Land, Water, Air and Freedom

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, Martínez-Alier analyses the commonalities shared by environmental defenders and offenders respectively.

Each narrative emphasizes the diverse vocabularies, iconographies, and valuation languages of poor and Indigenous activists without losing sight of the global scale of climate action and biodiversity loss. Revealing the circularity gap at the centre of the industrial economy, the book focuses on the frontiers of commodity extraction and waste disposal. Alongside exploring protagonists and geographies of resistance, chapters delve into corporate irresponsibility, unequal trade, and feminist neo-Malthusianism. Although grassroots movements for socio-economic sustainability are deeply diverse, there are global patterns of action and empowerment.

This book will be essential reading for students and scholars of environmental social sciences and humanities, anthropology, geography, international relations, and ecology. It will also help activists engaged in the movements for environmental justice.