In Search of an Ecological Constitution: Reformulating the Relationship between Society and Nature

One of the differentiating factors of our present is the increased environmental awareness. However, this has not yet been converted into social, economic and law systems that reveal the multiple challenges that are imposed on us. The destructive impulse of the dominant ideologies in the twentieth century maintains the hegemony of their spaces, barely trying to adapt itself into a new reality that surpasses them.

Meanwhile in 1972 we believed there was a marked environmental degradation, in 2022 we recognize that we are in the middle of the sixth mass extinction of the species, the earth temperature has already increased in more than one degree Celsius and a significant percent of the planet's sweet water is contaminated. If the Constitution that Chile is planning to write and set in force in the years to come, wants to capture the logic of our times, it is essential that it sets as something basic, the environmental conditions where the legal-political communities, constituted by the chileans communities, are going to develop.

This book explores the details of the "Ecological Constitution" concept, that refers to the provisions that have to be contained in a Constitution in a transversal way and that, setting the environmental protection as a central axis of the social organization, attempts to harmonize the social and nature activities.

The new Constitution of Chile won't change everything, but it can constitute a first fundamental base on that change. This book is an invitation to dream with that possibility and reflect on the different ways that the Constitution can take us in that direction. The systematic changes are urgent and we are in the position to begin with them.

Ezio Costa Cordella