User Tools

Site Tools


jma-envpoor

Joan Martínez-Alier, The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation

Environmentalism of the Poor

Paperback, 328 pages
Edward Elgar Publishing, 2003
ISBN: 9781843764861

This work helps to establish two emerging fields of study – political ecology and ecological economics – whilst also investigating the relations between them. It 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 favor 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?

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

jma-envpoor.txt · Last modified: 2017/12/25 10:50 by admin