Environmental justice

List environmental issues that are interlinked (4).

Climate change, biodiversity loss, resource depletion and pollution

What role have states played in the initiation of environmental issues?

Governments decided people couldn’t be trusted with commons, so they privatised it all, producing a consumerist mindset

What is green grabbing?

When environmental conservation becomes another way for resources to be controlled by states and private partnerships

What does political ecology teach us about environmental issues?

Environmental degradation is not a purely natural issue, but is shaped by power, inequality and accumulation

What types of violence come with environmental injustice?

Slow and silent violence: invisible impacts through illness and degradation

What two principles is environmental justice based on?

• All people have the right to a clean environment

• There should be an inclusive decision making process when forming environmental policy

Fun definition for political ecology?

Politics is fundamentally ecological and ecology is fundamentally political

What is the Anthropocene?

New geological epoch that acknowledges human impact on the environment

Outline Marxian theory in relation to the environment.

Primitive accumulation: separate people from their means of food, making them hungry. Now they need to buy food with money, so they need to sell their labour. New class of labourers formed

What is fortress conservation?

When people are barred from natural resources in the name of conservation

What is a sacrifice zone?

area where marginalised community is disproportionately exposed to pollution

What is the Capitalocene?

Wordplay on the Anthropocene: blames capitalism as opposed to all humans

What did Garrett Hardin (1968) discuss?

• the Tragedy of the Commons

• Shared resources are always subject to over-extraction, leading to collapse

• People ignore the boundary between personal gain and communal loss

  • Critique: oversimplification

What impact did Rachel Carson have on environmental justice?

Carson wrote Silent Spring. This book was a turning point in nature studies, it critiqued the pesticide industry and exposed extensive pollution reaching humans

What did Michael Watts research?

The Sahelian drought, how original theories of local mismanagement were wrong, and root causes could be found in colonialism

How did Watts blame colonialism for modern famines?

Colonialism made people reliant on external markets, while also forcing them to go into cash crop farming, which damages the soils and land, without giving time for restoration

Who else found that claims of local mismanagement were wrong?

Fairhead and Leach- deforestation!