Escribir la crisis climática desde la periferia forestal: historia del clima, uso del suelo y justicia ambiental en el Gran Chaco sudamericano

Abstract

This article advances a historiographical intervention that takes the South American Gran Chaco as a forest frontier from which to critically reassess climate history and Anthropocene debates. Its aim is to identify and discuss the spatial, epistemic, and thematic biases that shape much of the dominant climate historiography, particularly its emphasis on global scales, fossil-fuel-centered narratives, and technoscientific regimes of evidence. From this frontier of agricultural expansion and accelerated deforestation, the climate crisis is experienced primarily through land-use processes—deforestation, fires, forest degradation, and hydrological transformations—and through their social consequences.

The article argues that the Gran Chaco should not be understood as a “local case,” but rather as a privileged observatory of the present that allows for a reordering of historiographical agendas. First, it shifts the analytical focus from fossil energy toward land-use politics as an active climatic mechanism. Second, it connects climate history with environmental justice approaches, showing how climate change produces differential vulnerabilities, unequal distributions of costs and benefits, and persistent socio-environmental conflicts. Third, it foregrounds disputes over knowledge and authority, emphasizing the role of environmental memories and situated knowledges in the production and politicization of climate knowledge.

Overall, the article proposes a climate history from a forest frontier that complicates scales, sources, and categories, and situates the climate crisis as inseparable from inequality, territorial conflict, and struggles for environmental justice in the present.