Joan Martinez Alier facts for kids
Joan Martinez Alier was born in 1939 in Barcelona, Spain. He is a well-known economist and a retired professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He is famous for his important ideas in ecological economics and political ecology. He also wrote about the "environmentalism of the poor," which looks at how poorer communities often lead the fight for a healthier environment.
Contents
Life and Early Work
Joan Martinez Alier studied economics at the University of Barcelona in 1961. After that, he left Spain to avoid the strict government of Francoist Spain, a time when Spain was not a free country. He continued his studies in agricultural economics at Oxford University and Stanford University. He earned his PhD in Economics in 1976.
He spent several years researching at St Antony's College, Oxford in the UK. During this time, he studied conflicts over land, how land was shared, and unemployment in rural areas of Southern Spain. He also did research in Cuba, looking at small farmers, and in Peru, studying large farming estates. He visited many universities around the world, including in Brazil, Germany, and the United States.
Important Research Projects
From 2008 to 2015, Joan Martinez Alier led big research projects called CEECEC and EJOLT. These projects focused on ecological economics and political ecology. Even after officially retiring, he remained very active. In 2016, when he was in his mid-70s, he received a large grant of €2 million from the European Research Council. This money helped him start a new five-year project called A Global Environmental Justice Movement - The EJAtlas. This project maps out environmental conflicts around the world.
He was also a founding member and a past president of the International Society for Ecological Economics. This group brings together experts who study the link between the economy and the environment.
Key Ideas and Contributions
Joan Martinez Alier is very interested in how farming, the environment, and politics are all connected. He became interested in how energy is used in farming in the late 1970s. He also described a movement called Blockadia, which involves people protesting against projects that extract natural resources like oil or minerals.
He has helped define many important ideas in ecological economics. He believes that our economy isn't a closed loop where everything gets reused. Instead, he argues that energy is used up and materials are only partly recycled. This means that taking resources from the Earth and creating waste affects our environment. We can see these effects through pollution, the depletion of natural resources, and conflicts between communities and companies over environmental issues. These conflicts often happen more often as humans use more of nature's resources. He emphasizes that in environmental fights, protecting human society and nature's functions are just as important as economic gains.
Awards and Recognition
Joan Martinez Alier has received several important awards for his work:
- 2010: ISEE Kenneth Boulding Award for Ecological Economics. This award recognizes his significant contributions to the field.
- 2017: Leontief Prize for Advancing the Frontiers of Economic Thought from the GDAE. This prize honors economists who push the boundaries of economic thinking.
- 2020: Balzan Prize for Environmental Challenges. He received this for his outstanding work in creating ecological economics, his unique way of studying the links between economies and the environment, and his active role in promoting environmental justice.
- 2023: Holberg Prize. This major award recognized his groundbreaking research in ecological economics, political ecology, and environmental justice.
In 2023, a special book was published in his honor, called The Barcelona School of Ecological Economics and Political Ecology: A Companion in Honour of Joan Martinez-Alier.
Selected Books
Here are some of the books Joan Martinez Alier has written or co-written 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"
- 1997: Varieties of Environmentalism. Essays North and South (with Ramachandra Guha)
- 2002: The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation
- 2015: Handbook of Ecological Economics (with Roldan Muradian)
- 2023: Land, Water, Air and Freedom. The Making of World Movements for Environmental Justice
Interviews
You can learn more about Joan Martinez Alier and his ideas through these interviews:
- 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
