Environmental protection by the global poor
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.
As described by Joan Martinez Alier, the "environmentalism of the poor" is a set of struggles and practices in which the so-called ‘’poor’’ people engage whenever they are threatened by ecological distribution conflicts. Ecological distribution conflicts, also defined by Martínez-Alier, are social conflicts that appear when the ecological impacts of an economic activity are unevenly and unjustly distributed among society; usually, the ecological impacts are disregarded and not taken care of by businesses, and affect much more those who have less resources to fight them. Therefore, in this sense, the "environmentalism of the poor" consists of the struggles of those poor people against the economic activities that unjustly affect them. Examples include the Chipko movement and the indigenous people's struggles against Brazilian agribusiness.
Environmentalism of the poor includes a myriad of environmental movements in the global South that are strikingly under-represented in the discourse of mainstream environmentalism. However, impoverished people embroiled in local conflicts are becoming more aware of the global environmental justice movement, and trans-national environmental justice networks enable these environmental defenders to potentially leverage international support for their struggles.
Background.
In 1988, Peruvian historian Alberto Flores Galindo suggested the term 'environmentalism of the poor' to describe eco-socialist peasant resistance movements, being inspired by the narodniki movement. In 1997 Joan Martinez-Alier and Ramachandra Guha contrasted these movements with the 'full-belly environmentalism' of the global North and drew parallels between rural and third-world 'environmentalism of the poor' and the more urban environmental justice movement arising in the United States.
Varieties of environmentalism.
In his 2002 book, "Environmentalism of the Poor", Martinez-Alier describes three different currents within environmentalism: the 'cult of the wilderness'; the later 'gospel of eco-efficiency' and the growing environmental justice movement or 'environmentalism of the poor'.
Cult of Wilderness.
The Cult of the Wilderness, also called "wilderness thinking" by Ramachandra Guha, is associated with the conservation movement and people like John Muir, and Henry David Thoreau. This movement arose in the 19th century with organizations such as the Sierra Club and the Audubon Society; Aldo Leopold, with his 1949 book A Sand County Almanac, was also one of the main figures
The cult of wilderness is not inherently against economic activity, but it states (in Leopold's words) that "a thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise". The conservation movement does try to limit the effects of economic activity on the natural environment. The main course of action proposed by conservationists is to separate economic activity and the environment, to limit the effects of the former on the latter. The main tools to do so are natural reserves and protected areas, in which human activity is regulated. By performing this separation, the conservationists intend to perform a ‘rearguard action’ to preserve nature (using Leopold's quotation in Martínez-Alier, 2003). This ‘rearguard action’ consists of conservation practices such as ecosystem management, habitat restoration, or recuperation of endangered species, all of them examples of conservation biology.
The main reasons given for this type of environmentalism are very diverse. Some authors take a utilitarian approach: Nature is seen as essential to economic and social development, and the creation of reserves and protected areas aims to preserve it for it to keep providing ecosystem services and natural capital for society. Thus, biodiversity loss is the main concern, since biodiversity is crucial for providing natural capital and ecosystem services (both crucial to economic development).
Other reasons usually given are the inherent aesthetic value of nature, the religious value of nature, the inherently humane tendency to be attracted by nature (biophilia), and the right of nature and its species to exist by their own right.
Milestones of this type of conservationism are the Convention on Biological Diversity in Rio de Janeiro (1992), the Endangered Species Act of 1973, or the creation of the Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks in the USA. Currently, it is institutionally represented by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), the World Wide Fund (WWF) and The Nature Conservancy. On the activist side, it is represented by deep ecology and the conservationist movement.
The "gospel of eco-efficiency".
The "gospel of eco-efficiency", or ‘scientific industrialism’, originated with the 19th-century writings of Malthus and William Stanley Jevons and grew during the 20th century when the effects of pollution and resource exhaustion were more apparent. As Martinez Alier puts it, the ‘gospel of eco-efficiency’ is ‘’worried about the effects of economic growth not only on pristine areas but also on the industrial, agricultural and urban economy’’. It was called ‘the gospel of eco-efficiency’’ by Martínez Alier as a homage to Samuel P. Hays, who in his book "Conservation and the Gospel of Efficiency" (1959) described the ‘Progressive Conservation Movement during the Progressive Era as a ‘gospel of efficiency’, in the sense that the U.S. Government put emphasis in efficient resource management.
The gospel of eco-efficiency asks questions such as, ‘’How is pollution going to affect economic development?’’; ‘’How can we minimize pollution?’’; ‘’How can we remediate its consequences?’’; ‘’How can we minimize the consumption of resources?’’; and ‘’How can we turn waste into a resource?’’.
Usually, the answers given go in the line of sustainable development, which the Brundtland report defines as "development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs". The ‘gospel of eco-efficiency’ usually defends economic growth, but not at any cost. Instead, it searches for a growth that needs less and less resources and generates less and less pollution and waste, therefore minimizing its impacts and improving its sustainability: the so-called dematerialization of the economy. The defenders of the gospel usually argue that through improving the efficiency of technology it is possible to achieve high levels of economic development with very low levels of waste production and resource-consumption that are manageable for the ecosystems, thus becoming sustainable. However, many criticisms have been raised against the theory of dematerialization: mainly, that the entropy law makes it impossible to infinitely improve the efficiency of a technology; and that the decoupling of local rich economies is only possible because they outsource the production of material-intensive goods to the developing countries.
The main tools proposed by the ‘gospel of eco-efficiency’ concern (1) economic, eco-taxes and markets in emission permits, and (2) technological support for materials and energy-saving changes.
According to Joan Martinez Alier, some of the most prominent proponents of the ‘gospel of ecoefficiency are Gifford Pinchot in the USA and the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy in Europe. Pinchot was the head of the United States Forest Service during the Progressive Era, and advocated the conservation of the nation's reserves by planned use and renewal. The Wuppertal Institute pioneered industrial ecology in Europe during the 90s, and designed several high-efficiency products such as the Passive house and also developed indicators such as the material input per unit of service (MIPS).
Environmentalism of the poor.
Both the ‘cult of wilderness’ and the ‘gospel of eco-efficiency’ are a bit technocratic (although it is not always the case). The ‘cult of wilderness’ has been associated with middle to upper-class people, with scientists, and with statisticians. The ‘gospel of eco-efficiency’ has been associated with state policies, with private businesses, and with scientists and engineers. And they have been historically associated with the Global North, and with white, cis-hetero males.
Environmentalism has therefore been historically seen as elitist, and poverty has been associated with environmentally damaging practices and disinterest in environmental concerns. For instance, the Brundtland Report concluded that poverty is one of the most important drivers of environmental degradation; political scientist Ronald Inglehart also argued that affluent societies are more likely to protect nature. Similarly, Kuznets curves associate environmental improvements with higher per-capita income, implying that the cure for environmental degradation is more growth. However, numerous case studies pointed out that poor people protect the environment against powerful interests to defend their livelihoods and cultures. Therefore, according to Martínez Alier, ‘poor people’ engage in this third current of environmentalism: the ‘environmentalism of the poor’ (or livelihood ecology, liberation ecology, the environmental justice movement, popular environmentalism, etc.).
The environmentalism of the poor emphasizes social justice and the protection of land for the use of marginalized people. Martinez-Alier draws upon political ecology and ecological economics to create a theoretical basis for a global environmental justice movement that arises from local environmental conflicts. This current of environmentalism arises from the uneven distribution of environmental harms among different sectors of society (what Martínez Alier and Martin O'Connor call ecological distribution conflicts), caused by economic activity and economic growth. This current of environmentalism, therefore, stands that the Global North exports environmental damage to the Global South, or that poor people are more likely to suffer environmental damage than rich people, or even that racialized people have a greater chance of suffering it than white people.
Therefore, it is composed of a myriad of different movements, all of which have one thing in common: the fact that due to this uneven distribution of environmental harms, their livelihoods are threatened (understanding livelihood in a broad sense; not only the material basis of human life, but also the cultural, communitarian and individual basis). Martínez Alier argues that, as the scale of the economy increases, ‘poor people’ are ‘’deprived of access to environmental resources and services, and they endure a disproportionate amount of pollution’’. Those ‘poor people’, whose livelihoods are threatened, struggle against the environmental harms that threaten them and against those responsible of the environmental harms.
In doing so, they protect their livelihoods, and this often means that they protect traditional ways of life that have coevolved in equilibrium with the environment, and that therefore are sustainable. This theory stands that traditional livelihoods have been historically shaped by the environmental conditions, and have learned to adapt to them, using sustainably the resources and the sinks available. Therefore, protecting them means protecting sustainable ways of life. For instance, traditional peasants have been actively protecting their sustainable, local way of life from the intensive, transnational model of agribusiness.
Martínez Alier argues that poor people simply protecting their livelihoods are often on the side of resource conservation and a clean environment, although they may not claim to be environmentalists and may use other language to describe their agendas (such as sacredness, sovereignty, etc.). Instead, he argues that people will resist environmental destruction that threatens their livelihood, culture, and prospects for survival, even if they aren't interested in protecting nature for its own sake. People will not easily give away their livelihoods in exchange for economic investment and development that offers them money, because values such as sovereignty and sacredness cannot be compared by monetary terms. For example, some cultures would deem money as valueless compared to the value of a sacred place, or compared to their freedom and sovereignty. Therefore, "poor people" often reject even the most economically-profitable projects if they harm things that they value and that are part of their livelihood. Environmentalism of the poor is thus partly a struggle to control the valuation language applied to the costs and benefits of resource extraction, gentrification, and other processes that threaten poor people's use of their land.
Examples of environmentalism of the poor include the struggles against environmental racism in the United States, urban air pollution, and struggles against mines and struggles for access to water, struggles forests, etc.
Ecofeminism.
Female leadership is common to environmentalism of the poor and creates intersections with eco-feminism. Women more often have social roles that bring them into direct contact with nature such as collecting water, growing crops, tending animals, gathering, etc. For example, in urban settings, women are most likely to take action against the dumping of waste or other pollution, even if gendered hierarchies prevent their participation. Ecological distribution conflicts not only affect unevenly poor people in general, but also affect women more because of their closer relationship with Nature and pollution. Therefore, women tend to participate more in environmental struggles. According to Johanna oksala,