You’ve mentioned to me that Jóvenes por el clima does not consider themselves to be a climate organization but rather and ecological movement with a focus on the climate. Can you break down that distinction. 

When we first started with that very first mobilization we were focused on listening to the science and reducing our carbon emissions by 2030. I’ll be honest. When we started we didn’t really know a whole lot. I knew carbon emissions were bad and that our generation was going to be affected the most by them but we didn’t have a grasp on the science. We began developing objectives that were a bit more broad. Climate is difficult to measure and it is a very narrow way of looking at this crisis. Take our wetlands for example. Argentina has vast networks of wetlands all over the country. From a strict climate perspective, wetlands are incredibly important ecosystems because they act as natural absorbers of carbon emissions. Protecting them is a way to protect ourselves from greenhouse gas emissions. When we destroy those ecosystems, we don’t just eliminate important carbon absorbers, we create floods. Who is going to be most affected by man made floods? People who have been historically marginalized by the State. People who live in really rural areas and are most likely Indigenous. Those are people who already do not have access to resources and support and are significantly affected by ecological destruction and its after effects. Our governance does not understand that the ecological crisis is the greatest catalyst of systemic inequality and social injustices. You can not solve environmental problems without solving social problems and vice versa. From the very beginning, we have defined ourselves as a global movement that was Latin American and for the people. The world needs to recognize two things. First, the climate crisis is the strongest catalyst of social injustice. You cannot solve one without addressing the other. Second, the problems of the climate crisis in the global south are not the same as in the global north. If you live in the global north, you have to reduce your carbon emissions. People of the global north have to demand that their governments reduce emissions. But if you live in Latin America, it is our responsibility to protect our communal natural resources.

I want to dive deeper into this because I think that a lot of what I read from the Global North about the climate crisis is very uniform. I don’t see a lot of writing in the media that expounds on the interconnectedness of the crisis and how that creates nuanced problems regionally. What makes this movement distinct from a regional perspective? 

We understand that we aren’t going to be able to accomplish anything working in a vacuum. This is a global issue. But I do think that the crisis is more urgent in Latin America. We need to protect our natural resources. The world needs Latin America to protect its natural resources. The world needs us to not burn down our forests and jungles, destroy our wetlands, it is necessary that those spaces are protected. Our problem isn’t carbon emissions through industrialization, it is destroying land and nature that act as absorbers and releasing that captured carbon. The problem that we have in Argentina is that we have structural economic problems, particularly with our currency. The way that Latin America finances our economies, specifically Argentina, is with agriculture that we use to export food and raw materials. Our economy was set up to be exporters of raw materials. We export the cow hide and import the leather shoes. We are always at a commercial deficit. So there are many things going on here. What I want to say is that we have these two opposing forces, we want to protect our natural resources but we need to pump dollars into the economy. So you have the G7 countries, they expect us to protect our natural resources. All of those governments stood up to talk when the Amazon jungle was on fire. They demanded their protection which is great. But if those demands are not accompanied by measures that facilitate their protection, then what are we even talking about? If you truly want Latin America to stop destroying their natural resources, the easiest way to do that is to eliminate or drastically reduce our international debts. We can talk a lot about the legitimacy of that debt but what I would really like to talk about is a historic need for reparations. The global north owes the global south. I think this is really a fundamental discrepancy with activism of the global north is that they do not realize that they have a quality of life which was built on the destruction of nature here. The activism of the North needs to recognize how they are part of that whole system. They are living in countries that are causing the problems, the one that produces the most carbon emissions, the ones that destroyed their own nature and then exported that destruction abroad to the global South. Those countries increased their standards of life through cheap labor and destruction of nature here. 

There is a total divorce of the way the North consumes and behaves now and the history behind that. Why do the governments of the Global South function the way that they do? Why are policies that promote environmental degradation standard policies? I feel like a lot of what I read about Latin America and the climate crisis and politics in general from US publications is that US consumption is sort of a foot-note. It’s a lot of victim blaming. It’s all Bolsonaro’s fault that the Amazon jungle is experiencing massive deforestation. We don’t discuss the hundreds of years worth of colonialist policy that allowed a character like Bolsonaro to take power in the first place.  

This is five centuries of colonization that started with Colón and continues today in other ways. The last period of industrialization was built by an authoritarian regime that was backed by foreign interests and replicated in nearly every single country of Latin America. The United States trained our military and provided aid to authoritarian governments. That is the big difference between the North and the South. We need reparations. That is the only way towards a just and real transition. But that will never happen if this is a regional movement. This is something that the citizens of the Global North have to become aware of and demand for us as well. And I think that even many people who consider themselves climate activists in the North don’t grasp that. They think that they need to work exclusively on what happens within the United States or within Europe without a real understanding of how every single decision made in those regions affects people outside of them and probably more profoundly. We need to become protagonists of this fight. The most well known climate activists come from the North. And I am not suggesting that they are bad people. Not at all. They are doing what they can with the information that they have. But it is systemic. What did you study at school in terms of history? You learned about the history of the US and probably Europe, right? 

Oh yeah. I didn’t learn anything about South America until college in an elective course. We are only taught about Africa through the lens of the slave trade but they don’t tell us anything that happened before or what happened after. 

So if you aren’t taught that we even exist, how is the Global North meant to fight for us? We have to have a space to speak for ourselves. 

I want to talk about activism on a more local level. There is a deeply rooted social construct that makes climate activism difficult to take root. I read this book by Maristella Svampa and Enrique Viale El colapso ecológico ya llegó (2020) [The ecologic collapse has already arrived] and they make this very obvious but very important point which is that Argentina for much of its history was this kind of model country for conventional agriculture. The country was quick to adapt new technologies during the Green Revolution and that transformed into the wide use of transgenic seeds in the 1990s. The point they made is that the first transgenic seed was planted less than 25 years ago and the use of synthetic pesticides has maybe been around for fifty years in Argentina. And both have had massive, proven impacts on public health. Yet somehow the country is completely convinced that this is the only way to farm and stimulate the economy. They cannot imagine a different agricultural system. Like you said this is still a small movement within Argentina, why do you think there isn’t more outrage and urgency?

This comes down to power. It is the way that the land is distributed in Argentina. Agricultural reform is this bad word here. If you look at the United States, the way that land was distributed [referring to the Homestead Act] to immigrants was significantly different than what happened here. So that was a project that gave land to people who in many cases knew how to work it and provided them with a means to sustain themselves. Argentina’s land distribution is incredibly concentrated. It was distributed amongst the political oligarchy and that was how it remained. When you have hundreds of thousands of acres, it makes sense that they just pay Monsanto for the whole package and farm their land that way. We need to provide land to people who need it. I would love to see a redistribution of land. I don’t think that is possible. But even so, we don’t need to take land away because the state has enough to give to small farmers to develop the land with agroecological farming and demand that all land be farmed that way.

Beyond it being quote unquote more practical from a financial perspective to farm with conventional methods, if you look at the history of farming in Argentina it has absolutely never been about feeding people. It has always been about extracting everything from the land in order to line a few pockets. Nature was always viewed as infinite. There never existed a respect or understanding of nature as a living thing. The social impact of that extractionism and power concentration is not new information. Argentina was funding research back in the early 20th century about the lives of the rural poor. But you want to know why that investigation was funded? To squash anarchism, not to solve capitalism's poverty problem. 

One of our greatest political thinkers, Arturo Jauretche, said: If the gringo that buys us is bad, the criollo that sells us is worse. And that is what this is. We have a small group of elites that value their own enrichment over the well being of the collective and our country. They respond more to the interests of the international markets than the interests of their own people. Which is how our global economy works anyway. 

What are your hopes for the future of Jóvenes por el clima?

We are creating critical mass and social pressure. I think that we are beginning to convince politicians, especially young politicians. We have participated in some legislation. We have influence. We helped pressure Argentina to declare a climate emergency before the EU even did. Locally we are working on that. Convincing people to join this fight. And internationally, we are working every day to speak for ourselves and become leaders in this global crisis.