Ecological Distribution Conflicts and the Vocabulary of Environmental Justice

There is a fundamental clash between economy and the environment due to the growing social metabolism of industrial economies. Energy cannot be recycled. Therefore, the energy from the fossil fuels is used only once, and new supplies of coal, oil, and gas must be obtained from the “commodity extraction frontiers”. 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, and paper pulp. The industrial economy is entropic. Meanwhile, permanent “funds” such as aquifers, forests, and fisheries are overexploited, the fertility of the soil is jeopardized and biodiversity is depleted. Thus, the changing social metabolism of industrial economies (including waste disposal such as the excessive production of carbon dioxide) gives rise to growing numbers of ecological distribution conflicts that sometimes overlap with other social conflicts on class, ethnicity or indigenous identity, gender, caste, or territorial rights. The term Ecological Distribution Conflicts (EDC) was coined to describe social conflicts born from the unfair access to natural resources and the unjust burdens of pollution. Such conflicts give birth to movements of resistance, to the point that we can speak already of a global movement for Environmental Justice.  Professor of Economics and Economic History and ICTA researcher, at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain  Joan.Martinez.Alier@uab.cat


Introduction
The increasing number of ecological distribution conflicts around the world is ultimately caused by the changing metabolism of the economy in terms of growing flows of energy and materials. "Ecological distribution conflicts" Martinez-Alier & O'Connor, 1996) is a term for environmental injustices that comes from ecological economics. For instance, a factory may be polluting the river (which belongs to nobody or belongs to a community that manages the riveras studied by Ostrom (1990) and her school). This is not a damage valued in the market. The same happens with climate change, causing perhaps sea level rise in some Pacific islands or in Kuna islands in Panama or in the Sunderbans. More than market failures (a terminology that implies that such externalities could be valued in money terms and internalized into the price system) these are "costshifting successes" (Kapp, 1950;Gerber, 2016) which oftentimes lead to complaints from those bearing them. If such complaints were effective (which is not the rule), some activities could be banned, or, if we accept economic commensuration and reject incommensurability of values (Martinez-Alier et al. 1998), "equivalent" eco-compensation mechanisms could be introduced. The economy would change accordingly.
The term "ecological distribution conflicts" has been used since 1995 to describe social conflicts born from the unfair access to natural resources and the unjust burdens of pollution.
Environmental gains and losses are distributed in a way that causes such conflicts. While the term "economic distribution conflicts" in political economy describes conflicts between capital and labour (profits versus salaries), or conflicts on prices between sellers and buyers of commodities, or conflicts on the interest rate to be paid by debtors to creditors, the term "ecological distribution conflicts" in political ecology stresses the idea that the unequal or unfair distribution of environmental goods and bads is not always coterminous with economic distribution.
Such ecological distribution conflicts were perceived in terms of persistent injustices towards "people of color" in the United States giving rise to a social movement in the 1980s when the words "environmental justice" (EJ) began to be used in struggles against the disproportionate dumping of toxic waste in urban or periurban African-American areas. EJ offers a powerful lens to make sense of many struggles over the negative impacts that the changing metabolism imposes on human livelihoods and nature conservation worldwide (Gottlieb 2005). As early as in 1991, at the "People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit" in Washington DC ties were forged so as "to begin to build a national and international movement of all peoples of color to fight the destruction and taking of our lands and communities" as the declaration states. The principles developed at this Summit spoke to the world, and not to a minority.
Participants wanted to restablish humans' spiritual interdependence with the sacredness of our Mother Earth; to respect and celebrate each of our cultures, languages and beliefs about the natural world and our roles in healing ourselves; to ensure EJ and promote economic alternatives which would contribute to the development of environmentally safe livelihoods; and to secure political, economic, and cultural liberation denied for five centuries of colonization and oppression, resulting in the poisoning of communities and land and the genocide of peoples.
Conceptually "environmentalism of the poor" is related to the EJ movement applied to rural and indigenous populations in India and Latin America. It was introduced by academics and also by activists like Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) in India in the late 1980s and Hugo Blanco in Peru and early 1990s respectively. Since the mid-1990s the explicit connection between the two movements-EJ in the United States and the environmentalism of the poor in Latin America, Africa, and Asiawas established both in theory and practice (Martinez-Alier, 1997;Martinez-Alier 1997, 1999). In the mid-1990s, classical books analyzing movements against dams (McCully 1996) and tree plantations (Carrere and Lohman 1996)

The vocabulary of environmental justice
Since the 1980s and 1990s the global EJ movement developed a set of concepts and campaign slogans to describe and intervene in ecological distribution conflicts. Critical to the development of global EJ networks and activist movements has been the conceptual language that has arisen from particular conflicts such as those collected in the EJAtlas (www.ejatlas.org). We present here a set of concepts with origins outside academia and which are used by the global EJ movement Sikor and Newell 2014). Many of them come from Latin America and India. Enviromental Justice Organisations (EJOs) have produced not only a series of powerful concepts but they also link them to practice through what Charles Tilly called "repertoires of collective action" in his study of other social movements Tilly and Tilly 1981). Short definitions and the dates of origin of such concepts are provided in Table 1. This does not come only from the knowledge acquired through the EJOLT project  and the compilation of the EJAtlas but also from previous research together with activists over many years (Martinez-Alier 2002;Healy et al. 2012 (Bullard 1990;1999).
"People of color" and low-income populations suffer disproportionate harm from waste sites, refineries and incinerators, transport infrastructures.

Environmental racism
Rev Benjamin Chavis, 1982 The fight for EJ, against pollution in Black, Hispanic, Indigenous areas, was seen as a fight against environmental racism.

Ecological debt
Instituto Ecología Política, Chile, 1992, Acción Ecológica 1997 Rich countries' liability for resource plunder and disproportionate use of space for waste dumping (e.g. GHG). Popular epidemiology Brown, P. , 1992Brown, P. , , 1997 "Lay" local knowledge of illnesses from pollution may be more valid than official knowledge (sometimes absent In conflicts on mining, oil exploitation, dams… communities ask for applying legislation defending indigenous rights.. "Sand mafias" Name given c. 2005 by environmental movement, journalists.
The illegal "mining" of sand and gravel in India in many rivers, driven by the growing building and public works industry.
"Cancer villages" In China, popular name adopted by academics, officials (Lora-Wainright, 2013) Rural villages where industry has caused pollution (e.g. heavy metals), where lay knowledge of illness is relevant, and subdued protests take place.
There are concepts of academic origin (such as "working class environmentalism" [Barca, 2012], "ecologically unequal trade" [Hornborg, 1998] or "ecological footprint") that are also used or could be used by the global EJ movement. Here we focus on concepts of nonacademic origin. The first concept in the list is "environmental justice," born in the United States in struggles against waste dumping in North Carolina in 1982, as mentioned above.
Activist authors such as sociologist Robert Bullard but also civil rights activists with no academic affiliation and members of Christian churches, saw themselves as militants of EJ (Bullard1999; Bryant and Mohai1992;Agyeman et al. 2003;Pellow, 2005Pellow, , 2007. The fight against the disproportionate incidence of pollution in areas predominantly black, Hispanic, or indigenous was also seen as a fight against "environmental racism", a concept that in the EJOs' language means to treat badly other people in pollution or resource extraction injustices on grounds of membership of particular ethnic groups, social class or caste. In EJ conflicts, the disproportionate incidence of morbidity or mortality sometimes cannot be proved from official statistics because of the lack of doctors or hospitals in the areas concerned. Hence the rise of so-called "popular epidemiology" (Brown 1992(Brown , 1997 knowledge of pollution illnesses is not less valid than official knowledge. It is a concept that fits into the "post-normal science" theory (Funtowicz and Ravetz 1993), "street science" (Corburn 2005) and the notion of "activists mobilizing science" (Conde 2015).
Reflecting the specific environmental challenges and distributional inequities of the global South, some EJOs adopted the term "environmentalism of the poor" which as explained above, is very close to the notion of EJ born in the US but applies less to urban than to rural peoples in the global South, like the Navajo in New Mexico who suffered from uranium mining. Academics started to use this term in 1988-89 (drawing on research on India and Latin America). Similar words had been used by Anil Agarwal, the founder of the CSE in Delhi and editor of the First Citizens' Report on the State of India's Environment. His successor, Sunita Narain, often uses this term to refer to the struggles in India against dams, deforestation, mining projects and nuclear power stations (Narain 2008). Recently Shrivastava and Kothari (2012) have compiled many socio-environmental struggles and successes while putting forward a proposal for a radical ecology democracy.
The "environmentalism of the poor" (and of the indigenous) is a concept opposed to the influential "post-materialist" interpretation of environmentalism (and other new social movements) by Ronald Inglehart (Inglehart 1995). It does not envision environmental preservation as a luxury good, contrary to what Inglehart did. It is also contrary to Ulrich Beck's view of environmental risks as being impartial to social class (as might have been the case for a nuclear accident such as Chernobyl but which is not true in general) (Beck 1992).
The "environmentalism of the poor" is expressed by the poor and indigenous in place-based struggles for their own material livelihoods. In most ecological distribution conflicts, the poor are more often than not on the side of preservation of nature against business firms and the State. This behavior is consistent with their interests and their values, including the defense of indigenous territorial rights and claims regarding the sacredness of particular elements of nature (a mountain, a forest, a river or lake, or even a tree). It follows that those affected will be motivated to act provided that there is a sufficient degree of democracy and they are not suffocated by fear or are not violently repressed. In the EJAtlas we have collected about 2100 cases of socio-environmental conflict by May 2017. In about 12% one of the outcomes is (one or more) "deaths" of environmental defenders.
One of the primary environmental challenges faced by populations of the global South stems from an economic system that produces "ecologically unequal trade", an academic concept (Bunker 1985;Hornborg 1998Hornborg , 2005Hornborg et al. 2007) mentioned earlier. One form of such unequal trade has been called biopiracy by Pat Mooney of RAFI in 1993 and Shiva (1997). Biopiracy denotes the appropriation of genetic resources (in medicinal or agricultural plants) without any recognition of the original knowledge and "property rights" of indigenous peoples. The word "biopiracy" has been used in many complaints by EJOs.
Even State authorities in Brazil and India have started to use this term. Many academics writers and doctoral students also use it (Robinson 2010).
There are a number of other EJO concepts and policies that stem from the conflicts over biomass. The many complaints against tree plantations grown for wood or paper pulp, depriving local people of land and water, led to the slogan and movement "Plantations are not forests" twenty years ago. In Brazil, "green deserts" was the spontaneous, bottom up name for eucalyptus plantations in some regions, which were opposed by local peasants and indigenous peoples. This was certainly a form of enclosure of commons. The driving force was the export of paper pulp and cellulose.
The related concept "food sovereignty" was introduced in the early 1990s by Via Campesina, an international movement of farmers, peasants, and landless workers. Food sovereignty means the right of rural people (including women in particular) to grow their own food for themselves and for local markets, against corporate agriculture, particularly against agrofuel monocultures and tree plantations (Schutter 2012;GRAIN 2005 A term originating from the EJOs that has been very successful in the fights against ecologically unequal trade and for identifying those responsible for climate change is that of the "ecological debt" (Robleto and Marcelo 1992;Borrero 1994). There was an alternative vulnerable to climate change impacts, but there was "one thing that we do not accept and will not accept in this agreement and that is the notion that there should be liability and compensation for loss and damage. That is a line that we can't cross". He was supported by Miguel Arias Cañete, EU climate commissioner, who said there was now a "growing understanding" that loss and damage provisions would be included in the Paris Agreement, as long as they did not expose wealthy countries to new claims for compensation. Therefore, the

Paris agreement denies liability and offers no recognition of an ecological debt (Financial
Times, 6 Dec. 2015).
Unsurprisingly, it was also EJOs that had introduced and developed the related concept of "climate justice". An influential role in its introduction and dissemination was played by the CSE (Delhi) booklet of 1991, Global Warming in an unequal world: A Case of Environmental Colonialism, authored by Anil Agarwal and Sunita Narain pointing out that there were subsistence carbon dioxide emissions vs. luxury carbon dioxide emissions and it is important to differentiate the two (Shue 1994(Shue , 1999. Subsequently, in the late 1990s came the Jubilee campaign against Northern financial bullying of the South, comparing the large ecological debt from North to South to the financial debt from South to North (Simms et al. 1999;Simms 2005). The concept of climate debt was supported by the World Council of Churches, the Third World Network, Action Aid, and Christian Aid.
A 2000 event in The Hague sponsored by the New York group CorpWatch was the first known conference based on this term (Bond, 2011(Bond, , 2013. CorpWatch in a document in November 1999 stated that Climate Justice means, first of all, removing the causes of global warming and allowing the Earth to continue to nourish our lives and those of all living beings. This entails radically reducing emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Climate Justice means opposing destruction wreaked by the Greenhouse Gangsters at every step of the production and distribution process-from a moratorium on new oil exploration, to stopping the poisoning of communities by refinery emissions-from drastic domestic reductions in auto emissions, to the promotion of efficient and effective public transportation (Bruno et al. 1999).
Four years later, the Durban Group for Climate Justice was launched. It made itself well-known by its campaigns against fake Clean Development Mechanism projects.
The concept of water justice is associated with a university professor, Rutgerd Boelens (Wageningen University; Boelens et al. 2011) but he has been working so closely with activists for many years that he himself would no doubt like to see water justice or hydric justice as concept of the EJOs themselves. Their favorite slogans are "water runs towards power" and "water runs towards money" unless stopped by civil society movements.
The World Commission on Dams (WCD) was a civil society initiative that reported its Also in the field of energy policy, the civil society movements against nuclear energy since the 1970s gave rise to their own concepts. One of them, in Germany, was Energiewende Other new concepts that are growing among the EJOs are "energy sovereignty", "sacrifice zones" (Lerner, 2010), "ecocide" (Zierler 2011) and the call for an international environmental crimes tribunal (complementary to demands for civil liabilities). Refusing to participate in the game of corporate social responsibility, the EJOs have asked for corporate accountability (Broad and Cavanagh 1999). The new provision on the "rights of nature" (introduced in Ecuador's Constitution 2008, article 71, after an original idea from Accion Ecologica) is also popular among the EJOs that see themselves as fighting against crimes against humanity and crimes against nature.
The movement in Southern Italy denounces the eco-mafia and campaigns against waste dumping, complaining about "biocide" (Armiero and D'Alisa 2012). There must be many other national or regional terms of EJ that we could discover through the EJAtlas. For instance, in India conflicts on sand and gravel mining from rivers or beaches are particularly acute (with people getting killed in different states), and the new label "sand mafias" was given to this phenomenon. Similarly in China, in the complaints against pollution not only in urban areas but also in rural areas, the term "cancer villages" began to be used in the last ten For the EJ movement of the 1980s, with urban roots, a good environment as defined by the 1991 People of Color Environmental Leadership conference in Washington DC was a safe, non-polluted place for living and making a livingenvironment is where we "live, work, and play". Most of the world population is now urban. Inside cities, there are inter-connected movements introducing new concepts for a less unsustainable economy, such as "food justice", "transit justice", cyclist and pedestrian rights (cyclists' "critical mass" movements in many cities) (Carlsson 2008), and fights against gentrification. Such urban movements give a political meaning to squatting (Cattaneo 2011), they remake places for groups in danger of being "dis-placed", re-assert traditional or new practices of land use, urban food prodution and water harvesting, and try to protect territory from contamination, land grabbing and real estate speculation (Gottlieb 2009;Gottlieb and Joshi 2010;.
New terms and new cultural manifestations of the global environmental justice movement appear from time to time. Thus, in parallel to "land grabbing", the movement in defense of fisherfolk has proposed the slogan "ocean grabbing", to cast new light on processes of enclosures negatively affecting communities whose cultural identity and livelihoods depend on their involvement in small-scale fishing. Ocean grabbing thus means the capturing of control by powerful economic actors of crucial decision-making around fisheries, their main concern being making profits by gaining control of both the fisheries' resources and the

Conclusion
A well known expert in agrarian studies who reviewed my boon The Environmentalism of the Poor (Bernstein, 2005) wrote that it merely provided a series of "vignettes" of environmental conflicts, not weighty enough to support the thesis that there is a rural and urban global movement for environmental justice. Now we have the EJAtlas, and more evidence also from other sources to show that such a global movement exists although it (fortunately?) lacks a "central committee" or "politbureau". EJ networks spread out across borders (Keck and Sikkin, 1998;Bandy and Smith, 2005).
Environmental conflicts are related to the changing and growing social metabolism of industrial economies (Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl 1997, 2015Steinberger et al. 2010;. Energy cannot be recycled. Therefore, the energy from the fossil fuels can be used only once, and new supplies of coal, oil, and gas must be obtained from the "commodity extraction frontiers" (Moore 2000). Similarly, materials can be recycled only in part, and therefore, even an economy that would not grow would need fresh supplies of iron ore, bauxite, copper, and paper pulp. The economy is not circular; it is entropic (Haas et al, 2015). Meanwhile, renewable resources such as aquifers, timber, and fisheries are overexploited, the fertility of the soil is jeopardized and biodiversity Many concepts and theories have been produced in these booming fields of science in the last 30 years. There are also grassroots concepts for sustainability introduced by EJOs which have been discussed here and which are also objects of academic research. Such concepts support the global EJ movement, at the same time they also support local rural and urban movements protecting territory and defending place-based interests and values (Escobar 2008; Anguelovski and Martinez-Alier 2014).