Global Environmental Justice and the Environmentalism of the Poor

Abstract

There are an increasing number of ecological distribution conflicts around the world ultimately caused from the increase in the metabolism of the economy in terms of flows of energy and materials. There are resource extraction conflicts, transport conflicts, and also waste disposal conflicts. Therefore, there are many local complaints. Since the 1980s and 1990s there has been a globalizing environmental justice movement that in its strategy meetings and practices has developed a set of concepts and slogans to describe and intervene in such conflicts. They include “environmental racism,” “popular epidemiology,” “the environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous,” “biopiracy,” “tree plantations are not forests,” “the ecological debt,” “climate justice,” “food sovereignty,” “water justice,” and so on . . . These notions have been born from socio-environmental activism but sometimes they have been taken up also by academic political ecologists and used in their analyses.

A global environmental justice movement: mapping ecological distribution conflicts

“…The EJAtlas is thus an outcome of and a tool for research on the environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous, and the global environmental justice movement that we started around 1990 with Ramachandra Guha and other colleagues (Martinez-Alier, 1992;Guha andMartinez-Alier, 1997, 1999;Martinez-Alier 2016c). We argued (Martinez-Alier, 1991, 1995aMartinez-Alier and Hershberg, 1992) against Inglehart's "post-materialist" thesis (e.g.…”

Informal Work and Sustainable Cities: From Formalization to Reparation

“…119,120 Environmental justice research demonstrates that political-economic processes concentrate environmental harm in poor, racialized communities, protecting spaces of privilege. 121 Emphasizing the scale of environmental harms, ecologists and environmentalists propose we are in a new geologic age, the Anthropocene, in which anthropogenic climate change and environmental destruction are earth-transforming features and system-wide threats. But culpability is not evenly distributed.…”

“…Our debt here is to the Black radical tradition, 77 scholars and activists proposing collective redress for the unspeakable violence and thefts of slavery, legacies that live into the present. [120][121][122] Following W.E.B. Du Bois, the ethic of reparation activates memory against the forces of willful forgetting that deny history and deep relationality.…”

Identifying Ecological Distribution Conflicts Around the Inter-regional Flow of Energy in Turkey: A Mapping Exercise

“…It is a multidimensional and multifaceted notion where the aspects of distribution, recognition, and participation are all interlinked and incorporated (Schlosberg, 2007(Schlosberg, , 2013, hence calling for an interdisciplinary or rather a transdisciplinary research methodology (Temper et al, 2015) The broadening of the concept of environmental justice (EJ) is not only political or academic, but also spatial. A concept originating from a movement in United States has now expanded both horizontally, in the sense that it was followed by movements with similar EJ claims in different countries and locations in the world; and vertically, as there is now a globalising EJ movement acting together beyond borders, on issues such as climate change, trade agreements, and waste transfers (Schlosberg, 2013;Martinez-Alier, 2016). All around the world, people have been uniting to defend their lands, rivers, forests (in short, their livelihoods) against the activities, and projects such as mining, dams, tree plantations, landfills, and land grabbing (Martinez-Alier et al, 2016).…”

“…The EJAtlas maps the worldwide ecological distribution conflicts through a bottom-up methodology, using data and knowledge co-produced by activists and academics (Martinez-Alier, 2016;Temper and Del Bene, 2016). It utilises previous mapping and data collecting initiatives about ecological conflicts and environmental justice movements.…”