Joan Martinez Alier (born 1939, Barcelona, Spain) is a Catalan economist, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Economic History and researcher at ICTA at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. [1] He has made important contributions in ecological economics and political ecology, which he synthesised in his work on environmentalism of the poor.
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Martinez Alier has a Lic. Economics, Universitat de Barcelona (1961), after which he went abroad to escape Francoist Spain, and studied agricultural economics at Oxford University and Stanford. [2] He then received a scholarship to return to Oxford (B.Litt. St Antony's College, 1967). His PhD was in Economics from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona (1976). He cooperated with the exile publishing house Ruedo Iberico in Paris between 1966 and 1979.
He remained as a researcher at St. Antony's College Oxford into the early 70s (1966–73 and 1984–85), working on agrarian conflicts, land reform, rural unemployment and the capitalist logic of sharecropping in Southern Spain and also conducting research in Cuba (on smallholders in the early years of Castro's administration); and in Peru (on the hacienda peasantry). He was visiting professor at the State University of Campinas (Brasil) in 1974, before returning to his home town to join the Department of Economics and Economic History at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain, in 1975. He has also been a visitor at the Free University of Berlin (1980–81), Stanford University, the University of California, Davis (1988–89), Yale University (1999-2001), and FLACSO Sede-Ecuador (1994–95 and 2007–15). [3]
He directed the CEECEC and EJOLT research projects on ecological economics and political ecology between 2008 and 2015. He is officially retired from AUB, but still professionally active and in 2016, aged in his mid 70s, he received a €2 million Advanced Grant from the European Research Council (ERC) for a further five-year project: A Global Environmental Justice Movement - The EJAtlas (www.ejatlas.org).
He is a founding member and past president of the International Society for Ecological Economics. He was a member (2000–08) of the European Environment Agency Scientific Committee. [4]
Martinez Alier's interests are agrarian studies, ecological economics and political ecology. In the late seventies Martinez Alier became interested in agricultural energetics and the work of Sergei Podolinsky (1850-1891), publishing a text on this with J.M. Naredo in 1982. [5] He has also described and mapped the anti-extractivist Blockadia movement. [6]
He has defined many of the key concepts and approaches in ecological economics. He argues, against neoclassical economists, that the economy is not circular, but entropic. Calculations of social metabolic flows of energy and materials need to figure in neoclassical and marxist economics.[ clarification needed ] Energy is not recycled and materials are only partially recycled - and resource extraction and waste disposal manifest themselves in ecological systems. They are visible through the drawing down of physical resources, pollution, and through socio-ecological distribution conflicts. The latter are hastened by an increase in social metabolism and human appropriation of nature. "In environmental struggles, reproduction of human society and of nature’s functions are more important or just as important as fights over the (purported) economic surplus." [7]
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The Autonomous University of Barcelona is a public university mostly located in Cerdanyola del Vallès, near the city of Barcelona in Catalonia, Spain.
Ecological economics, bioeconomics, ecolonomy, eco-economics, or ecol-econ is both a transdisciplinary and an interdisciplinary field of academic research addressing the interdependence and coevolution of human economies and natural ecosystems, both intertemporally and spatially. By treating the economy as a subsystem of Earth's larger ecosystem, and by emphasizing the preservation of natural capital, the field of ecological economics is differentiated from environmental economics, which is the mainstream economic analysis of the environment. One survey of German economists found that ecological and environmental economics are different schools of economic thought, with ecological economists emphasizing strong sustainability and rejecting the proposition that physical (human-made) capital can substitute for natural capital.
Embodied energy is the sum of all the energy required to produce any goods or services, considered as if that energy was incorporated or 'embodied' in the product itself. The concept can be useful in determining the effectiveness of energy-producing or energy saving devices, or the "real" replacement cost of a building, and, because energy-inputs usually entail greenhouse gas emissions, in deciding whether a product contributes to or mitigates global warming. One fundamental purpose for measuring this quantity is to compare the amount of energy produced or saved by the product in question to the amount of energy consumed in producing it.
Environmental justice or eco-justice, is a social movement to address environmental injustice, which occurs when poor or marginalized communities are harmed by hazardous waste, resource extraction, and other land uses from which they do not benefit. The movement has generated hundreds of studies showing that exposure to environmental harm is inequitably distributed.
The environmental humanities is an interdisciplinary area of research, drawing on the many environmental sub-disciplines that have emerged in the humanities over the past several decades, in particular environmental literature, environmental philosophy, environmental history, science and technology studies, environmental anthropology, and environmental communication. Environmental humanities employs humanistic questions about meaning, culture, values, ethics, and responsibilities to address pressing environmental problems. The environmental humanities aim to help bridge traditional divides between the sciences and the humanities, as well as between Western, Eastern, and Indigenous ways of relating to the natural world and the place of humans within it. The field also resists the traditional divide between "nature" and "culture," showing how many "environmental" issues have always been entangled in human questions of justice, labor, and politics. Environmental humanities is also a way of synthesizing methods from different fields to create new ways of thinking through environmental problems.
TheHolberg Prize is an international prize awarded annually by the government of Norway to outstanding scholars for work in the arts, humanities, social sciences, law and theology, either within one of these fields or through interdisciplinary work. The prize is named after the Danish-Norwegian writer and academic Ludvig Holberg (1684–1754). The Holberg Prize comes with a monetary award of 6 million Norwegian kroner (NOK), which are intended to be used to further the research of the recipient. The winner of the Holberg Prize is announced in March, and the award ceremony takes place every June in Bergen, Norway.
Simon Asher Levin is an American ecologist and the James S. McDonnell Distinguished University Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and the director of the Center for BioComplexity at Princeton University. He specializes in using mathematical modeling and empirical studies in the understanding of macroscopic patterns of ecosystems and biological diversities.
The Global Development And Environment Institute is a research center at Tufts University founded in 1993. GDAE conducts research and develops teaching materials in economics and related areas that follow an interdisciplinary approach that emphasizes ecological, cultural, social, and institutional factors. The Institute has produced more than twenty books and numerous articles, policy documents, and discussion papers. These materials are being used in academic settings, to enhance the teaching of economics and related subjects, and in policy circles, where GDAE researchers are recognized leaders in their fields.
Environmental issues are disruptions in the usual function of ecosystems. Further, these issues can be caused by humans or they can be natural. These issues are considered serious when the ecosystem cannot recover in the present situation, and catastrophic if the ecosystem is projected to certainly collapse.
The International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE) was founded in 1989, based heavily on the work of Herman Daly to promote ecological economics and assist ecological economists and related societies.
The Mesoamerican Society for Ecological Economics (SMEE) is a regional chapter of the International Society for Ecological Economics (ISEE). After its foundation in 2008 at Guatemala City, the organization has already celebrated its first International Conference in 2010 at Mexico City and will carry out the second International Conference, EcoEco Alternatives, between March 4 and 8 2014 at the main campus of the University of Costa Rica.
Marina Fischer-Kowalski is an Austrian sociologist and social ecologist and a professor emeritus of the University of Klagenfurt, currently teaching at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, the University of Klagenfurt and the University of Vienna. She is known for founding the Vienna School of Social Ecology and for her pioneering work on the widely used metric for material and energy flows to complement economic accounting. Fischer-Kowalski works on socio-environmental change, sustainable development and the Anthropocene.
Giorgos Kallis is an ecological economist from Greece. He is an ICREA Research Professor at ICTA - Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, where he teaches political ecology. He is one of the principal advocates of the theory of degrowth.
Ecologically or ecological unequal exchange is a concept from ecological economics that builds from the notion of unequal exchange. It considers the inequities hidden in the monetary value of trade flows not only in terms of wages, and quantities of labor but also regarding materials, energy and environmental degradation. As labor is also a form of energy, unequal exchange of embodied labor can even be considered a subset of the wider phenomenon of ecologically unequal exchange. There is an uneven utilization of the environment at the global level not only due to the uneven distribution of resources, but also to shift the environmental burden. The consumption and capital accumulation of core countries are based on environmental degradation and extraction in periphery countries. Sustainability analysis and solutions with a production-based perspective in core countries may thus keep increase unsustainability at the global level. The current configuration of global production networks that leads to this asymmetric trade patterns has evolved historically with colonialism. Whereas ecological unequal exchange is a concept developed in academia, the concept of ecological debt is used in an activism context of environmental justice. The latter defines the accumulation of this unequal exchange through history
Environmental defenders or environmental human rights defenders are individuals or collectives who protect the environment from harms resulting from resource extraction, hazardous waste disposal, infrastructure projects, land appropriation, or other dangers. In 2019, the UN Human Rights Council unanimously recognised their importance to environmental protection. The term environmental defender is broadly applied to a diverse range of environmental groups and leaders from different cultures that all employ different tactics and hold different agendas. Use of the term is contested, as it homogenizes such a wide range of groups and campaigns, many of whom do not self-identify with the term and may not have explicit aims to protect the environment.
Environmental conflicts or ecological distribution conflicts (EDCs) are social conflicts caused by environmental degradation or by unequal distribution of environmental resources. The Environmental Justice Atlas documented 3,100 environmental conflicts worldwide as of April 2020 and emphasised that many more conflicts remained undocumented. Parties involved in these conflicts include locally affected communities, states, companies and investors, and social or environmental movements; typically environmental defenders are protecting their homelands from resource extraction or hazardous waste disposal. Resource extraction and hazardous waste activities often create resource scarcities, pollute the environment, and degrade the living space for humans and nature, resulting in conflict. A particular case of environmental conflicts are forestry conflicts, or forest conflicts which "are broadly viewed as struggles of varying intensity between interest groups, over values and issues related to forest policy and the use of forest resources". In the last decades, a growing number of these have been identified globally.
Environmentalism of the poor is a set of social movements that arise from environmental conflicts when impoverished people struggle against powerful state or private interests that threaten their livelihood, health, sovereignty, and culture. Part of the global environmental justice movement, it differs from mainstream environmentalism by emphasizing social justice issues instead of emphasizing conservation and eco-efficiency. It is becoming an increasingly important force for global sustainability.
Blockadia is a global anti-extractivism movement; and a roving, transnational conflict zone where everyday people obstruct development of extractive projects, especially in the fossil fuel industry. Blockadia resistance movements differ from mainstream environmentalism by use of confrontational tactics such as civil disobedience, mass arrests, lockdowns, and blockades to contest perceived threats arising from extractivist projects’ contributions to global climate change and local environmental injustice. Some researchers have concluded that Blockadia contributes to a transition toward a more just society.
The Environmental Justice Atlas, sometimes known as EJAtlas is a website that documents environmental conflict.
The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation is a 2002 non-fiction book by Joan Martinez Alier about the environmentalism of the poor.
