In their own battles and strategy meetings since the early 1980s, EJOs (environmental justice organizations) and their networks have introduced several concepts to political ecology that have also been taken up by academics and policy makers. In this paper, we explain the contexts in which such notions have arisen, providing definitions of a wide array of concepts and slogans related to environmental inequities and sustainability, and explore the connections and relations between them. These concepts include: environmental justice, ecological debt, popular epidemiology, environmental racism, climate justice, environmentalism of the poor, water justice, biopiracy, food sovereignty, "green deserts", "peasant agriculture cools downs the Earth", land grabbing, Ogonization and Yasunization, resource caps, corporate accountability, ecocide, and indigenous territorial rights, among others. We examine how activists have coined these notions and built demands around them, and how academic research has in turn further applied them and supplied other related concepts, working in a mutually reinforcing way with EJOs. We argue that these processes and dynamics build an activist-led and co-produced social sustainability science, furthering both academic scholarship and activism on environmental justice. Keywords: Political ecology, environmental justice organizations, environmentalism of the poor, ecological debt, activist knowledge RésuméDepuis le début des années 80, à travers leurs propres luttes et réunions stratégiques, les EJOS (Organisations de Justice Environnementale) et leurs réseaux ont introduit quelques concepts différents d'écologie politique qui ont été repris par le monde académique et par les décideurs politiques. Dans cet article, nous expliquons les contextes qui ont promu l'émergence de ces concepts, et offrons des définitions pour un large ensemble de concepts et de slogans lies aux inégalités environnementales et à la protection durable de l'environnement, et nous explorons les connections entre eux. Ces concepts incluent: La justice environnementale, la dette écologique, l'épidémiologie populaire, le racisme environnemental, la justice climatique, l'environnementalisme des pauvres, la justice hydrique, la bio-piraterie, la souveraineté alimentaire, «les déserts verts», «l'agriculture paysanne rafraichit la terre», la prise des terres (land grabbing), l'Ogonisation et la Yasunisation, les plafonds de ressources, la responsabilité des entreprises, l'écocide, les droits indigènes territoriaux, et quelques autres. Nous examinons comment les activistes ont inventé ces termes, construit des demandes autour d'eux, et comment la recherche académique les a appliqués, et ensuite comment elle a offert de nouveaux concepts, travaillant de manière symbiotique avec les EJOS. Nous argumentons que ces processus et dynamiques construisent une science du développement durable conduite et co-produite par les activistes, ce qui renforce ainsi la littérature académique et l'activisme sur la justice environnementale....
A central concept raised by the climate justice movement is climate debt. Here, the claims and warrants of the movement support for climate debt is identified through an argumentation analysis of their central manifestos. It is found that the climate debt claim is understood as primarily restorative, in the sense that the environmental space of the developing countries must be returned, “decolonized.” The damage caused by climate change also gives rise to a compensatory adaptation debt. The result is compared with an earlier study on ecological debt. Both concepts are framed within an unjust power relation between North and South, but there are differences. Ecological debt is mainly analyzed in terms of an unjust economic exploitation, which is congenial with its use as an argument for cancellation of Southern external debts; climate debt is rather seen as a violation of communal rights and territories, an argument for climate justice.
Ecological debt is usually conceptualized as the accumulated result of different kinds of uneven flows of natural resources and waste, but these flows are seldom referred to as ecologically unequal exchange. Ecologically unequal exchange, on the other hand, is usually defined as different flows of resources and waste, but the accumulated results of these flows are seldom referred to as ecological debt. In this article, influential definitions and conceptualizations of ecological debt and ecologically unequal exchange are compared and the notions linked together analytically with a stock-flow perspective. A particular challenge is presented by emissions of substances that have global consequences, most importantly carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. They form part of ecologically unequal exchange, but what is unequal is not the exchange of resources or energy, but the appropriation of the sinks that absorb these substances. New concepts, unequal sink appropriation and the more specific carbon sink appropriation are proposed as a way of highlighting this distinction.Key words: ecological debt, ecologically unequal exchange, unequal sink appropriation, carbon sink appropriation
In the contemporary dual crisis, economic crisis policies cannot be dealt with in isolation from the rampant and acute ecological crisis – and vice versa. In this article, we challenge the hegemonic positions in purported attempts to solve the crises so far: in the economic realm, the Keynesian episode of 2008–2009 as well as austerity policies, and with regard to the ecological crisis, ecological modernization and green economy. Instead, we will propose that both the economic and the climate crises can be ‘solved’ through the destruction of a particular kind of capital, that is, fossil capital. Given that capital destruction in general seems to be an essential part of overcoming capitalist crises historically and given the urgent need to demolish large parts of the fossil infrastructure in order to avert climate change, we discuss in this article the possibilities to politically steer the processes of creative destruction so that crises policies benefit the economy and the environment to highest possible extent.
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