Environmentalism of the poor

People standing around trees, hugging them, holding each other's hands

A scene of Chipko Movement, one of the strongest movements to conserve forests in India

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 amongst society; usually, the ecological impacts are disregarded and not taken care of by businessess, 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 of environmentalism of the poor struggles are, for example, the Chipko movement or 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 October 2011, the Kenyan Ambassador to Germany, Ken Osinde, planted a tree in honor of Wangari Maathai of the Green Belt Movement in the garden of the Heinrich Böll Foundation's office in Berlin.

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

Main article: Conservation movement

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 off 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 tool 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 in 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 an utilitarian approach: Nature is seen as essential to economic and social development, and the creation of reserves and protected areas aims to preserve it in order 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 reasongs 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"

Main article: 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-efficency’ 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-efficency’’ 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.

1. The ‘gospel of eco-efficiency’  is concerned with the efficiency of the production process, that is, the efficiency of the technologies involved in it. It focuses on finding solutions that improve the efficiency of resource use and of waste/pollution generation, mainly through investment in research and development.
2. It is also concerned with the efficiency of the economic market, and sees environmental problems as inefficiencies of it, not as structural problems of it. Therefore, it focuses on finding solutions to these inefficiencies, mainly through internalizing them in market accounts. The gospel is championed by environmental economics, a discipline that stands that the market has negative externalities that are not accounted as economic costs, and that if those are accounted as such, the market will readjust in order to reduce those costs, thus reducing the externalities. Some tools that environmental economics propose for accounting those costs are eco-taxes and emission permits.

According to Joan Martinez Alier, some 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 staticians. The ‘gospel of eco-efficiency’ has been associated with State policies, with private businesess, 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 that poor people protect the environment against powerful interests in order 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 emphasises social justice and protection of land for the use of marginalised 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 amongst 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 by 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 are incommensurable in 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 struggle against environmental racism in the United States, struggles against urban air pollution, struggles against mines, struggles for access to water, struggles for access to forests, etc.

Eco-feminism

Ecofeminism

Main article: Ecofeminism

Female leadership is common to environmentalism of the poor, creating 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. In urban settings, women are most likely to take action against dumping of waste or other pollution, even if gendered hierarchies prevent their participation. Notable examples of environmentalism of the poor led by women activists are the Chipko movement in India and the Kenyan Green Belt Movement.

Global movement

Political ecology scholars and environmental justice organizations are pointing toward a global environmental justice movement led by environmental defenders from the global poor. Local movements need international support to challenge major trans-national corporations, and environmentalism of the poor would need global influence to affect global issues such as the extinction crisis and climate change.

Increasingly, local conflicts are finding international support and wider influence. For example, the struggle against the Tipaimukh Dam in India originated with poor people whose water source was being threatened, and that conflict became a dynamic and international resistance movement. International networks such as Oilwatch have also arisen from direct action taken by Indigenous people fighting against oil exploration in places like the Niger delta, Colombia, and Peru.

Conflicts and alliances with other forms of environmentalism

Although there are some clear differences, the ‘gospel of eco-efficiency’, the ‘cult of wilderness’ and the ‘environmentalism’ of the poor overlap and intertwine in certain topics, and can form alliances. In the words of Martínez Alier, ‘’they have a lot in common, and all three are opposed by anti-environmentalists or despised or neglected by them’’, and in the Global South they are even attacked and killed.

The ‘environmentalism of the poor’ and the ‘cult of wilderness’

The ‘cult of wilderness’ historically took a pragmatic approach and engaged in protecting natural, 'pristine' areas of wilderness from human activity by banning or at least regulating human activity in the area, creating nature reserves or national parks. The basic assumption was that human activity as a whole was prejudicial to the environment. Therefore, some currents within this movement tended to see human population as the core cause of environmental destruction.

Thus, the ‘cult of wilderness’ has historically been elitist and racist. For example, poor people or indigenous people are deemed ignorant and incapable of respecting the environment; therefore, they are sometimes banned from accessing it. In multiple cases, they are even expelled from the lands they inhabited, to create natural reserves (see, for example, the case of the Kruger National Park, the case of Batwa people being expelled from the Kahuzi-Biéga National Park by WWF-trained guards, or the case of indigenous indians being expelled from their communal forests by governmental policy).

However, poor and indigenous people are not ignorant, and in fact are much more conscious of the necessity of biodiversity and the environment as a positive asset worthy of conservation. Over time, they have learnt its value because their livelihoods depend on it. For example, poor farmers are often interested in preserving the environment and the soil because they know it’s crucial for their material livelihood. And indigenous people often want to preserve the value of the environment because they have spiritual connections with it, which is also crucial for their livelihood.

Here lies the possibility of an alliance. Recent studies have shown that Indigenous people are effective conservators of the majority of biodiversity in the planet: therefore, protecting them is also a way to manage biodiversity. For example, Indigenous people in Brazil have demonstrated to play a key role in avoiding deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. In Canada, Indigenous-led fire stewardship ‘’enhances ecosystem diversity, assists with the management of complex resources, and reduces wildfire risk by lessening fuel loads’’. Often indigenous people are better managers of the biodiversity than private companies or than the State itself.

Thus, an alliance between conservationists and poor environmentalists could lead to an effective protection and management of ‘’wilderness’’. Conservationists have begun to understand that ‘poor people’ will defend wilderness if they consider it as part of their livelihood. Conservationists are beginning to understand that nature should be protected by protecting its protectors.