ERG Colloquium Series Spring 2026, with Joan Martinez-Alier

ERG Colloquium Series Spring 2026
 

Speaker: Joan Martínez Alier, ICTA-UAB
 

• Date: Wednesday, April 1st 2026
• Time: 4 - 5:30 p.m.(01:00 am of April 2nd in Spain)
• Venue: Giannini 141. Berkeley. University of California

Even without further economic growth, the industrial economy would need new supplies of energy and materials extracted from the “commodity frontiers”. Waste disposal, including excessive amounts of greenhouse gases, keep rising. Less than ten percent of the materials coming into the economy (including the energy carriers) are recycled. Therefore, new ecological distribution conflicts arise all the time giving rise to an environmentalism of the poor and the Indigenous. Here we present insights from a global database documenting ca 4500 of such conflicts (the EJ Atlas). We also introduce a related project investigating how the digitalisation of grassroots transformative initiatives in pursuit of environmental justice and biocultural diversity is unfolding amidst unequal digital endowments (the DIVERSE project).

Joan Martinez-Alier is an Emeritus Professor at the Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA-UAB), Autonomous University of Barcelona. Balzan prize 2020, Holberg prize 2023 for his work on ecological economics, political ecology and environmental justice. Director of the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (https://ejatlas.org/.)

Beatriz Rodríguez-Labajos is a Distinguished Researcher and Tenure-Track Professor at the Department of Political and Social Sciences, Pompeu Fabra University-Barcelona. PI of the ERC-CoG-funded project DIVERSE (https://www.upf.edu/web/diverse).