Joan Martinez Alier facts for kids
Joan Martinez Alier is a famous Spanish economist born in Barcelona, Spain, in 1939. He is a retired professor from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is well-known for his big ideas in ecological economics and political ecology. These fields study how our economy affects the environment and how people fight for a healthier planet. He especially focused on the "environmentalism of the poor", which looks at how poorer communities often face the worst environmental problems.
Contents
Life and Education
Joan Martinez Alier studied economics at the University of Barcelona in 1961. After that, he left Spain to study agricultural economics. He went to Oxford University and Stanford University.
He later earned another degree from St Antony's College, Oxford, in 1967. He completed his PhD in Economics in 1976 at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona.
Early Career and Research
From 1966 to 1973, Martinez Alier worked as a researcher at St Antony's College, Oxford. He studied farming conflicts and land issues in Southern Spain. He also did research in Cuba, looking at small farmers. In Peru, he studied the lives of peasants on large estates.
He was a visiting professor in Brazil in 1974. In 1975, he returned to Barcelona to teach at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. He also taught at other universities around the world. These included the Free University of Berlin and Yale University.
Later Projects and Recognition
From 2008 to 2015, he led important research projects. These projects focused on ecological economics and political ecology. Even after officially retiring, he remained very active.
In 2016, he received a large grant of €2 million. This money helped him start a five-year project. The project was called "A Global Environmental Justice Movement - The EJAtlas." It aimed to map environmental conflicts worldwide.
He helped start the International Society for Ecological Economics. He also served on the Scientific Committee of the European Environment Agency.
Key Ideas and Contributions
Martinez Alier is interested in how farming, the economy, and the environment are connected. He has helped define many important ideas in ecological economics.
Economy and Nature
He believes that the economy is not a closed circle. Instead, it constantly uses up resources and creates waste. He argues that we need to measure how much energy and materials our societies use. This is called "social metabolism."
Energy cannot be reused, and materials are only partly recycled. Taking resources from nature and throwing away waste causes pollution. It also leads to conflicts between people and the environment. These conflicts happen when humans use too much of nature's resources.
He emphasizes that protecting human society and nature is very important. These goals are just as important as making money.
Awards and Honors
Joan Martinez Alier has received many important awards for his work:
- In 2010, he received the ISEE Kenneth Boulding Award for Ecological Economics.
- He won the Leontief Prize in 2017. This award recognizes people who advance economic thought.
- In 2020, he received the Balzan Prize. This prize honored his work on environmental challenges. It recognized his efforts to combine different fields of study. He was also praised for promoting environmental justice.
- He was awarded the Holberg Prize in 2023. This prize recognized his groundbreaking research. It highlighted his work in ecological economics, political ecology, and environmental justice.
Selected Books (in English)
- 1971: Labourers and Landowners in Southern Spain
- 1977: Haciendas, Plantations and Collective Farms (Cuba and Peru)
- 1987: Ecological economics: energy, environment and society
- 1994: The environment as a luxury good or "too poor to be green"
- 1996: Getting down to earth: practical applications of ecological economics (with Robert Costanza and Olman Segura)
- 1997: Varieties of Environmentalism. Essays North and South (with Ramachandra Guha)
- 2002: The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation
- 2007: Rethinking Environmental History: World-Systems History and Global Environmental Change (with Alf Hornborg and John Mc Neill)
- 2008: Recent Developments in Ecological Economics 2 vols. (with Inge Ropke)
- 2012: Ecological Economics from the Ground Up (with Hali Healy et al.)
- 2015: Handbook of Ecological Economics (with Roldan Muradian)
- 2023: Land, Water, Air and Freedom. The Making of World Movements for Environmental Justice
Interviews (in English)
- Interview with Lorenzo Pellegrini in Development & Change, 2012
- Ecological Economics, Video Interview at The Montreal Degrowth Conference 2012
- [1] ESEE Interview 2023.
- [2]Leontief-prize/recipients
See also
In Spanish: Joan Martínez Alier para niños
