Political Ecology

Joan Martínez-Alier, Professor of Economics and Economic History, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

The Environmentalism of the Poor has the explicit intention of helping to establish two emerging fields of study – political ecology and ecological economics – whilst also investigating the relations between them.

The Environmentalism of the Poor has the explicit intention of helping to establish two emerging fields of study – political ecology and ecological economics – whilst also investigating the relations between them.

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.

ENDORSEMENTS:

‘[Joan] Martinez-Alier combines the honest discipline of a scholar with the passionate energy of an activist. The result, The Environmentalism of the Poor, is highly recommended!’
– Herman E. Daly, University of Maryland, College Park, US

‘Any book by the ecological economist Joan Martinez-Alier is a Big Publishing Event. . . this is a book by a writer who loves his subject, knows it well, respects its history, and is driven by the desire to do justice. These are qualities enough to send you to the bookshop or the library in search of The Environmentalism of the Poor.’
– Andrew Dobson, Environment Politics

Contents: Preface 1. Currents of Environmentalism 2. Ecological Economics: ‘Taking Nature into Account’ 3. Indices of (Un) Sustainability, and Neo-Malthusianism 4. Political Ecology: The Study of Ecological Distribution Conflicts 5. Mangroves Versus Shrimps 6. The Environmentalism of the Poor: Gold, Oil, Forests, Rivers, Biopiracy 7. Indicators of Urban Unsustainability as Indicators of Social Conflict 8. Environmental Justice in the United States and South Africa 9. The State and Other Actors 10. The Ecological Debt 11. On the Relations between Political Ecology and Ecological Economics Bibliography Index

It has long been claimed that a better understanding of human or social dimensions of environmental issues will improve conservation. The social sciences are one important means through which researchers and practitioners can attain that better understanding. Yet, a lack of awareness of the scope and uncertainty about the purpose of the conservation social sciences impedes the conservation community's effective engagement with the human dimensions. This paper examines the scope and purpose of eighteen subfields of classic, interdisciplinary and applied conservation social sciences and articulates ten distinct contributions that the social sciences can make to understanding and improving conservation. In brief, the conservation social sciences can be valuable to conservation for descriptive, diagnostic, disruptive, reflexive, generative, innovative, or instrumental reasons. This review and supporting materials provides a succinct yet comprehensive reference for conservation scientists and practitioners. We contend that the social sciences can help facilitate conservation policies, actions and outcomes that are more legitimate, salient, robust and effective.

In rural places that sit at the uneasy crossroads between 'traditional' natural resource-based production and 'new' economies and cultures of aesthetic landscape 'consumption', ideas of landscape become increasingly important and contested. This paper examines one such ...

Recent debates within political ecology have motivated new field. In the introduction to this special issue, we vital challenges faced today, and present a new set of studies that respond to these concerns. We conceptualize power as a social relation built on the asymmetrical distribution of resources and risks and locate power in the interactions among, and the processes that constitute, people, places, and resources. Politics, then, are found in the practices and mechanisms through which such power is circulated. The focus here is on politics related to the environment, understood as biophysical phenomena, together with human knowledge and practice. To apply these concepts, we promote multiscale research models that articulate selected ecological phenomena and local social processes, together with regional and global forces and ideas. We also advocate methods for research and practice that are sensitive to relations of difference and power among and within social groups. Rather than dilute ecological dimensions of study, this approach aims to strengthen our ability to account for the dialectical processes through which humans appropriate, contest, and manipulate the world around them.