Geoforum 54 (2014) 239–241

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Geoforum
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum

Critical review

The environmentalism of the poor

Joan Martinez-Alier
ICTA, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, 08193 Spain

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: There are several varieties of environmentalism. Here the focus is on the environmentalism of poor or
Available online 14 May 2013 indigenous populations involved in resource extraction conflicts around the world. In their struggle to
preserve their own livelihoods against mining companies, hydroelectric dams, biomass extraction and
Keywords: land grabbing, and oil and gas exploitation, peasant and indigenous communities have been since the
Environmentalism 1980s and 1990s the backbone of the global environmental justice movement.
Poor Ó 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Conflicts
Valuation
Indigenous peoples
Environmental justice

Contents

1. Introduction . . . . . . . . . . ........ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239

2. Causes of environmental conflicts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240
3. Indigenous rights . . . . . . ........ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
4. Conclusion . . . . . . . . . . . ........ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241
References . . . . . . . . . . . ........ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241

1. Introduction Relying on his own case studies in Cameroon and Ecuador and on a
literature review corresponding to 58 conflict cases, he finds that a
The growth in social metabolism is one main cause of global main cause of resistance is the corporate control over land result-
and local environmental injustices. My approach in terms of the ing in displacements and the end of local uses of ecosystems as
‘environmentalism of the poor’ converges with Environmental Jus- they are replaced by monocultures. Resistance affirms a ‘‘moral
tice approaches. The globalising scale of the contemporary capital- economy’’ of local populations, and includes the ‘weapons of the
ist world economy means we are seeing more instances of resource weak’, ranging from dialogue to direct confrontation and from local
extraction conflicts in poor or indigenous communities brought to international involvement in a ‘glocal’ pattern (Swyngedouw,
into the front line of contests about the values of environmental re- 1997, 2004). It often involves NGOs, especially for legal issues.
sources and services. Demonstrations, lawsuits, road blockades and tree uprooting have
Focusing on case studies, the field of Political Ecology (Peet and been reported in several countries. Authorities have responded
Watts, 1996; Bryant and Bailey, 1997; Rocheleau et al., 1996) stud- with repression in about half of the cases analysed, while popular
ied since the 1980s many environmental conflicts in Southern struggles have been able to stop plantations in about one fifth,
countries. Going beyond case studies, researchers are starting to mainly through winning lawsuits or massive social unrest. Gerber
generate statistics of conflicts on resource extraction and waste gives statistics also on gender participation, and on cases involving
disposal. For instance, Gerber (2011) has researched conflicts on murder. Such movements have a double face. They can be inter-
industrial tree plantations for wood, palm oil and rubber produc- preted as classical land conflicts. But they also have an ecological
tion. Gerber investigates the impacts of the plantations, the social content.
traits of the protesters involved, and the modalities of the conflicts. Activists in many countries understand and use the concept of
the ‘‘environmentalism of the poor’’. Thus in India (which is its
cradle), Sunita Narain wrote recently (once again) on the
E-mail address: joanmartinezalier@gmail.com

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240 J. Martinez-Alier / Geoforum 54 (2014) 239–241
environmentalism of the poor on 10th January 2011 in an article in
Business Standard from which I quote:
The year 2010 was a loud year for the environment. High profile
projects – from Vedanta to Posco and Navi Mumbai airport and
now Lavasa – hit the headlines for non-compliance with environ-
mental regulations. While 2009 was the 25th anniversary of the
Bhopal gas tragedy, it was only last year that we were all outraged
by the disaster. The realisation of how every institution – the judi-
ciary, Parliament and government – had miserably failed to pro-
vide justice to the victims shocked us deeply.
The question is what is the cacophony adding up to. Where is it
leading us?
Take the issue of projects that have been cancelled or held up
because of environmental reasons. It would not be wrong to say
that virtually all infrastructure and industrial projects – from min-
ing to thermal and hydel and nuclear power to cement or steel –
are under attack today from local communities who fear loss of
livelihoods. These communities today are at the forefront of India’s
environmental movement. They are its warriors. But for them envi-
ronment is not a matter of luxury – fixing the problems of growth,
but of survival – fixing growth itself. They know that when the land
is mined and trees are cut, their water source dries up or they lose
grazing and agricultural fields. They know they are poor. But they
are saying, loudly and as clearly as they can, what we call develop-
ment will only make them poorer. This is what I have called the
environmentalism of the poor. . .The question is where do we go
from here? I would argue, we need to keep listening to these voices,
not dismiss or stifle them in the name of anti-growth dissent or
even Naxalism. . . . In most cases you will find the concern raised
by people is pushed aside as projects are rammed through in the
name of industrial development. This must stop. . .. We must under-
stand that our future lies in being part of the environmentalism of
the poor, as this movement will force us all to seek new answers to
old problems.
One can enumerate cases and do studies on them. Or, rather,
similarly to Gerber’s work, one can draw on the ‘‘activist knowl-
edge’’ of the NGOs to do statistics of conflicts on oil extraction,
mining or biomass, not forgetting however that while conflict often
signals injustice, many injustices do not immediately produce open
conflicts.
The thesis of the ‘‘environmentalism of the poor’’ does not as-
sert that as a rule poor people feel, think and behave as environ-
mentalists. This is not so. The thesis is that in the many resource
extraction and waste disposal conflicts in history and today, the
poor are often on the side of the preservation of nature against
business firms and the state. This behaviour is consistent with their
interests and with their values.
The environmentalism of the poor centres then on social justice,
including claims to recognition and participation (Schlosberg,
2007), and builds on the premise that the fights for human rights
and environment are inseparable. From the resistance, new institu-
tions arise. The successful anti-gold mining movements in Tambo
Grande, Peru and Esquel, Argentina around 2000 (Urkidi and Wal-
ter, 2011), appealed to local democracy and imposed a new institu-
tion, the local referendum or public consultation, which allows the
expression of values that would otherwise remain hidden.
The environmentalism of the poor relates to actions and con-
cerns in situations where the environment is a source of livelihood.
This is reinforced by other values, such as the defence of indige-
nous territorial rights (appealing to Convention 169 of the Interna-
tional Labour Organisation, ILO), the claim to the sacredness of
particular elements of nature (a mountain, a forest, or even a tree).
When livelihood is threatened, those affected will be motivated to
act provided that there is a sufficient degree of democracy and they
are not suffocated by fear as is often the case. Indeed, a clean and
safe environment is a need for all humans rather than a luxury
good.
2. Causes of environmental conflicts
The fundamental clash between economy and the environment
comes from two facts. First, population growth. In the 20th century
population grew four times. It now seems that ‘‘peak population’’
will be reached at about 8500 million by 2045. Second, the social
metabolism of industrial economies. Energy cannot be recycled.
Therefore, the energy from the fossil fuels is used only once, and
new supplies must be obtained from the ‘‘commodity frontiers’’
(Moore, 2000). Similarly, materials are recycled only in part, and
therefore, even an economy that would not grow, would need fresh
supplies of iron ore, bauxite, copper. The growth in the number of
resource extraction conflicts and also waste disposal conflicts is ex-
plained by the social metabolism. The situation under neo-liberal
policies is not much different from what it would be under Keyne-
sian social-democratic policies.
Whereas wealthier people of the North have in general lost the
idea of the environment as their source of livelihood, the poor and
largely rural populations of the South are more connected to the
environment, and thus have a more intimate understanding of
what is at stake by not managing it carefully (Davey, 2009; Guha,
2000; Martinez-Alier, 2000, 2002). In the North on the other hand,
while people consume large quantities of imported energy and
materials, and produce increasing amount of waste, many of the ef-
fects are exported elsewhere, following Lawrence Summers’ princi-
ple. (The then chief economist of the World Bank argued famously
– The Economist, 8 February 1992 – that, from a strictly economic
viewpoint, polluting industries should be located in low income
areas because the costs of morbidity and mortality would be lower
than in rich areas.) Awareness of the externalised costs of their
purchases can only be gained second-hand from campaign materi-
als on fair trade or from an individual’s commitment to find out
about the origins of commodities and the destination of waste (Da-
vey, 2009).
New institutions arise from the conflicts and also new networks
are born from them, as for example, Oilwatch in 1995 because of
numerous protests by indigenous peoples and local communities
in the Amazonia of Ecuador, and the Ogoni and Ijaw in the Niger
Delta. This is a ‘network’ (Oilwatch, 2011) that deals with issues
of biodiversity, pollution, deforestation, protection of indigenous
territorial rights, and global climate change. In Kyoto, in 1997,
200 organisations signed a declaration that helped draw attention
to the link between oil extraction and carbon dioxide production,
from which 10 years later the Yasuni ITT proposal in Ecuador
was born. The environmentalism of the poor has thus led to inter-
national networks being created that have successfully linked the
local movements to wider global issues (Davey, 2009).
In the United States, in the early 1980s, the first social move-
ments (with origins in the Civil Rights movement of Martin Luther
King) were identified among poor and minority communities
against disproportionate burdens of pollution and lack of voice
on environmental policy implementation. This environmental jus-
tice movement was initially concerned only by the incidence of
pollution in areas inhabited by what in that country are described
as ‘‘minority populations’’, or ‘‘people of colour’’, which at world le-
vel are a majority. The movement called attention to the link be-
tween pollution, race and poverty (Bullard, 1993).
The fight against so-called ‘‘environmental racism’’ became
spectacularly successful in public policy making when President
Clinton in February 1994 issued executive order 12898 asking
all departments in the administration to make achieving
 J. Martinez-Alier / Geoforum 54 (2014) 239–241
environmental justice part of their mission, with the Environmental
Protection Agency leading the way. Little by little, the Environmen-
tal Justice movement in the United States started to collaborate with
environmental movements around the world in defense of the poor
and the indigenous (Bullard, 1996; Agyeman et al., 2003).
3. Indigenous rights
Indigenous territories in many countries (Canada, Australia,
Peru, Brazil, India, South Africa and Namibia) are also at the fron-
tiers of resource extraction. In countries which have ratified Con-
vention 169 of ILO, there is an obligation to obtain prior consent
for resource extraction. On September 13, 2007 the UN General
Assembly adopted the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peo-
ples. There are over 370 million indigenous people in Africa, the
Americas, Asia, Europe and the Pacific. The extraction frontiers
for minerals and fossil fuels, and for biomass, are often in indige-
nous lands. Thus, territorial struggles overlap with environmental
struggles. The Declaration defends indigenous territories against
waste disposal (art. 29.2) and against resource extraction (art.
32.2) without prior informed consent. The Declaration is an
achievement that comes after centuries of social, economic and
environmental injustices.
In my experience, representatives of indigenous peoples some-
times object to the expression ‘‘environmentalism of the poor’’,
pointing out that undisturbed indigenous peoples have often lived
in harmony with nature, with limited needs easily satisfied with a
few hours of work. ‘‘Poverty’’ does not apply here. Indigenous peo-
ples have been impoverished in history because of land grabbing
and forced labour. Their fights to keep the resources they need for
livelihood are nonetheless in line with the environmentalism of
the poor.
In such struggles, different languages of valuation may be de-
ployed side by side such as livelihood, human rights to life and
health, the sacredness of the land and local indigenous territorial
rights. These are different from the language of economic valuation
of negative externalities appropriate in a court case for damages
such as the Chevron-Texaco case in Ecuador or the case against
Shell from the Niger Delta currently under trial in The Netherlands.
There are still other languages available, for instance that of envi-
ronmental justice against ‘‘environmental racism’’. Who has the
right, or the power, to impose one particular valuation language?
4. Conclusion
The ‘‘environmentalism of the poor’’ was not recognised as such
until the 1980s and 1990s, as actors in such conflicts over environ-
mental justice have often not used an environmental idiom. The
conflicts are not only around distribution, they are also about rec-
ognition and participation.
The poor are not always environmentalists, and environmental-
ists are not always poor. There are, however, numerous cases of
environmentalism of the poor and of the growing number of
impoverished indigenous communities around the world. This is
because of the increase in the social metabolism reaching the last
frontiers of extraction. ‘Environmentalism of the Poor’ was words
that Guha and I started to use shortly after we met for the first time
in August 1988 in Bangalore. We noticed, then, how his work on
the Chipko movement fitted with the work I was starting to do
on Latin American environmental movements. In December 1988
Chico Mendes was killed defending the Amazon forest in Brazil.
This was a clear case of the environmentalism of the poor. Some
years later, after Ken Saro-Wiwa and his companions had been
killed in 1995 for complaining against Shell and the Nigerian gov-
ernment we wrote Varieties of Environmentalism (Guha and
Martinez-Alier, 1997) explaining the theory of the environmental-
241
ism of the poor as if we were academic decomposers usefully recy-
cling corpses and other cruel historical realities.
Environmental struggles resort sometimes to the language of
economic valuation, for instance when compensation for externali-
ties is asked for. This is the case in forensic contexts claiming dam-
ages. In such a case the bottom line is money. In many other cases,
the poor and indigenous have tried to stop degradation of the envi-
ronment by arguing not in terms of economic costs but in terms of
rights (territorial rights, human rights), or in terms of sacredness.
Valuation languages are often not translatable into one another.
There is no common currency. Commensuration would be an act
of power.
The environmentalism of the poor is part of the global ‘environ-
mental justice’ movement. The concept arose in India and Latin
America independently of the movement in the United States from
the early 1980s against ‘environmental racism’. The connection be-
tween both movements is now closer than ever (Nixon, 2011).
Environmental injustices are not only local, they are also global.
Hence the notions of ecologically unequal trade and the ecological
debt. First, the exports of raw materials and other products from
relatively poor countries are sold at unsustainable rates and at
prices which do not include compensation for local or global exter-
nalities. Second, rich countries make a disproportionate use of
environmental space without payment, and even without recogni-
tion of other people’s entitlements to such services (particularly,
the disproportionate free use of carbon dioxide sinks and reser-
voirs). The claim of ecological debt underpins the ‘‘ecological
adjustment’’ which the north must make. The environmentalism
of the poor, popular environmentalism, livelihood ecology, libera-
tion ecology and the movement for environmental justice (local
and global), may help to move society and economy in the direc-
tion of social justice and ecological sustainability.
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