Comment on environmentalism of the poor. (2023, 10 Marks)
The environmentalism of the poor names the struggles of peasants, Adivasis, fishers and pastoralists to defend the forests, water and land on which their subsistence depends. Ramachandra Guha and the Catalan ecological economist Joan Martínez-Alier developed it in Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North and South (1997); Martínez-Alier’s The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation (2002) gave it a full theory.
The argument
- Against post-materialism. Ronald Inglehart’s The Silent Revolution (1977) linked environmental concern to affluence. Guha and Martínez-Alier invert this: the poor are environmentalists because they are poor, since the resource is their income. Guha contrasts the North’s full-stomach environmentalism with the South’s empty-belly variety.
- Ecological distribution conflicts. As the economy’s throughput of energy and materials grows, extraction and waste are pushed to commodity frontiers, and their burdens (deforestation, polluted water, dispossession, foul air) fall on those with least power.
- Languages of valuation. The affected resist in idioms of livelihood, sacredness and territory that money cannot measure; Martínez-Alier sets this environmental justice current against the cult of wilderness and the gospel of eco-efficiency.
- Slow violence. Rob Nixon (Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, 2011) shows that such harm is gradual and invisible, so the poor must make it visible.
Illustrations
- India: Chipko’s claim to fuel and fodder (1973–74); Kerala fishworkers winning a monsoon trawling ban; the Narmada Bachao Andolan; the twelve Niyamgiri gram sabhas that rejected bauxite mining (2013).
- Brazil: Chico Mendes and the rubber tappers blocking ranchers’ clearance of the Amazon; indigenous resistance to the agribusiness frontier.
- Now: in January 2026 Great Nicobar’s tribal leaders said they were being pressed to sign land-surrender certificates for an ₹81,000-crore project that will fell about a million trees, while they say their forest rights are unrecognised.
- The Environmental Justice Atlas, built by Martínez-Alier’s team, recorded over 4,000 such conflicts by early 2024.
Limits
- Romanticism. The poor are not natural conservers: Kerala’s smallholders helped defeat Madhav Gadgil’s Western Ghats report (2011), and distress can drive clearance.
- Mediation. Urban activists and NGOs often speak for the affected, and victories stay local and defensive.
- Class. In cities a middle-class environmentalism of clean air and green spaces can evict the very poor the concept defends.
Conclusion
The concept refutes the view that environmentalism is an elite luxury and relocates it from lifestyle to distribution and democracy: whose resources feed whose growth? It is best read as a claim about interests, not virtues, the ground for a just and inclusive conservation in which the users of nature share its governance.