Melissa Moreano

I studied Biology at the Catholic University of Quito, Ecuador, and worked for several conservation NGOs on environmental education and conservation-related research. After a while I decided to move to the public sector: I worked for the local government of an Amazonian city largely polluted by oil industry and for the Municipality of Quito, my hometown, for 5 years.

In the meantime I did a Master in Social Studies of Science and Technology at the University of Salamanca, Spain. Influenced by my experience in the Amazon, I did my dissertation on science as a tool used by 'popular environmentalists' to control the oil industry in Ecuador, analysing the emblematic trial against Chevron-Texaco. I moved to London in 2011 to start my PhD at King's College thanks to a scholarship of the Ecuadorian Secretariat of Science and Technology. For my thesis I continued my research on Ecuadorian environmentalism.

I am very interested in political mobilization and social change. In Ecuador I am engaged with the Institute of Ecologist Studies of the Third World and the Collective of Critical Geography, that accompany and support processes of local resistance against capitalist appropriation of the territories. I am also committed with organisations and groups that work on urban agriculture, sustainable construction, and community life.

Ecuadorian Diverse Environmentalisms: Are Buen Vivir, Pachamama And Territory Confronting Green Capitalism?

Member of the Environment, Politics and Development research group.

Political ecology, social construction of nature, green capitalism, market environmentalism, social movements, decolonial theory, eco-Marxism, eco-socialism, territory, Latin America.

My PhD assesses whether and in what ways Ecuadorian environmentalism poses alternatives to green capitalism, in the context of the current Latin American debates about wellbeing, nature and territory, and within forest conservation strategies, specifically. Green capitalism is assumed, from a political ecology perspective, as a new regime of capital accumulation that produces 'green' commodities to be sold in 'green' markets. As such, it raises a new form of production of nature and space, and of regulation of the human/nature relationship. 

This theoretical context frames a multi-scalar analysis at three levels: governmental environmentalism, the social movement of critical ecologism and an indigenous territory. Central to the analysis are the concepts of sustainable development/wellbeing, the human/nature relationship, and the (capitalist) production of space.