🗓️ Session 6: Environmental conflicts
Abstract
Where ecologically unequal exchange touches the ground, it is often contested. This first part of the session picks up where Free trade — blessing or curse? (Session 5) ended. It introduces ecological distribution conflicts and the environmentalism of the poor, presents the Environmental Justice Atlas (EJAtlas), and offers a structured way of analysing a single conflict — illustrated with lithium mining in the Salar de Atacama, Chile. In the group work, you apply it to a conflict in your country.
🖥️ Lecture Slides
🧭 Group work
- Analysing an environmental conflict: seven questions (PDF) — the grid for the group work, and a template for the conflict section of your poster.
- Environmental Justice Atlas — filter by your country.
📚 Follow-up Reading
- Scheidel et al. (2020) — what environmental defenders achieve worldwide, and at what risk.
🏆 Further readings
- Temper et al. (2015) — how the EJAtlas is built; read this before you cite it.
- Scheidel et al. (2018) — the conceptual framework behind the seven questions.
- Anguelovski and Martínez-Alier (2014) — the environmentalism of the poor, revisited.
- Flores Fernández and Alba (2023) (open access) and Jerez Henríquez et al. (2021) — the lithium case from the lecture.
References
Anguelovski, I. and Martínez-Alier, J. (2014) “The ‘Environmentalism of the Poor’ revisited: Territory and place in disconnected glocal struggles,” Ecological Economics 102: 167–176.
Flores Fernández, C. and Alba, R. (2023) “Water or mineral resource? Legal interpretations and hydrosocial configurations of lithium mining in Chile,” Frontiers in Water 5: 1075139.
Jerez Henríquez, B., Garcés, I. and Torres Salinas, R. (2021) “Lithium extractivism and water injustices in the Salar de Atacama, Chile: The colonial shadow of green electromobility,” Political Geography 87.
Scheidel, A. et al. (2020) “Environmental conflicts and defenders: A global overview,” Global Environmental Change 63: 102104.
Scheidel, A., Temper, L., Demaria, F. and Martínez-Alier, J. (2018) “Ecological distribution conflicts as forces for sustainability: An overview and conceptual framework,” Sustainability Science 13(3): 585–598.
Temper, L., Del Bene, D. and Martínez-Alier, J. (2015) “Mapping the frontiers and front lines of global environmental justice: The EJAtlas,” Journal of Political Ecology 22(1): 255–278.