«El Pacto Andaluz por la Naturaleza» (1985). La confluencia del movimiento campesino y el movimiento ecologista

In recent years there has been an intensive debate on the relationship between peasantry and environmentalism in Environmental History. The starting point was the controversial definition of Popular Environmentalism by Ramachandra Guha and Martínez Alier (1997). In the present article we focus on these ideas through the analysis of a specific social movement, the «Andalusian Agreement for Nature» (Pacto Andaluz por la Naturaleza, 1985/1986), one of the first expressions of the Spanish green movement. The interesting feature lies in its origin. This green movement, claiming for a new sustainable use of forests, arose from the confluence of several environmentalist organizations and the traditional Peasant Union (Sindicato de Obreros del Campo). The struggles achieved a new Forest Policy (1989) adopted by the regional government, introducing new ecological values in the population beyond the traditional conservationist conception of environmentalism. This is the history of the confluence of an Old Social Movement, the peasant movement, and a New Social Movement, the green one. We consider this to be a good example for understanding the complexity and the auto-transformation capacity of the social conflict.