Morin’s (2021) great multidimensional crisis, Mari\u00e1tegui’s (1928) civilizational crisis, Fern\u00e1ndez Buey’s (2009), or Riemen’s (2010), are theoretical constructions fully valid in times when the planet’s triple crisis\u2014of biodiversity, climate, and pollution (UNEP, 2021)\u2014keeps on the public agenda the urgent duty to attend to the formation of citizenries capable of transforming people’s competencies, ways of thinking and feeling humanity, developing a species-consciousness with an identity that transcends any parameter of discrimination. The civilizational crisis is underpinned by a dichotomous understanding of reality, in which the human and the environmental are assumed as split ontic dimensions, when deontologically they are bound to be assumed in a unified manner\u2014a dichotomy that has taken the current context far beyond the limits of due respect, especially against those who understand and proclaim the interpenetration of the human and the environmental as the most essential platform for life. The worst expression reflecting the crisis in environmental matters is found in the situations experienced by environmental human rights defenders in Latin America and the Caribbean, a phenomenon that, far from decreasing, feeds alarming figures of violations and threats against the lives and integrity of those who empower themselves in defense of the commons. The work of environmental human rights defenders externalizes the exercise of the right to defend the rights of those who often have no voice, who have historically been subsumed beneath the thresholds of recognition, and who have been pigeonholed into the vulnerability that perpetuates the ineffectiveness of material equality throughout Latin America and the Caribbean. It is therefore time to ask ourselves: What is the right to defend environmental rights? What is an environmental human rights defender in Latin America and the Caribbean? In what ways is it configured as an emerging right in the nations of the Global South? What legal and social experiences inform the contents and scope of the right to defend environmental rights? How do environmental human rights defenders experience, give meaning to, or perceive the exercise of the right to defend rights? And in what ways is the exercise of the right to defend rights confronting the crises of climate, biodiversity, and pollution? Latin America and the Caribbean have undertaken noble actions to recognize and protect leadership in the exercise of the right to defend environmental rights, where access to information, participation, and justice drive legal and political developments that require legitimation and appropriation by citizens, in whom, ultimately, the greatest potential to overcome the civilizational crisis resides.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"template":"","simposio_area":[52],"class_list":["post-10500","simposio","type-simposio","status-publish","hentry","simposio_area-derecho-y-derechos-humanos"],"yoast_head":"\n