Book launch: Land, Water, Air and Freedom: The Making of World Movements for Environmental Justice
By Joan Martínez-Alier in conversation with Dr Paula Serafini (CLaSP)
This ground-breaking book makes visible the global counter-movement for environmental justice, combining ecological economics and political ecology. Using 500 in-depth empirical analyses from the Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas), Martínez-Alier analyses the commonalities shared by environmental defenders and offenders respectively. The book reveals the enormous “entropy hole” at the centre of the industrial economy, and traces “ecological distribution conflicts” at the frontiers of commodity extraction and waste disposal. It also serves as a textbook on Global Comparative Political Ecology based on the EJAtlas, a collection of “ecological distribution conflicts” (EDC) that began in 2012 and reached 4,000 entries by March 2024.
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 License. It is free to read, download and share on Elgaronline.com
About the author: Joan Martinez-Alier is an Emeritus Professor of Economics and Economic History, and senior researcher at ICTA UAB. He was awarded a Balzan prize in 2020 and the Holberg prize in 2023 as a scholar of ecological economics, political ecology and environmental justice. He was a research fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford between 1963 and 1973, and 1984-85. He published Ecological economics: energy, environment, and society (1987); Varieties of environmentalism: Essays North and South (1997) with Ramachandra Guha; and The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation (2003). He co-edited the textbook Ecological Economics from the Ground Up (2013) and directed the EJOLT project (2011-15). He has co-directed about 40 doctoral theses as mentor of the Barcelona School of Ecological Economics and Political Ecology. He was co-founder (1990) and president of the International Society for Ecological Economics (2006-2007). In 2016, he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for the project EnvJustice, and he co-directs the Atlas of Environmental Justice.