The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation

by Joan Martínez-Alier

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

The author analyzes 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. He studies, in detail, many ecological distribution conflicts in history and at present, in urban and rural settings, showing how poor people often favor resource conservation. The environment is thus not so much a luxury of the rich as a necessity of the poor. The book 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.

Genres: Economics, Environment, Sociology, Theory, Nonfiction

328 pages, Paperback

First published October 26, 2003

Reviews

[Sara · Rating 3 out of 5]

The conflict is not (only) the struggle

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The book clearly defines the scope and objectives of political ecology and ecological economics, siding with the material as opposed to constructivist strand of the discipline. But contrary to its claims, it does end up being a catalogue of anecdotal environmental struggles from below. However significant and inspiring, these episodes do not exhaust the meaning of ecological distribution conflict, which can (and should) be conceptually interpreted also on a systemic and global scale.

Ecological distribution conflicts are active and powerful even and especially when they are not marked by protests, but are smoothed out by the intricacies of contemporary financialized capitalism, which separates the two sides of the distributional zero-sum game by inserting in between many (network theory) degrees, miles and temporal lags. Not acknowledging protest-less conflicts would be equivalent to falling victims to the 'Brimblecombe principle', whereby people tend to protest only against 'visible single-point sources' of pollution.

It is the job of poltical theory and activism to make subterranean, muted conflicts emerge and be recognized by the parties affected, so that change can take place. Before being 'exacerbated', as the author proposes, conflicts need framing. To stay within the boundaries of the struggles of the poor, Gandhi's genius consisted in seeing (ecological) distribution conflicts where Victorian capitalism saw only peaceful trades. The overdue boycott against British cotton cloth and the rise of home spinning as a symbol of national unity were the result of the identification of a conflict that had never manifested itself in protests.

Therefore, 'learning from the poor' is not enough, as for Gandhi simply leveraging existing protests would have meant renouncing his political leadership role.

But if we want to learn from active or past struggles, a modicum of (materialist / constructivist) analysis is required, to avoid assimilating situations that only share very superficial traits. For example, if the shrimp farm/ mangrovia forest is a horizontal, direct conflict, also striking for its genocidal overtones, it is more difficult to read the famous shrimp fishing / turtles controversy, which opposed the US to developing countries within WTO rules, under the same rubric of ecological distribution conflict.

Very interesting for the pioneering reconstruction of the history of political ecology and ecological economics, and for the rich overview of popular environmental struggles in contemporary history and across five continents.

[Jan · Rating 4 out of 5]

strangely easy to read. The arguments are complex, deep and the author has a strange tendency to mix multiple arguments in a way that one should be able to see each paragraph as a whole, not starting the first sentence and reading up to the last but instead to read both the first and the last simultaneously and work your way up to the middle, where the arguments meet and only then the paragraph attains it meaning. Am I crazy? Anyways, it is also easy to read (1+1=2).

If you're, say, a first year student you may want to put this underneath in your to-read stack, on the other hand reading this first may protect you from becoming too indoctrinated with all the myths preventing you from thinking.

[Bernardo · Rating 5 out of 5]

This pioneering book is key for anyone interested in understanding both causes of the climate crisis and struggles for a livable planet.