Land, Water, Air and Freedom: The Making of World Movements for Environmental Justice
Abstract
The speaker will discuss his new book, which sheds light on the global countermovement for environmental justice. Combining ecological economics and political ecology, the book analyses the commonalities shared by environmental defenders and offenders. This lecture will cover some narratives from the book to emphasize the diverse vocabularies, iconographies, and valuation languages of poor and Indigenous activists, without losing sight of the global scale of climate action and biodiversity loss. The lecture will reveal the circularity gap at the centre of the industrial economy, with a focus on the frontiers of commodity extraction and waste disposal. Alongside exploring protagonists and geographies of resistance, the lecture will also delve into corporate irresponsibility, unequal trade, and feminist neo-Malthusianism. Although grassroots movements for socio-economic sustainability are deeply diverse, the speaker will argue there are global patterns of action and empowerment.
About the Speaker
Prof. Joan Martinez-Alier received his PhD in Economics from the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (UAB) in 1976. He was at the Department of Economics and Economic History of UAB in 1976 – 2009. He co-founded the Environmental Science and Technology Institute of UAB and is currently a Professor Emeritus there. He is also a Professor Emeritus at the Latin American Faculty of Social Sciences (FLACSO).
Prof. Martinez-Alier’s research focuses on ecological economics, political ecology, agrarian studies, environmental justice, and the environmentalism of the poor and the indigenous. His publications are numerous and two of his most influential books are Ecological Economics: Energy, Environment and Society (with Klaus Schlüpmann, 1987) and The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation (2002). He has edited the journal Ecología Política in Barcelona since 1990. In 2016, he was awarded a European Research Council Advanced Grant for the project EnvJustice (A global environmental justice movement), 2016-21. He is also a co-founder of the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas), a large database of ecological distribution conflicts.
Prof. Martinez-Alier has served as President of the International Society for Ecological Economics in 2006 and 2007, and as a member of the scientific committee of the European Environment Agency between 2000 and 2008. He was awarded the Balzan Prize in 2020 and the Holberg Prize in 2023 for his contributions in ecological economics and political ecology.
For Attendees' Attention
Seating is on a first come, first served basis.
