This volume studies the essential origin and trends of environmental devastation in the world and in Mexico, the responsibility of deep economic logic, neoliberal economic policies, the attitude of neoliberal businessmen and governments, as well as some exemplary reactions of socio-environmental protest that have been unleashed in our country.

It analyzes, first of all, the civilizational crisis generated by the development of the real subsumption of consumption under capital and the process of overaccumulation of harmful or frankly destructive productive forces by neoliberal policies and by the consequent arbitrariness with which the State ( social capital) has carried out a structural diversion of power in favor of the largest private capital. The global environmental crisis is thus explained from the critique of political economy and historical materialism. In this context, an original and profound heterodox reflection is offered on the degradation of moral agents in which humanity has lost its capacities for dignified material reproduction, in freedom and fraternity, and the urgency of rebuilding new communities and societies that are capable of recovering them to face the environmental crisis.

Secondly, the structural nature of socio-environmental conflicts and the legal-institutional conditions of their development and overcoming are addressed. Thus, on the one hand, the structural changes and their socio-environmental impacts are studied, the diversion of power of the Mexican State, the promotion of unsustainable economic activities, the adoption of harmful technologies and the systematic violation of human rights. On the other hand, the legal routes of the processes of dispossession and environmental devastation are described and the paths and main legal tools of the claim of rights, resistance and social transformation in the popular struggles for the defense of the territory and the environmental Protection.

Finally, particular aspects of the material social metabolism are studied in relation to specific environmental problems related to the irresponsible use of genetically modified organisms, the loss of food sovereignty, the scarcity of water in the country's large cities and the magnitude of the garbage problem in the country. state of Morelos.