Another Compass

by Florencia Roitstein

There comes a moment, walking through a forest, when we no longer know where we are. At first, we try to find the path. We look for familiar signs. We trust our memory. Then something more difficult happens: we realize that the map we were carrying was the problem. It wasn't incomplete. It had simply ceased to correspond to the territory we inhabit. Perhaps that is what is happening to us.

We continue to speak of development, growth, and progress as though those words still pointed toward a horizon. But the landscape has changed. Rivers disappear or shrink. Forests retreat. Soils are exhausted. Lands dry out. Biodiversity fades away while the struggle for water, lithium, rare earths, and other minerals opens up new geographies of conflict and sacrifice. We are not simply facing a socio-environmental crisis in which repairing a few broken parts will allow everything else to continue as before. We are facing the end of a map. And when a map no longer serves us, no compass can lead us back to where we began—or to where we hoped to go. Yet we persist.

We are told that technology will solve what political culture can no longer imagine. That sacrificing territories is the inevitable price of prosperity. That those who defend the fabric of life are naïve because they still believe that a river is worth more than a mine, a forest more than profit, a community more than a financial balance sheet. Perhaps the real naïveté lies in believing there is a way back. There is not.

The depletion of nature's wealth began decades ago; it simply was not as visible to everyone. Wildfires were not devastating thousands of hectares across multiple countries at once. Extreme heat was not claiming thousands of lives. Depleted soils were not demanding millions of additional tones of fertilizer. Seismic exploration was not disrupting entire marine ecosystems. The question, then, is how to inhabit the world that is emerging. That is why naming ecocide matters—and matters profoundly. Not because words can restore what has been lost, but because they allow us to stop walking in the wrong direction. To name is to find our bearings. It is to recover the ability to distinguish between those who sustain life and those who consume it.

Latin America knows this crossroads better than almost any other region. It safeguards some of the most biodiverse territories on Earth while bearing economic models that transform abundance into poverty, violence, and dispossession. Extractivism does not only empty mountains, oceans, forests, lands, or salt flats. It also empties language. It teaches us to call devastation "progress" and sacrifice "development." 

We need another compass. One built on participatory democracy, the rights of nature, and collective intelligence. A compass that does not tell us how to dominate the land, but how to belong to it. Perhaps that is why organized women are opening some of the most fertile paths of our time. Not because they are our saviours, but because for decades they have sustained networks of care, defended water, organized communities, and built power where others see only resources to be extracted. They have learned something that politics is only beginning to remember: that the fabric of life is sustained not through conquest, but through interdependence. Because women's hope is a form of critical thinking, not naïveté. A way of seeing broad enough to allow hope and grief to coexist. Perhaps hope was never a form of optimism. Perhaps it has always been a form of orientation. Courage does not lie in pretending we know where we are going. It lies in accepting that we are crossing an unfamiliar and complex landscape without confusing being lost with defeat. We do not know the way. But that is precisely why the possibility of inventing it still exists. 

We have hope because we have memory and history. And because only those who are willing to lose the map can begin to imagine another one. And perhaps that is, today, one of the most radical political act before us.