Book Review: Land, Water, Air and Freedom: The Making of World Movements for Environmental Justice by Joan Martínez-Alier
Joan Martínez-Alier’s latest book offers important evidence on why the environmentalism of the poor is key to socioecological transformation. Also, it doesn’t shy away from thorny subjects.
(Image credit: Angie Vanessita)
Land, Water, Air and Freedom: The Making of World Movements for Environmental Justice (Edward Elgar, 2024) is the latest book by Joan Martinez-Alier, Emeritus Professor of Economics and Economic History and senior researcher at ICTA UAB, and a key figure in the development of ecological economics. In this extensive volume, Martínez-Alier seeks to answer the question: is there a global environmental justice movement? Rather than responding upfront, he provides us with an impressive tour of movements for environmental justice from across the globe, drawing on the analysis of 500 cases from the Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas), and pointing to the commonalities and shared experiences of environmental defenders (and offenders) in different parts of the world. In a way, as the author explains, the book is one of many possible interpretations of this major live archive of environmental conflicts.
The methodological approach of the book is comparative political ecology. While several chapters are situated in specific countries or regions, from India to the Arctic, others are transversal thematic chapters that bring together similar socio-ecological conflicts or aspects of these in different continents and countries: e.g. chapter 4 on women environmental defenders, chapter 10 on the anti-nuclear movement, chapter 20 on working class environmentalism and chapter 27 on corporate social ‘irresponsibility.’ Martínez-Alier explains the attempt here is to escape from “methodological nationalism” (2024: 25). At the same time, the book does engage with the particular context of each conflict and how legal, economic, and cultural factors condition not only the acting of companies but also the actions of communities in resistance. The book thus achieves that hard-to-reach balance between situated and ‘big picture’ forms of analysis, offering both in ways that feed into each other.
Activating history
One of the contributions of the book is the historical perspective that complements the case studies. The book tells a recent history of collective action and trends within the environmental movement. As the author himself explains, “the great difference between an impartial treatise of Social Movement Theory and the present book is that environmentalism has the historical potential to change human society (and its relations with nature). History has a sense.” (2024: 694) In addition, the book provides a history of the theoretical approaches that have been used to understand environmental conflicts. It traces, for instance, Marxist and feminist traditions in a way that contributes to a more nuanced understanding of how those lenses can be usefully applied in our analysis today, openly discussing the pitfalls of theory and the opportunities of action that different political and intellectual traditions offer. For instance, the book underlines the importance of using the framing of class struggle, but calls for an updated theory of labour value, or indeed, a move towards a value theory of nature.
What the transition looks like
One of the important interventions of the book is about the socioecological transition, and what that looks or might look like. The book emphasizes something critical which is the expansion of the commodity frontier, or what we could also call the extractive frontier, which brings to light the multiple material forms of the extractive economy but also of the transition economy, a reality that techno enthusiasts and mainstream sustainability advocates alike tend to conveniently leave aside.
At different points, the book engages with degrowth and clearly positions itself on the advocacy side, but it does so from a critical perspective. Degrowth is discussed in relation to environmental movements and movements for transition in the global south. As he has done in the past, Martínez-Alier proposes that many movements in the global south might share principles with degrowth, but use other expressions to name this idea or practice those principles in a different manner. In this way, he cuts through superfluous discussions on terminologies to instead reconcile theory and practice emerging from different parts of the world, opening the door to a pluriversal environmental movement. Martinéz-Alier’s position is reminiscent of a phrase by Arturo Escobar that I always find useful for describing this kind of pluriversal movement: “While the age to come is described in the North as being postgrowth, postmaterialist, post economic, postcapitalist, and post human, for the South it is expressed in terms of being postdevelopment, nonliberal, postcapitalist/noncapitalist, biocentric, and postextractivist.” (Escobar 2018).
The main actors of a just socioecological transition
The book centres the poor and the indigenous as the main actors of a just socio-ecological transition, including the overlapping positions and identities of workers, peasants, and women, in addition to organisations like NGOs and trade unions. The evidence for this claim is in the data gathered in the atlas: the string of successes on different fronts, mostly by common people fighting powerful companies and governments and effectively cancelling huge extractive projects. But the evidence is not only in the stories of success from the resistance. It is also in the innovation that such movements offer in terms of organising forms, economies, and imaginaries. Martínez-Alier’s book platforms the innovative practices of these movements. It doesn’t speculate on what the subaltern could do, but rather shows us the ways in which these actors are already enacting transitions in different places. Importantly, the book breaks with the dichotomy between working class environmentalism and indigenous and peasant environmentalism by pointing to how these are all manifestations of the environmentalism of the poor. It also challenges the false dichotomy between a focus on class or on coloniality.
“Importantly, the book breaks with the dichotomy between working class environmentalism and indigenous and peasant environmentalism by pointing to how these are all manifestations of the environmentalism of the poor. It also challenges the false dichotomy between a focus on class or on coloniality.”
One of the things the book brings to our attention is the phenomenon of company towns as epicentres of environmental activism. Here, environmental actors are either the company workers themselves acting through their unions, and/or other affected workers living in the same area. Interestingly, most of the examples of workers organising are from global south countries, e.g. claims against Unilever in India because of mercury poisoning, organising against the effects of coal mining in Zambia, and in Brazil, cases of asbestos in Bahia and Goiás, and the Brumadinho dam disaster at an iron ore mine in Minas Gerais. These cases help counter two common assumptions in environmental action narratives. The first is that workers are against environmental measures—in the book, the author also references the work of researchers like Stefania Barca, Karen Bell, Silpa Satheesh and Grettel Navas et al, “who are sceptical about the “jobs vs environment” dilemma.” (2024: 450) The second is that the idea of workers as a category of people with agency refers predominantly to workers in central economies. Much to the contrary, the environmentalism of the poor includes the many workers of the global south that are usually left out of the white, industrial imaginary of the worker: workers of the informal economy such as waste pickers, who are highly organised in places like India and Argentina. Indeed, it is important that these workers are centred. Drawing on data from the EJA, the book reveals that industrial workers are largely absent as actors in environmental conflicts.
Neo-Malthusianism as a leftist issue?
Finally, I find it important to mention the author’s engagement with a controversial topic within environmentalism, which is the matter of population growth in relation to planetary limits. The discussion on population growth is often quickly shut down on the left due to the association of arguments for reducing population growth with other ideologies and experiences: namely eugenics, racism, and programmes propelled by the post-1970s wave of neo-Malthusianism with the aim of controlling the bodies of mostly poor, racialised, and disabled women, including through forced sterilisation. Instead, leftist, feminist, anti-racist environmentalists tend to focus on unequal and reckless levels of production and consumption as the main drivers of climate change and ecological breakdown: it is not about the number of people, but about their footprint.
However, in this chapter co-authored with Eduard Masjuan, the authors bring back our attention to the matter of the expected increase in consumption levels in many parts of the world – bound to happen unless there is a rapid and marked shift in the global economy - to emphasise the persisting significance of population size in ecological economics. In response to this, the chapter seeks to break the association between neo-Malthusianism and oppressive and violent top-down policies by highlighting another facet of the history of neo-Malthusianism: one associated with leftist, mostly anarchist movements of the early 20th century in Europe, the Americas, and the south of India. These movements, which despite embracing the term neo-Malthusian differentiated themselves politically from Malthus, advocated for ‘conscious procreation’ among the working classes with the aim of limiting population growth. Their main arguments were: “women’s freedom, the downward pressure of excessive population on wages, and the threat to the environment and human subsistence” (2024: 675). In Europe, resisting migration overseas and anti-militarism were also drivers. The chapter is detailed in its account of many of the key figures of the movement, including the likes of Emma Goldman. It argues that many of these early manifestations of neo-Malthusianism were in fact feminist and/or proto-environmentalist movements.
While challenging, the chapter offers an accessible way into a subject that leftist environmentalism has, for good reasons, mostly neglected. While it acknowledges the horror of top-down population control policies that have been implemented in the name of controlling population growth in past decades - it describes, for instance, experiences in India – what it does not do is propose a way to overcome, in practice, the living trauma that such policies have had on real women, from India to Peru to Czech Republic to the USA. Without this, it is unlikely that arguments for curving population growth as part of a socioecological transition will be successful in many contexts.
The intervention is still valuable, however, at a time when pronatalist movements associated with the far-right – and with the preservation of capitalism more broadly - are on the rise at the same time as anti-migrant feelings are fuelled, calling for us to engage with the subject of population and resources once again. The chapter offers us a political-historical perspective that can be useful in the task of analysing anti and pronatalist positions today.
“The environmentalism of the poor includes the many workers of the global south that are usually left out of the white, industrial imaginary of the worker: workers of the informal economy such as waste pickers, who are highly organised in places like India and Argentina.”
A message of hope
This book is a significant contribution to the fields of political ecology and ecological economics, but it is also an important tool for students, for activists, for NGOS, and for historians in a range of areas, including social movements, environmentalism and energy.
Land, Water, Air and Freedom is a book that manages to bring us hope. It brings us hope not through a utopian vision for a better world, but rather by providing us with evidence. Though at points the book is heavy in description, the amount of information offered serves a purpose. The many environmental conflicts discussed and analysed in the book show us who the people organising for environmental justice are, how they are doing this, and that sometimes, despite huge power imbalances, they win. At a time when other writing on climate justice seems more speculative than evidence-based, imagining model climate actors that are yet to mobilise, Joan Martínez-Alier points us back to what is happening on the ground. It is feminism and the environmentalism of the poor that have the most potential for enacting transformative change, because they are the movements that are transforming the world right now.