ABSTRACT
Pachamama is one expression of what the radical lawyer, philosopher, and activist Boaventura de Sousa Santos, in his work, The Epistemology of the South, argues is a broader break from human-centric Western ways of thinking, to a nature-centered epistemology or way of knowing, in which humans are viewed as part of nature rather than its master. In the age of climate change, resistance must universalize to protect not just humans, but all life species and the environmental ecology that supports them. Progressive universalizers recognize that the fight for social justice and human rights is inseparable from the fight to save the environment, and they redefine and expand the fight for human rights to broader "rights of nature". The most important and frightening consequence of system universalizing today is the degradation of the environment. Environmental movements around the world are looking to indigenous and other non-Western cultures to help transform the way of understanding humans and the natural world.
