EnvJustice

ARTICLE by Joan Martínez-Alier, Balzan prize 2020 and Holberg prize 2023.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197762097.013.0015

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Abstract

For over 100 years, there have been protests against coal mining for its displacement of local people, accidents, land subsidence, and respiratory illnesses. Complaints arose against coal-fired power plants by local citizens in many different places before there was awareness of climate change. Similarly, oil drilling and extraction caused strong protests in many places such as the Niger Delta and in Ecuador over the last 60 years, without mentioning the effects on climate change. Opposition today by local peoples to liquified natural gas in Cabo Delgado, Mozambique, is perhaps not yet linked to the global impact of CO₂ and methane emissions. Many manifestations of an environmentalism of the poor and the Indigenous against extraction, transport, and burning of fossil fuels were not yet related to climate change. However, in the mid-1990s, local grievances against the fossil fuels industry started to be related to climate change and to claims for an ecological debt. Proposals by Oilwatch after 1995 and numerous “leave the fossil fuels underground” conflicts (collected in the Atlas of Environmental Justice, envjustice.org) display the slogans “leave oil in the soil” and “leave coal in the hole,” linking local grievances to the global climate and environmental justice movements.