Geoethics, Food, and Water in Latin America: Insights from Relational Geoscientific Pragmatism

Abstract

Food is not merely a commodity or a source of nourishment, but a foundational element of human life embedded in extensive social, ecological, cultural, scientific, economic, and political relationships. Because food production, distribution, preparation, consumption, and waste depend on, and substantially affect, soils, water, climate, biodiversity, energy, and other components of the Earth system, food-related decisions and actions have important ethical, and specifically geoethical, implications. This paper examines these implications through Relational Geoscientific Pragmatism (RGP), a framework that integrates geoscientific knowledge, ethical reflection, and context-sensitive action. With particular attention to Latin America, the study considers food and water rights, food security and sovereignty, key dimensions of food systems, and the contributions of geoscience and geoscientists to such systems across the interconnected Sustainable Development Goals, with SDG 2 as a principal reference. RGP is applied to institutional and personal spheres of decision-making and to the analysis and organization of literature concerning livestock production and related geoethical issues. The paper, furthermore, shows how RGP extends existing approaches, such as sustainable soil management, by advancing a comprehensive and reusable decision framework; providing a structured approach to decision-making; making uncertainty an explicit and integral component of the analytical process; framing geoscientists as contributors to responsible decision-making; requiring that values, rights, and affected actors be explicitly identified and discussed; treating trade-offs and ethical dilemmas as central analytical objects; and explicitly mapping responsibilities across actors, scales, and capacities. Finally, the paper proposes pathways for geoethical action.