Is there a global environmental justice movement?

Abstract

One of the causes of the increasing number of ecological distribution conflicts around the world is the changing metabolism of the economy in terms of growing flows of energy and materials. There are conflicts on resource extraction, transport and waste disposal. Therefore, there are many local complaints, as shown in the Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJatlas) and other inventories. And not only complaints; there are also many successful examples of stopping projects and developing alternatives, testifying to the existence of a rural and urban global movement for environmental justice. Moreover, since the 1980s and 1990s, this movement has developed a set of concepts and campaign 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, land grabbing and water justice, among other concepts. These terms were born from socio-environmental activism, but sometimes they have also been taken up by academic political ecologists and ecological economists who, for their part, have contributed other concepts to the global environmental justice movement, such as ‘ecologically unequal exchange’ or the ‘ecological footprint’.

Keywords:

• environmental justice
• ecological distribution conflicts
• collaborative research
• activist knowledge
• EJatlas
• environmental racism
• environmentalism of the poor
• climate justice
• statistical political ecology

Acknowledgements

We are very grateful to all partners in the EJOLT project and to the many outside collaborators with the EJAtlas. Also, we thank Lucia Arguelles and Yakup Cetinkaya for their technical support.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

ORCID

Daniela Del Bene http://orcid.org/0000-0002-7879-5275

Arnim Scheidel http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9764-685X

Notes

¹Boff is a Brazilian ‘liberation theologist’, whose work is fully vindicated in the encyclical Laudato si' (Pope Francis 2015) which calls in many of its paragraphs for environmental justice.

²A previous article drawing on the EJatlas was published by L. Temper, D. Del Bene and J. Martinez-Alier in the Journal of Political Ecology, where we focused on methodology (Temper, Del Bene, and Martinez-Alier 2015). The coverage and analysis of the EJatlas will be expanded based on the new 2016–2019 project ‘Academic-Activist Co-Produced Knowledge for Environmental Justice' (funded by the International Social Science Council's (ISSC) Transformations for Sustainability programe), coordinated by Leah Temper from the Institut de Ciència i Tecnologia Ambiental, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona (ICTA-UAB) and Ashish Kothari of Kalpavriksh (India).

³There are several monographic reports and analyses on tree plantations conflicts: see Gerber (2011); Kröger (2011); Overbeek, Kröger, and Gerber (2012); Kröger (2014).

⁴See also Hadden's (2015) recent book about activist networks in the international climate change movement.

Additional information

Funding

This work received funding from the EJOLT Project, Environmental Justice Organisations, Liabilities and Trade, an FP7 project supported by the European Commission, 2011–2015 [grant number 266642]; as well as by the Transformations to Sustainability Programme from the International Social Science Council (ISSC) (Seed Grant T2S_PP_289 and Grant TKN150317115354). The Transformations to Sustainability Programme represents a contribution to Future Earth.

Notes on contributors

Joan Martinez-Alier

Joan Martinez-Alier is an emeritus professor at ICTA, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and also at FLACSO, Quito, Ecuador. He published Ecological economics: energy, environment and society in 1987, and The environmentalism of the poor: a study of ecological conflicts and languages of valuation in 2002. He is co-editor of the Handbook of ecological economics (2015). Email: [email protected]

Leah Temper

Leah Temper is the coordinator and co-editor of the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJatlas) and director of the Seeds of Survival Program. Email: [email protected]

Daniela Del Bene

Daniela Del Bene is a PhD candidate at ICTA, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, and co-editor of the EJatlas since 2012. Her current research interest is in political ecology and environmental justice of dam-related conflicts, energy and water democracy and sovereignty. She is a member of the Observatory on Debt in Globalization (ODG) and of the European Water Movement. Email: [email protected]

Arnim Scheidel

Arnim Scheidel is a postdoctoral fellow at ICTA, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He joined the EJatlas team in early 2015 and focuses on environmental conflicts in Southeast Asia. His general research interests include ecological economics, political ecology and rural studies.