Welcome to an upstream interview, which is part of the Economics for Transition Project.

I'm Dela Duncan, and today I'm in conversation with Eduardo Guilliness,

a leading scholar on Buen-Vir, a social movement to focus development on the good life.

He is also the Executive Secretary of the Latin American Center for Social Ecology in Uruguay and the author of 10 books in many articles.

Welcome, Eduardo.

Well, thank you very much.

Can you tell us a little bit more about your background and what inspired you to do the work that you do?

Sure, I start with ecological issues and being part of the ecological movement in the south end of South America in Uruguay,

in the late 70s and in the early 80s and we start to warm mainly with wildlife

conservation but soon very soon we discovered that those issues at least in our country were closely related to social

perspective social demands. So in the 80s we were working on something that could be described as a mix between human ecology and social

ecology.

How would you describe the difference between human ecology and social ecology?

Well, human ecology, at least the mainstream concept in English and in the North, is more related

to human relationship with the environment closely linked to ecological anthropology for example.

While social ecology was more related to social movements, there was at that time a strong influence of Mururai bookshins, social ecology,

perspective that has, let's say,

and libertarian anarchist touch.

So these two were easily related in our practice in the South, particularly by that time.

Also, there were many endeavors, many experiments, many efforts, on non-traditional education with grassroots movements that were

called popular education or popular adult education and also including some practices of participatory

research that were very common in many Latin American countries and in some

...