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Environmental Justice Atlas: Cartographies for Resistance

2015-present

Barcelona, Spain

An open-access online atlas that catalogues social conflict over environmental issues around the world as part of a drive for greater transparency and a culture of critical inquiry

Context

Throughout the world people fight to defend their land, air and water ways, forests, and socioeconomic livelihoods from extractive projects that harm environments and communities through mining, damming, monoculture tree plantations, fracking, gas flaring, waste disposal, and so on. Much of the global economy operates in commodity chains of extraction, processing, and disposal, whereby climate and social damages are outsourced which results in burdening the world’s poorest and most marginalised peoples. Such commodity chains are rarely visible to citizens or consumers of the end products as the exploitative actions that cause climate breakdown are often hidden from view.

Practice

In 2015 a group of researchers in Barcelona devised the Environmental Justice Atlas to tell the stories of communities struggling for environmental justice. Using an interactive world map on a website, the Atlas functions as a catalogue of issues and a starting point for concerned citizens and activist groups to gain information and to see the work of similar groups elsewhere. The Atlas highlights claims and testimonies, calling for corporate and state responsibility for climate and social injustice.

The Atlas is made by hundreds of collaborators, including academic researchers, concerned citizens, informal committees, NGOs, and other activist groups.¹ All data are moderated by the editorial team who double check the information. Anyone can create an account and contact the editorial team to contribute information. A commenting function is available on each page representing an “ecological conflict” in order to facilitate discussion.²

Cases are added to the Atlas, which maps conflicts across 10 categories (nuclear, mineral ores and building extractions, etc.) if they fulfil one or more criteria for environmental conflict:

“Economic activity or legislation with actual or potential negative environmental and social outcomes; Claim and mobilization by environmental justice organization(s) that such harm occurred or is likely to occur as a result of that activity; Reporting of that particular conflict in one or more media stories.“³

Clicking on the map, visitors to the Atlas website can access a database that contains information on investors, stakeholders and the impacts of their trade deals, basic data regarding the source and nature of a conflict, outlines of impacts, outcomes, legislation, related academic research, videos, and pictures.

Since 2015, further maps have been developed for the Atlas in collaboration with ongoing campaigns or research projects. These show a number of socioeconomic indicators in the form of colour intensity (known as choropleth maps) They indicate GDP, poverty or material extraction, for example, or represent different types of land uses and biophysical parameters such as pasture lands, forests, or areas with water scarcity. Geodata stem from national planning agencies, international agencies, and organisations working on specific issues such as shale gas (www.unconventionalenergyresources.com) or land use (www.globallandproject.org). Socioeconomic data from sources, such as materialflows.net or the UN’s Comtrade, also form geographical layers for the Atlas maps through geo-referencing statistical data.

The website also contains an informational section explaining that environmental conflict usually arises from structural inequalities of income and power, and that environmental justice works to secure distribution, recognition, and participation. The informational text cites examples of conflict and justice issues, including the distribution of pollution and access to environmental resources, the right to participate in decision-making and the recognition of alternate worldviews.⁴ Action, the website explains, may include formal claim-making, petitions, meetings, demonstrations, boycotts, strikes, legal actions, civil disobedience, collective violence, international campaigns, and more.⁵

“Growing consumption of resources is fueling ever more conflicts globally. Most of these are used to satisfy the material needs of the rich segments of the world population. But over-consumption by the rich visits ecological violence on the poor. It is a story of luxury for some v. livelihood for many.”⁶

Of the cases currently on the map, approximately 18% qualify as successes for environmental justice where court cases have been won, access to common land reclaimed, or destructive projects scrapped.3 Such victories demonstrate the transformative power of resistance, community organising, policy-making and practicing ecologically-driven philosophies such as Sumak Kawsay and Ubuntu. The Atlas provides a teaching, solidarity and advocacy resource for activist organisers, researchers, policy-makers, educators and citizens seeking information about often invisible conflicts occurring behind the scenes of a commodity chain or service. By increasing the visibility of environmental conflicts and the many solidarity movements that face them, the Atlas provides a space for both critical focus and future-oriented hope.

Notes

1
Environmental Justice Atlas. <https://ejatlas.org/> [Accessed 5 November 2023].
2
Mariana Walter, and Lucrecia Wagner, ‘Mining Struggles in Argentina. The Keys of a Successful Story of Mobilisation’. The Extractive Industries and Society 8, 4 (1 December 2021): 100940 <https://doi.org/10.1016/j.exis.2021.100940>
3
Walter and Wagner, ‘Mining Struggles in Argentina’.
4
Walter and Wagner, ‘Mining Struggles in Argentina’.
5
Walter and Wagner, ‘Mining Struggles in Argentina’.
6
Remembrance Day For Lost Species. ‘The Environmental Justice Atlas’, 11 October 2018 <https://www.lostspeciesday.org/?p=1110> [accessed 21 November 2023].

Chile’s Constitution: Social and Ecological Justice

2019-2022

Chile

A proposed national constitution, written collectively by over 150 people representing diverse backgrounds and perspectives, calling for widespread legal, economic, social, and ecological reform, including the recognition of the rights of nature

Context

Chile’s current constitution was written during Augusto Pinochet’s right-wing dictatorship in 1980 and has not been replaced. The country’s new, left-wing leader Gabriel Boric came to power in 2022 promising a new constitution, which was to be co-written with a convention of 154 democratically elected members. Most of these members were independent politicians, and a large number of them were leftists, feminists, environmentalists, and advocates of Indigenous groups. 78% of voters approved Boric’s suggestion to rewrite the constitution in a referendum held in 2020.¹

Practice

The constitutional convention drafted a document containing 388 articles which drew on their breadth of perspectives and expertise. Written by and for people outside the traditional political sphere, with the wellbeing of an array of social sectors, minority groups, and natural habitats in mind, the constitution was acclaimed the world over for its far-reaching ecological and social foresight.²

The constitution emphasises the rights of nature, its first article stating that it “recognises as intrinsic and absolute” the “dignity, freedom and substantive equality of human beings and their indissoluble relationship with nature”.³ Any business enterprise and scientific development, the constitution warns, must also “be developed according to the bioethical principles of solidarity, cooperation, and responsibility, and with full respect for human dignity, animal sentience, nature’s rights”.⁴ The constitution stresses the importance of Chile’s Indigenous nations, and their rights to land, self-determination, cultural heritage, and linguistic independence. Other social rights include those regarding education, health, housing, and gender equality. In sum, the constitution takes an eco-intersectional approach to understand people and planet as a symbiotic or holistic system.

When it came to the vote concerning the adoption or rejection of the constitution, 62% of Chileans voted against it. People have speculated about the reasons for this rejection, citing the fact that the constitution was overly complex and long, that its contents were damaged by fake news on social media ahead of the vote, and that most private donations were given to the constitution rejection campaign.⁵ Time will tell whether the constitution’s re-drafted iteration will uphold the values of solidarity, ecocentrism, democratic and representational governance, and territorial autonomy that make the first draft so extraordinary.

Notes

1
Maria Contesse, ‘Why We Failed to Approve the New Chilean Constitution | LSE Latin America and Caribbean’. LSE Latin America and Caribbean Blog (blog), 15 September 2022 <https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/latamcaribbean/2022/09/15/why-we-failed-to-approve-the-new-chilean-constitution/> [accessed 5 November 2023].
2
Contesse, ‘Why We Failed to Approve’.
3
International IDEA, DRAFT Political Constitution of the Republic of Chile, July 2022 <https://constitutionnet.org/sites/default/files/2022-09/International%20IDEA%20Translation%20Chile%202022%20Draft%20Constitution.pdf> [accessed 15 November 2022].
4
International IDEA, DRAFT Political Constitution of the Republic of Chile
5
Another factor was voter turnout, which increased for the constitution vote, but brought more new voters who rejected the constitution than those who approved it.

Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST): Coalition for Land Rights

1984-present

Brazil

A movement representing the interests of landless, poor and Indigenous people, using education, direct action, and media to achieve land reform, and understanding its task to resist both social and ecological degradation through extractive agro-business and industry

Context

In Brazil, private land ownership, combined with harmful practices that extract natural resources and exploit people’s labour, has mapped the country along axes of capital accumulation and control. Calls for land reform to democratise space and access to resources grew in the early and mid twentieth century. They included grassroots campaigns led by Leftist activists and peasant leagues in northeastern Brazil who resisted the exploitation of land and people such as tenant evictions and large-scale cattle ranching. Campaigns such as these planted seeds for further organising and activism.¹ But they also met fierce and brutal opposition. Numerous oppressive political regimes, including a period of military dictatorship between 1964 and 1985, suppressed peasant leagues and enabled large-scale plantation and ranching monopolies to develop land from which poor, Indigenous communities were evicted. Violating people’s spatial rights to safe and habitable lands, and the rights of nature itself, these imposed systems of intensive financialised land use constructed rigid and often arbitrary borders to demarcate land ownership, simultaneously damaging ecosystems and communities.

Practice

Building upon grassroots campaigns led by earlier peasant leagues, a coalition of Indigenous people, the Landless Workers’ Movement (in Portuguese: Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, MST) formed in 1984 to defend their rights to land and self-determination. To this day MST reimagines and realigns governance within living earth systems, calling for a “Just Transition” towards regenerative economies and inclusive democracies. It has over 1.5 million members based across Brazil.

MST’s central objective is land reform through agrarian laws and policies that would give Indigenous people rights to land for growing food and looking after ecosystems. It points towards sections of the Brazilian constitution which indicate that land should have a social function, and defines its goal as exactly that: to unite spatial and social functions of rural land for the common good and the protection of biodiversity.²

MST lists barriers for achieving land reform, including racism, sexism, media monopolisation which neglects reporting land disputes, and socio-economic inequality. MST uses direct action strategies including land occupation to reclaim space. It also runs its own schools across primary and secondary ages and in adult and higher education contexts, focusing on issues of social solidarity and ecology.

Through its culture sector, MST fosters international partnerships with artists and researchers to communicate its work to wider audiences. In this context, the photographer Sebastião Salgado worked with MST on his exhibition and book Terra: Struggle of the Landless (1997). Harnessing cultural engagement and global audiences through collaborations with artists like Salgado is a crucial means for MST to increase its impact abroad and harness modern media and communication techniques for direct action.

In the 2000s, the Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso criticised MST for wanting a return to “an archaic agrarian past”.³ But according to an anonymous member, MST desires land reform to build “a new way of life”.⁴ The contrast between these two opinions, one demonising land reform as archaic and the other celebrating it as future-oriented, illustrates the extent of the struggle that continues today between capitalist land owners in Brazil and those who would like to steward the land.

Other Indigenous groups, including Ñambi Rimai in Colombia and Karrabing in Australia, use media in a similar way to raise international awareness and gain support on issues of land dispossession. MST’s aim of replacing territorial borders with ecological boundaries, meanwhile, resonates with eco-political reforms underway in other regions of South America, such as in Chile and Ecuador. These campaigns for ecological protections to accommodate the needs of local communities and more-than-human habitats exemplify strategies for what the Colombian theorist Arturo Escobar calls a “renovation of life”.⁵

Notes

1
Michael Moran and Geraint Parry, eds. Democracy and Democratization (London: Routledge, 1994) p. 191.
2
See Articles 5, 184 and 186 of Brazil’s current Constitution (1988)
3
Eugene Walker Gogol. The concept of Other in Latin American liberation: fusing emancipatory philosophic thought and social revolt (Lanham, MA: Lexington Books, 2002) p. 318.
4
Quoted by Jeff Noonan. Democratic society and human needs (Montreal, Quebec and Kingston, Ontario: McGill Queen’s University Press, 2006) p. 244.
5
Arturo Escobar. Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), p. 13.

The Timber Network: Long-term Regeneration

First Exhibited 2016 in Venice

Kurimoto, Japan

Firewood supply plant and farm that provides a local source of income and activity through carefully managed supply chains and low-intensity forestry. Supporting a relational network comprising architecture, forestry ecology, and supply chain economics with a social and ecological focus

Context

In the 1950s, Japan grew most of its own timber. By 1970 this figure had plummeted, and continued to drop in the 2000s.¹ For centuries, Japan relied on forests for construction timber and thatch, firewood for cooking and heating, fallen leaves for agricultural fertiliser, and wood for making utensils and tools. But, as the post-war Japanese economy boomed, building preferences shifted to concrete and steel, farmers used more chemical fertilisers, imported oil replaced many fuel needs, and low-cost timber from regions including the US pushed Japanese woodland regions and economies into decline. Kurimoto, a rural region on the outskirts of Tokyo, faced precisely this problem. This economic context was coupled with a labour shortage: as Japan’s birthrate has plummeted since the 1970s, regions such as Kurimoto have struggled to replace an ageing, dwindling workforce.²

Practice

Working with Kurimoto residents and businesses, the Japanese architectural practice Atelier Bow-Wow designed a firewood supply plant to provide a safe workplace that included elderly and disabled workers, and helps people reconnect with nature while earning a living. This provision engages people otherwise marginalised from work, exemplifying a care farm model of combining social welfare with agriculture.

This model contrasts ecologically and economically extractive norms prevalent in the globalised timber trade that intensify production and undercut competitors. Kurimoto Timber Network re-localises and de-intensifies timber production by engaging the local community in activities centred around its small-scale forest area, sawmill, woodshop, laboratory, and farm.³

The project is an intervention that creates ongoing opportunities within an existing social and economic context of timber production, helping ecological habitats and a community to flourish. Not only does this project contrast traditional philanthropic models of aid provision, it also rethinks the traditional architectural project’s focus on objecthood, newness, and the completion of a building, by emphasising the importance of iterative and long-term processes of collaboration. In so doing, the project demonstrates that engaging local industrial, economic, and community stakeholders offers an ethical, ecological alternative to the extractive approaches of globalised timber and construction industries.

Notes

1
See Thomas R. Cox, “The North American–Japan Timber Trade: The Roots of Canadian andU.S. approaches,”, Forest & Conservation History (A Special Issue on International Forest History) 34, no. 3 (July 1990), p. 113.
2
Japan’s Birth Rate 1950-2023 <https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/JPN/japan/birth-rate> [accessed 5 November 2023]. See also Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017).
3
Cathelijne Nuijsink and Momoyo Kaijima, “Timber Behaviorology”, Architectural Theory Review, 25:1-2 (2017), pp. 136-151.

Band-aiding by disciplining

As long as band-aiding remains confined to disciplinary silos, then wider structural issues driving climate breakdown continue unchallenged. When a technocratic breakthrough fixes a discrete problem, it often displaces the issue to another context. For example, geo-engineering and automation are designed to solve narrowly defined problems but ignore relational and long-term considerations such as habitat conservation and labour rights. Band-aiding also risks perpetuating global inequities whereby the Global North “fixes” problems it caused elsewhere. Climate breakdown resists such fragmented ‘solutions’, instead calling for a relational approach which acknowledges cause and effect.

Separating Functions from each other

The separating urge of modernity extends to the division of functions and policies: political life is organised into separate ministries, buildings defined by functional type, and cities divided into use zones. Such a tight-fit, functionalist approach to a systemic condition suppresses opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration and imposes fixed typologies, where alternative, more flexible, and locally specific practices could flourish. Similar to the way cities are often zoned by function and their populations unfairly segregated, the practice of separating functions isolates and emaciates potentials for systemic change. Any policy or action to face climate breakdown must transcend functional and political siloing.

Policy

Policies at a national, regional, and local level frame and thus determine action in relation to climate. Often attributed to elites, policies are criticised for their ineffectiveness, narrow focus on single issues, and tendency to reinforce the status quo through risk management approaches. Climate-related policies are more effective as relational devices that cut across disciplinary, political, and conceptual boundaries, consistent with the relational conditions of climate. This suggests the need for policies that are beyond partial fixes and expose the conditions in which things are made, as a form of analysis as well as future projection: policies that are informed by activism, a concern for Gaia, the rights of nature. Bringing policies back to their original roots in citizenship as means for collective betterment is crucial, particularly given that the lack of effective climate action is tied to democratic deficits. This is why citizens assemblies, practices of participatory governance, and other forms of redistributed decision-making become central to more equitable climate action.

Architecture is Climate

Sarah Bovelett

Anthony Powis

Tatjana Schneider

Christina Serifi

Jeremy Till

Becca Voelcker

Forge connections across scales – relate every policy and action to another