El golfo de México en el siglo XXI

Abstract

This is a story of human evolution in the Gulf of Mexico region. Human activity in an indissoluble historical relationship with the natural environment, which has as its axis a body of water, framed in a basin to the west of the Atlantic: which extends along the seabed, but also on the surface through mountain ranges, coastal plains and hydrological systems of rivers that flow into the Gulf, inhabited and covered by a complex flora and fauna in constant interaction. This is a long-term story in which we identify different periods of productive occupation in which changes are created in the productive systems that mark their adaptive strategies as a close link between human beings and the environment and that gives life to a regional historical dynamic. The short duration of the political processes has made us forget that there are cultural layers, identities of the inhabitants of the Gulf, and that they are reserves of human powers for the necessary change. The construction of nations, territorial ambitions, ideological disputes, differences in legal criteria, have hindered, until very recently, the adoption and implementation of common actions to preserve the ecosystem, to jointly attack the phenomena that harm it and that are the consequence of a long common history of local devastation of it.