Joan Martinez-Alier – författare

Each narrative emphasizes 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. Revealing the circularity gap at the centre of the industrial economy, the book focuses on the frontiers of commodity extraction and waste disposal. Alongside exploring protagonists and geographies of resistance, chapters delve into corporate irresponsibility, unequal trade, and feminist neo-Malthusianism. Although grassroots movements for socio-economic sustainability are deeply diverse, there are global patterns of action and empowerment.

This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of environmental social sciences and humanities, anthropology, geography, international relations, and ecology. It will also help activists engaged in the movements for environmental justice.

Until very recently, studies of the environmental movement have been heavily biased towards the North Atlantic worlds. There was a common assumption amongst historians and sociologists that concerns over such issues as conservation or biodiversity were the exclusive preserve of the affluent westerner: the ultimate luxury of the consumer society. Citizens of the world''s poorest countries, ran the conventional wisdom, had nothing to gain from environmental concerns; they were ''too poor to be green'', and were attending to the more urgent business of survival. Yet strong environmental movements have sprung up over recent decades in some of the poorest countries in Asia and Latin America, albeit with origins and forms of expression quite distinct from their western counterparts. In Varieties of Environmentalism, Guha and Matinez-Alier seek to articulate the values and orientation of the environmentalism of the poor, and to explore the conflicting priorities of South and North that were so dramatically highlighted at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Essays on the ''ecology of affluence'' are also included, placing ion context such uniquely western phenomena as the ''cult of wilderness'' and the environmental justice movement. Using a combination of archival and field data,. The book presents analyses of environmental conflicts and ideologies in four continents: North and South America, Asia and Europe. The authors present the nature and history of environmental movements in quite a new light, one which clarifies the issues and the processes behind them. They also provide reappraisals for three seminal figures, Gandhi, Georgescu-Roegen and Mumford, whose legacy may yet contribute to a greater cross-cultural understanding within the environmental movements.

Until very recently, studies of the environmental movement have been heavily biased towards the North Atlantic worlds. There was a common assumption amongst historians and sociologists that concerns over such issues as conservation or biodiversity were the exclusive preserve of the affluent westerner: the ultimate luxury of the consumer society. Citizens of the world''s poorest countries, ran the conventional wisdom, had nothing to gain from environmental concerns; they were ''too poor to be green'', and were attending to the more urgent business of survival. Yet strong environmental movements have sprung up over recent decades in some of the poorest countries in Asia and Latin America, albeit with origins and forms of expression quite distinct from their western counterparts. In Varieties of Environmentalism, Guha and Matinez-Alier seek to articulate the values and orientation of the environmentalism of the poor, and to explore the conflicting priorities of South and North that were so dramatically highlighted at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992. Essays on the ''ecology of affluence'' are also included, placing ion context such uniquely western phenomena as the ''cult of wilderness'' and the environmental justice movement. Using a combination of archival and field data,. The book presents analyses of environmental conflicts and ideologies in four continents: North and South America, Asia and Europe. The authors present the nature and history of environmental movements in quite a new light, one which clarifies the issues and the processes behind them. They also provide reappraisals for three seminal figures, Gandhi, Georgescu-Roegen and Mumford, whose legacy may yet contribute to a greater cross-cultural understanding within the environmental movements.

Subjects covered include the analytical and philosophical foundations of ecological economics, deliberative valuation methods, social metabolism, ecological macroeconomics, the de-growth movement, socio-environmental conflicts, the scope and valuation of ecosystem services, traditional ecological knowledge, social dilemmas in common pool resource management; consumption patterns, global environmental governance and emerging tools for dealing with environmental problems, such as payments for ecosystem services.

Covering the most salient topics in the field of ecological economics and with a wide scope, from philosophical foundations to practical applications, this book will be invaluable to students, scholars, researchers and policy makers.

Contributors: D.N. Barton, L. Braat, J.C. Cárdenas, M. de Carvalho Amazonas, E. Coudel, R. de Groot, L. Eloy, J. Ferreira, M. Fischer-Kowalski, E. Gómez-Baggethun, A. Guarín, H. Haberl, M. Hercowitz, G. Kallis, B. Martín-López, J. Martínez-Alier, L. Mattos, P. May, B. Muraca, R. Muradian, A. Nadal, J. O''Neill, P. Petridis, M.-G. Piketty, V. Reyes-García, I. Ring, B. Rodríguez-Labajos, I. Røpke, I. Scholz, C.L. Spash, F. Toni, T. Uebel, A. Vatn, P.A. Victor, C. Zografos

The book analyses several manifestations of the growing ''environmental justice movement'', and also of ''popular environmentalism'' and the ''environmentalism of the poor'', which will be seen in the coming decades as driving forces in the process to achieve an ecologically sustainable society. The author studies, in detail, many ecological distribution conflicts in history and at present, in urban and rural settings, showing how poor people often favour resource conservation. The environment is thus not so much a luxury of the rich as a necessity of the poor. It concludes with the fundamental questions: who has the right to impose a language of valuation and who has the power to simplify complexity?

Joan Martinez-Alier combines the study of ecological conflicts and the study of environmental valuation in a totally original approach that will appeal to a wide cross-section of academics, ecologists and environmentalists.