond the empire of colonizing forces and based on common goods that have learned in a closer relationship with nature. In the South, there is cultural diversity, good coexistence practices, cooperative traditions, food quality, and biodiversity that are the bases for deepening the dreaming quality of life.

Part of the book: Quality of Life

By Jorge Rojas Hernández, Patricio Silva Ávila and Ricardo Barra Ríos

The pandemic afflicting the world is accompanied by a social, economic, political, cultural, and climatic multi-crisis. It is the crisis of the Anthropocene Era and modern paradigms. Modern society is in a complex situation. The responses to the multicrisis, including the pandemic, will probably come from the revalorization and resignification of experiences and socioecological knowledge of communities. Their historical experiences, currently fragmented by modernization processes, will be able to intercommunicate and, with resilient energy, open new possibilities for human and planetary life. It will be a great transformation, in which old and new models of development will be in tension. These tensions will also be expressed in the form of social and political radicalization and result in conflicts over natural resources, especially water, natural forests, ecosystems, and productive land. Human and planetary life is seriously threatened. Intellectual and scientific activity must connect with the ecological knowledge of local communities to defend human and natural life.

Part of the book: Anxiety, Uncertainty, and Resilience During the Pandemic Period