Poverty and Environmental Degradation
Between states as within their borders, “where there is social inequality,” we also find “environmental health threats” (according to David N. Pellow and Robert J. Brulle). During the 1980s, an environmental justice movement pointed out the disproportionate exposure of certain ethnic groups and underprivileged populations in the United States to external and environmental dangers. While waste processing and transport infrastructures that are harmful to health are installed in the poor neighborhoods of developed countries, these latter export their waste to countries of the South, to the detriment of local populations. In 2006, the ship Probo Koala discharged toxic waste from Europe into the port of Abidjan, creating lethal gas fumes which, according to the UN, killed 15 people and affected more than 100,000.
The environmental costs of producing and extracting natural resources are also paid by the Southern countries which export them. The most vulnerable populations face undue exposure to the consequences of climate change, particularly in a context of urbanization and the marginalization of small farmers in the global market economy.
Responsibility can also be strategically reversed. In Haiti, for example, national and international political actors, considering charcoal to be the main cause of the country’s deforestation, tend to cast blame on those who use and sell the charcoal, ignoring the historic and structural causes, the economic policies, and the power relationships that are at work. It is another example of how use of trees by the poor is criminalized, something which was systematic throughout the twentieth century.
Conversely, the work of Joan Martinez-Alier on the environmentalism of the poor has demonstrated the role played by the poor in conserving nature in the face of private corporations and states which they oppose, notably in conflicts over the extraction of resources.
World paper, plastic and textile waste trading, 2012-2016
Comment: This map shows the flows of waste materials registered as international trade. This means that there is no record of local or regional waste disposal, or of what takes place within countries; trafficking and illegal dumping also go unrecorded. Apart from the substantial movement of waste between European countries, the main producers of waste (North America, Europe and, to a lesser extent, Asia) send the large majority of their waste to China and Hong Kong.
- inequality > Inequality
- Unequal distribution of goods, material and/or non-material, regarded as necessary or desirable. Beyond income inequality (national, international and global), cumulative inequalities can also be measured with respect to accessing public services (healthcare, education, employment, housing, justice, effective security, etc.) and accessing property and natural resources more generally, and also relative to political expression or the capacity to respond to ecological risks. When these inequalities are based on criteria prohibited by law, they constitute discrimination.
- environmental justice > Environmental justice
- The concept of environmental justice is based on the realization that poor and minority populations are disproportionately exposed to environmental risks and to the harmful effects of environmental degradation (urban pollution, impacts of climate change, etc.). It implies recognition of each individual’s environmental rights, especially with respect to participation. In the context of climate change, climate justice refers both to intragenerational justice, especially between developed and developing countries, and to intergenerational justice, considering the actions, rights and needs of current and future generations.
- ethnic > Ethnicity
- Ethnicity is a descriptive category that appeared at the end of the 19th century, constructed by anthropologists and disseminated by colonial administrations. Unlike “race” it does not reference biological criteria but designates a group of individuals with the same origin, the same cultural tradition, whose unity is based on language, history, territory, beliefs and the awareness of belonging to an ethnic group. Ethnicity, which some have claimed to be a natural phenomenon, is in fact a social construct, externally imposed or claimed, at once arbitrary and evolving. Proposed as an exclusive identity, it becomes all the more powerful as an instrument of political mobilization when the state is in difficulty. Ethnocentrism consists in understanding the world exclusively through the lens of one’s own culture and seeking to impose this interpretation.
- developed countries > Developed Country
- At point 4 of his Inaugural Address of 1949, American President Harry S. Truman outlined a program of aid for “underdeveloped areas. This phrase refers to all the countries regarded as “lagging behind” in progress toward what thus becomes the model set by the developed, industrialized countries, which at that time had stronger growth and higher standards of living. The evolution of the terminology from underdeveloped to developing and developed countries has not altered the linear, evolutionist aspect of the overall vision. Nor has it in any way nuanced the homogenization and reification of the groups so described.
- environmental costs > Environmental costs
- Environmental costs, or environmental externalities, refer to the costs of the environmental consequences (pollution, soil depletion, contribution to climate change, etc.) of production and extraction of primary resources. As the costs of environmental degradation are sometimes difficult to calculate, they are not included in the calculation of primary resources and their by-products, which are undervalued as a result. The environmental costs of producing primary resources are unequally divided between the exporting countries of the Southern hemisphere and the importing countries of the North.
- climate change > Climate changes
- The UN defines climate change as “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods” (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change [UNFCCC], 1992). The expression is used to describe global warming of the Earth’s surface, whose extent and rapidity are without precedent in the planet’s history, and results from the increase in anthropic greenhouse gas emissions (principally carbon dioxide and CO2, but also methane, nitrous oxide, perfluorocarbons, hydrofluorocarbons, and sulfur hexafluoride).
- deforestation > Deforestation
- Deforestation results from the exploitation of wood resources (boards and planks, paper, fibers, charcoal production, etc.) and tree-felling to use the soil for other activities. It is often done with the aim of replacing forests with different types of farming (monoculture, fodder production, and so on) or for developing infrastructures. Until the mid-twentieth century, it mostly concerned temperate forests, but it then extended to tropical forests. Since the 1990s, private-sector actors have replaced states as the persons mainly responsible for deforestation. In 5,000 years, 1.8 billion hectares of forests have disappeared.
- environmentalism of the poor > Environmentalism of the poor
- Highlighted in the works of the economist Joan Martinez Alier, the environmentalism of the poor encompasses all maneuvers in defense of the environment implemented by populations in insecure situations, in both rural and urban environments. In this way the poor, i.e. the most underprivileged people, who constitute the majority in the countries of the South and a marginalized minority in the countries of the North, are actively involved in protecting ecosystems while striving to preserve their means of subsistence.
- conflicts > War
- Violent confrontation between armed groups over values, status, power or scarce resources, in which the aim of each party is to neutralize, weaken or eliminate their adversaries. This organized, collective, armed violence can be undertaken by states (via their national armies) or by non-state groups; it can bring several states into opposition (interstate war) or occur within a single state (civil war). The former, progressively codified within a legal framework, have become rare, while the latter, today primarily caused by state institutional failure, are tending to become more international in scope, to last over time (sometimes decades) and to be extremely devastating, especially for civilian populations.