 Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Circular Metabolism Podcast, a bi-weekly meeting where we have in-depth discussions with thinkers, researchers, activists, policymakers, and practitioners, to better understand the metabolism of our cities and how to reduce their environmental impact in a socially just and context-specific way. Today we celebrate the 40th episode of our podcast by covering an important topic which will confront the promises and imaginary of the circular economy on the one hand, and the ecological conflicts that happen, on the other hand, both on the commodity extraction and waste disposal frontiers. Today we will discuss about the entropic character of our industrial economy, the circularity gap or rift, the environmentalism of the poor, and the world movement or movements of environmental justice. To talk about these topics, we have Juan Martínez-Salier, which is an economist, that researched and published numerous articles and books on agrarian studies, on ecological economics, and political ecology. He has received two big prices, such as the Leontief Prize in 2017, for advancing the frontiers of economic thought, and by bringing together the ecological approaches, but also the justice and developmental approaches together. And in 2020, more recently, the Balsen Prize for Environmental Challenges, that once again put forward the word environmental justice movement, or movements, and is illustrated by the EG Atlas, this growing database of more than 3,350 ecological distribution conflicts that is being built in Iqta-Uwab. So with all that being said, thank you and welcome to the podcast. Could you perhaps briefly want to present your work and yourself? Yeah. Well, okay. Thank you for what you have summarized, exactly what I am doing. I am an ecological economist, and in fact I am one of the co-founders of the International Society for Ecological Economics in the 80s, with Hermandelli, as you mentioned, and Bob Costanza, and Marie Johnson, who died too early. And we were people coming from economics, and some people coming from ecology, from systems ecology, from Howard Odom, and counting on energy flows in the economy. And we, the economists, come rather from George S. Corregan and Kenneth Bowling, and Calvin M. Kapp, who had already died by the 80s. So this is ecological economics. And what we study is the social metabolism, and also issues of valuation, which I refer to this later. And I combine ecological economics, or I came to combine this later with political ecology, which is the study of environmental conflicts. And as you have mentioned, this has meant in the last few years, in the last 10 years, actually, building up with other people, perhaps 100 people around the world, this address of environmental conflicts. Yeah, thanks. So you have juggled, and you have just explained a number of concepts already. So you mentioned ecological economics, social metabolism, environmental justice. And I'm wondering, yeah? And political ecology. And political ecology. So which one do you think would help us to best introduce us to your work? Or with which one do you start when you have to present this complex topic? Which one do you prefer starting using and why? Well, it depends on the audience. But for the audience of this podcast, which already known the concept of the circular economy, I could start with this, because I think that there is no circular economy. In fact, we know the figures for this. There is an enormous circularity gap, or one could say metabolic gap, or perhaps an entropic gap. And I'll explain these words. We know that the world economy, which is an industrial economy, mostly capitalist, but it doesn't matter so much whether it's capitalist or not. In my view, the world economy is an industrial economy, and it's based on coal, gas, and oil as energy, and also on other numerous materials, biomass, eucalyptus for pulp paper, soybeans, boots, and lots of other minerals, especially sand and gravel for the cement industry. So if we count all the materials, and this has been done now quite competently by, you mentioned Marina Fischer-Kowalski before, so her group with Helmut Havel and Friedrich Krausman in Vienna, they have been doing these accounts of social metabolism already for about 30 years now. So we know that every year into the economy comes about 100 gigatons or billion tons, which is easy to remember. Easy to remember this year, because next year is going to be a bit more as we are coming out of the pandemic, and in three years time will be a bit more. And it won't be so easy as 100,000 million tons as it is apparently right now. And of these, only 8%, or 8 billion tons are recycled material, which could be paper for instance, could be aluminum, could be some copper, but this zero recycling of course of energy. Energy is only spent once. Once you burn one ton of oil is burned forever because of the second law of thermodynamics, or because what would say, because of common experience, we know that we cannot boil water again with the same gas as we have used for the first sort of liter of boiled water. So energy dissipates and materials dissipates also. So we learn this in ecological economics from some precursors about which I wrote a book in 87, which is called ecological economics already, but mainly because of George S. Reagan's book called the Entropilore and the Economic Process, which is from exactly 50 years ago, from 1971. So this would be the first concept I would like to discuss with you or to put forward the lack of circularity in the economy, because in my view all these links with the part of political ecology, with the study of the conflicts, because since the economy is not circular, the forms, the people who are active in the economy, what they do is to look for new materials and new energy, because they cannot use the one that already was produced last year. This is either dissipated, lost forever, or is in buildings, in the built environment, could be roads, could be railways, could be buildings, could be machines, and it could be our cars if we had a car. So all these things are stocks of materials, which they, when they end their lives, so to speak, their economic lives, they are not recycled, well the cars are recycled to some extent, but not so much. So to summarize again, only 8% of the materials entered in the economy are recycled, the rest are lost, or they are incorporated into stocks, and the maintenance of these stocks requires new energy materials. For instance, I live in an old house in Barcelona, all means 120 years, so the lift breaks down from time to time, and then we need to repair it, well you know these things. Therefore, we see that the economy is not circular, and there is research for new materials at the commodity extraction frontiers, which would be the Arctic, could be the Amazon, and therefore this is... The sea, the oceans. And so over there you say you have an example in your article, and you mentioned, let's imagine that we, in 70 years we consumed where we extract 200 gigatons and not 100, and let's say that we increase our circularity from 8% or 10% to 50%, that in essence will not really, I mean becoming more circular does not mean becoming more sober in materials and having less conflicts. No, because if the total amount of materials increases, then this is not very useful. So let's talk about this from... If the total amount increases, then if the circularity, the degree of circularity increases from 8% to 20%, it doesn't matter very much regarding the need, the requirement for obtaining new materials and new sources of energy. And these come from what we call from economic history, in fact from Wallerstein and from Jason Moore, which were studying colonial history, Europe as a colonial power. We call this the commodity extraction frontiers, which in the 16th century, these men Potosi and Zagatecas and a little bit India, where Vasco de Gamma went and collected some pepper, a little boat, ship, he became very rich, but they were not bulk commodities, big amounts of commodities. Nowadays, with big ships, big container ships or tankers with 200,000 tons perhaps, 200,000 tons, or with pipelines, like the ones coming to Europe from the Arctic, from Anatolia, from Central Asia, from Algeria, all kind of pipelines coming to Europe with gas or with oil. And of course, the amount of transport is much bigger that has never been in the whole history of humankind, much bigger. So what is interesting, of course, is that already this leads to, let's say deforestation and environmental degradation, but a number of times there's also people living in these frontiers, in these extractive frontiers. Deforestation is one consequence, but also the fact that there is a mine and the mines now, metal mining now is no longer than underground or almost never. This is done in open cast, open pit mining. So you need mines which have perhaps two kilometers by one kilometer, the whole, isn't it? Then you have the wasted water, the water which is used to take the gold or the copper and so on, which is totally polluted, which is also there. So there are lots of consequences, as you say, from the extraction of materials. And with oil it could be terrible that I know the Niger Delta in Nigeria, and I know Ecuador, the areas where cool, not called oil extraction has happened. And it's a mess, it's a mess for hundreds and hundreds of years. And as you say, so because it poisons water, because it destroys the habitats, a number of people living there have also, this results to conflicts, sometimes very strong armed conflicts, sometimes other types of conflicts. But I'm wondering how do you then became interested from the study of these flows to the actual consequences and to environmental conflicts? Yeah, because I was interested in social conflicts before, the first thing I did in my academic life when I was 25 years old, although I am from Barcelona, I went to southern Spain. I was in England at the time, but doing a thesis on southern Spain on agrarian conflicts, or rather on the lack of land reform under the Franco regime. The Franco regime came to power partly because of the agrarian question to stop a land reform. So I was studying this 30 years after the civil war, so my life has been rather linked to the study of agrarian conflicts when I was in my twenties and thirties, agrarian conflicts also in Peru, and the history of the land reform in Cuba. And then when I was 30, 31 years old is when I became interested in ecology, but this was because I realized that agriculture was a system of conversion of energy. That's what it is. Agriculture takes photosynthesis and converts into food or fiber, which can be counted also in terms of calories or joules, isn't it? So agriculture is a system of conversion of energy. So this was my entry into ecological economics. But the study of conflicts I already was interested in conflicts. And then because of traveling to India and then traveling to South America in the late 70s and early 80s, then I was involved in this kind of studies. And it was very much influenced in India by Ramachandra Guha and his book on the cheap co-movement. The cheap co-movement was these women and men which were embracing the trees to prevent the trees from being cut, isn't it? In the Himalaya. So this started in the 70s and his book of Ramua is from the late 80s. And I met him the first time in 88 in India, in Bangalore. And we both then developed this idea of the environmentalists of the poor, because I was seeing the same thing in Latin America. Chico Mendez was killed in 88 in Brazil, in Acre, Brazil, again defending the trees, the rubber trees against the cattle ranchers who wanted to cut the forest and to burn the forest to put some cows, well as has happened in Acre. So both in many places around the world one could see these environmentalists of the poor and the indigenous. Could you define a bit this environmentalism of the poor and is it in the contrast? No, you always call it the environmentalists of the poor and the indigenous because in the address of environmental justice where we have now about 3,500 cases. About 40 percent the protagonists of the of the complaints are indigenous people around the world, including the Arctic. We published an article a few weeks ago on the Arctic from Alaska to Alaska going around through Scandinavia and Russia. And they are pastoralists and they complain because the oil companies or gas companies or nickel or copper companies are using the fact that the ice is melting to increase the exploitation of the Arctic. And these people are really indigenous people. They have been there in a very hostile and cold environment for many thousands of years and they have their own names, Inuits and Samis, many like 100 different names around the Arctic and they complain. So this would be an example of these environmentalists of the poor and the indigenous. But there are so many other cases, isn't it? Because they live precisely at the frontiers of extraction or at the frontiers of waste disposal. So when there is waste, solid waste, that's where it goes. And another type of waste of course is excessive amount of carbon dioxide. And these we put anywhere in the world, isn't it? The atmosphere or the oceans and they also are suffering from this. So you also, with this definition of environmentalism of the poor, you also confront very much with Engelhardt in 95 that said that the poor are too poor to be green. Engelhardt started to write about this with other people in the 70s as environmentalism was one of the new social movements after 68 to speak. And then he thought that environmentalism was a middle class. A middle class was a new movement of some people in rich countries which were no longer concerned so much. He thought in the 70s about the economy in the sense of not the real economy of energy materials but the economic, the crematistic economy of salaries and so on. And he said no, these former students, the 68ers, people from 68, they are concerned about human rights, feminists and also environmentalists. But this exists, I think it's a type of population that exists. I think that the German greens, for instance, that who come from the 70s, they are not working class, industrial working class normally. They are middle class, university people quite often. And they are, but of course Engelhardt said that they were post-material movements. And I have always joked about this because I think it's such a wrong denomination, isn't it? Because in the 60s, Rachel Carson wrote about DGT, but DGT is a very material substance, isn't it? Then in the 70s, myself, we were all anti-nuclear or we became anti-nuclear energy, even more after Chernobyl or after Freemile Islands, which was 79. So radiation, you could say we don't see it, but we can feel it, isn't it? So radiation is a very material issue. So they were not post-material. What he meant was that they were like post-economic. They were no longer concerned about salaries and employment, which is also untrue because now because of the economic crisis, young people are very concerned about lack of employment, isn't it? But anyway, all this left aside, all these millions and millions of people fighting in the world for the forest, for clean water, and for clean air, which are very material issues. So this is the environmentalists of the poor against this view of environmentalists as a kind of post-68 new movement. It's not new, it's quite old, but it has been increasing. So in your atlas, yourself and your colleagues have characterized these conflicts by, let's say, flow, resistance form, by impact, by outcome. Is there some inside, some synthesis that we can extract from documenting so many different conflicts? Yeah, I think that one thing is the, which is more from social movement theory, who are the protagonists, which is not only poor indigenous people. I said indigenous people is 40% of the indigenous, but the other 60%, there are many protagonists, peasants quite often, isn't it? Or people in cities also. People in cities or could be also scientists and professionals and religious groups in Buddhist or liberation theology in Latin America. So we have like, we are studying who are the protagonists of these environmental movements. And then also we, and we can generalize that all these movements are expressions of different sort of values. So people complain because of subsistence values, livelihood, but also sometimes they ask for money compensation. Sometimes they say that the land or the water is sacred. So it's a religious vocabulary. This is what they call languages of valuation. They are very different languages of valuation and they are not commensurable. One languages with other languages, they are not commensurable. And this is part of ecological economics. This idea that you cannot express everything in economic valuation, in money valuation. Because if somebody says that the mountain is sacred, it doesn't make any sense to say, what is the price? How much sacred? Yeah. Well, you can say it's very sacred or not so much sacred. This is true. But you cannot say in our common language is to say, what is the price? It's not that he has just, or she has just said it's sacred, meaning it's outside the market, isn't it? And human livelihood, what is the price of human life? It depends on, it has a price in life insurance, isn't it? Or perhaps in a court case. So that's what we do with the others. We can study now over 3,000 cases. It's no longer kind of discussion of economic theory, economic ecological theory is a very practical database for the study how the increased metabolism and the changing metabolism that for instance with lithium mining or cobalt mining or balsa destruction of balsa trees in Ecuador for the windmills exported to China from Ecuador, the metabolism. And then we can also see this how in these conflicts different valuation languages appear and how so we are discussing as ecological economists and political ecologists the issues of valuation. Sometimes there are court cases, when there are court cases very good even if they lose but it's good for the brain in a way even if not always good for the people because the judges are going to say something about valuation. They sometimes they will say something about money, sometimes they might say that this is not a question of money. When there are no court cases then we have, court cases then we have the evidence has to come from other origins like evangelist or NGOs, people who are explaining what has happened. And yeah you had this famous movement about el agua vale más que el oro and how in some cases as well there is the valuation that changes over time. If you see that health is decreasing but then at the end of the day you lost everything that you have you still are asking for a compensation, a monetary compensation. I think at the end of the of the conflict if you are still alive because in the whole alas there are about 14% of the cases which means over 400 in which some of the protagonists have been killed. The activists are killed in great amounts in some countries in Colombia, Mexico and Philippines but in many places so we have the names of many of these people killed and among these 400 there are perhaps 80 women. It's not Bertha Cáceres who of course was killed a few years ago and is well known. Many other women around the world activists have been killed either in demonstrations or by by killers, hitmen you call this, they're always men actually killing other people paid by the companies for by the companies or sometimes by the government so this part of the research but then what it shows as you were saying if they are still alive at the end of the struggle either they win and they win perhaps 20% of the cases we study they manage to stop some projects or they lose in many cases they lose so if they lose they say well better money than nothing isn't it? If they win it means that they can preserve perhaps an alternative is born from these resistance so that's what we do. We do like like what I call it comparative political ecology in case studies but comparative and even statistical political ecology we can do. There is something very interesting into this first of all that you mentioned that very often these and ecological conflicts overlap with other conflicts, gender, ethnic, social class conflicts. Why is this? Is this because the Indigenous people are also often very very much put aside by society or how do you see that? Well this is like this I mean in fact the level of the theory comes a lot from the environmental justice movement in the US in the 80s which started from what the US would be minority populations black people or what they call BIPOC black indigenous people of color which in the US they are still a minority thing in the world they are a majority but in the US they thought these people were protagonists of an environmental justice movement against environmental racism. So you have an overlap or now it's called intersectionality an overlap between being people of color and becoming an environmentalist in practice at least in practice for instance in what is called the cancer alle in Louisiana from Baton Rouge to New Orleans there are lots of chemical industries this is a black area from former slaves and they are really very much polluted by this petrochemical industry isn't it? And in other places so when they complain they complain using a language of civil rights in the US which is socially more powerful than saying we are poor people and we are being polluted in the US perhaps they would say you're poor because you want isn't it because if you want to be rich in the US everybody's allowed to be rich it's not a caste society but it is a caste society in a way because being black means that you are unprivileged from birth isn't it? Therefore they use this language of what they call environmental justice against environmental racism in other countries would be different would be different because the social classes are for instance in India caste social caste is very relevant socially and being Dalit or being a divasi meaning a tribal quite often demonstrations are made with as a divasis as tribal people or as Dalits with a portrait of Ambedkar who was the Dalit leader at the time that the constitution of India was written and so being a Dalit makes you able to complain using a different kind of social language so there are many variations around the world in this but it's true that the protagonist in environmental conflicts quite often belong to they are not only environmentalists and quite often they would deny they are environmentalists or communists or anything that can be bring attention to the police and they feel more entitled to protest saying we are from a social group could be like roman roma people in europe for instance a minority people and for the then was another element that you mentioned the valuation and the different valuation languages how do we negotiate between all of these languages because of course there are so many different valuation points that you can have over material in a place well economists normally kind of not ecological economics but normal ecologists not a normal economist they used to decide about projects with cost benefit analysis from the 30s and 40s and this was considered to be an improvement because before that projects were decided for purely you know engineering criteria and this is a nice place to make a dam we'll make a dam and then the economy saves and all because make making a dam there are also externalities and we're going to count the economic value of the externalities for instance and let's scape has been destroyed we're going to ask the people how much they would pay to preserve the landscape things like this and so you would have the costs in money terms but also this internalized cost and the benefits isn't it both the financial benefits and perhaps also some of the benefits by being able to fish in a lake formed by a dam in a river so you do the dam because of the electricity and there are all kinds of side effects which are also monetarized and then you apply a discount rate that you take from yoria or from i don't know where six percent per year or four percent which is an estimate of how the economy will grow or some kind of nonsense like this because the discount rate is very essential to cost benefit analysis but the economists have no idea what the cost benefit the rate of discount should be isn't it and it influences a lot on this you can apply this to nuclear power plant to any kind of investment so with this could be a discussion from ecological economics on using multi-criteria analysis to say cost benefit is reductionist only and it's also very invented it's not convincing intellectually quite often so let's do multi-criteria analysis so we have different values different criteria and we analyze the alternatives across all these different values and you can have an algorithm and try to make a number at the end to say which alternative is better or just to frame the question and then to decide this by a referendum or in some other way isn't it but to frame the question as multi-criteria analysis so here in Barcelona we had Giuseppe Munda doing this for a few years and he taught us to do myself how to do multi-criteria analysis it can be highly mathematical kind of thing or more just to frame the question anyway this is what we do from ecological when we look at these conflicts all the time concrete conflicts well we see the same issue but the less formal level we see that many incommensurate different languages of valuation appear and we can study in practice what has happened which valuation languages have triumph have won isn't it and the economists try to win always this same economic logic is I don't know no they think they are more powerful than other people to decide the issues and this is not true I mean this is just a passing epoch in human history I think the power of the economists I hope disappears soon so that means also that the valuation languages from inhabitants need to be heard because so far I can imagine that an economic valuation or a technical valuation doesn't really care about who lives so it's not context specific it's not it has nothing to do with it so I guess there is a participative process or yeah but if you study with these conflicts historically for me I don't know where you're talking from but saying in Torino in Italy there is this case of asbestosis in Casal Monferrat there are many cases of asbestosis around the world many in the others we have like 15 or 20 in which asbestos was used for buildings isn't it it is still used in some places in the world now in the 30s and 40s it was realized that this was killing people the power of the asbestos and then many years later there have been court cases like in Casal Monferrat and so some people have died in between because of the illness so there was a court case to bring somebody to jail somebody called Smith Heiney who was the owner of these factories or if not to jail also or instead of jail perhaps to pay an indemnity so here you have what is the value of human life again which is the value of so much pain and uncertainty and and no social disaster in the community and then what would be whether going to jail compensates for the damage or does not so you have a lot of in this case some values are absent so Casal Monferrat was not a sacred place is more like a sacrifice zone isn't it so some valuations values are not present the people are not indigenous in a technical sense so it's not a racial minority so some aspects are not there and some so you can enrich the science of political ecology like this I'm wondering what are your thoughts about cities because they kind of sit in the middle of the network of you know materials going from extraction to waste and pollution and how do they fit within this environmental conflicts circularity gap even if you say that you said that some of the conflicts were actually in cities how do you see cities taking a role in all of this complex no yeah just to finish the talk the cities organize the extraction the capital cities of the world and the powerful states organize this but also the cities are a place of much consumption no city can live from photosynthesis cities live from important energy and materials even poor cities because of the density of populations the city can be defined like this almost by the density of pollution and inside the cities of course there are different parts and so some of the parts are really not only poor but also environmentally much more damaged so you get these movements for of complaining isn't it or sometimes in cities you have cement factories or you have metal factories or you have petrochemical industries right in the cities so very close to the cities but it is true that in the others we have many more rural cases than urban and perhaps I don't know whether it's just a matter of sampling that we have not done the proper sampling because I know that more people live in cities than in the countryside in the world but also perhaps the reason is that cities absorb resources and expel waste and the rural areas do a little bit perhaps to conclude I want to if you can give us some solutions or initiatives that you found inspiring throughout you know these years of looking at this word environmental justice uh are you know going from agrarian reforms defense of the of the commons the degrowth movement what is something that yeah these are new movements they are the question is whether the solution should come from the policies or the politics or the policies the state politics whether the solutions should come from social movements and or or both at the same time I don't believe very much in in policy solutions to the truth because when he sees climate change that from the first cup to the 26th cup a few weeks ago in Glasgow the carbon dioxide in the hemisphere has gone up from 360 past million to almost 420 past million and in your lifetime in 30 years more I will reach 450 past per million over for there is nothing stopping this and policy means talking talking talking and doing nothing and instead of these there are movements which I have studied a little bit this leaf fossil fuels underground which I think can be more effective so this applies to many areas of of environmental issues I think one thing we should do is to to get rid of the purely economic discussions and have a much broader discussions with ecological economics which is useful for this but this is happening very slowly because even the universities are very slow to acknowledge the the existence of ecological economics I think perhaps we will have a breakthrough sometime in the near future but so far it's not happening yet just to finish off do you have any thing that you're working on like a new article or a new book that you want to to work on and what would be some of the book because I have already announced this book before being finished which is a very imprudent thing to do but they have already written and explained this in several places like the other day where I was in Rome in this buzz on price and he said I was I was thanking the buzz on price and I said I was writing a book with the following title land water air and freedom and the subtitle is world movements for environmental justice and the title comes from land and freedom which was the old narodnik slogan in russia but also in zapata in mexico or the anarchist in spain they use this tierra y libertad land and freedom and they have added water and air because land is not enough when you land water and freedom and the subtitle is very clear world movements for environmental justice and what they do is to use the alias to explain many cases and then to draw through this I mean to draw this kind of generalizations we have been discussing here about the metabolism valuation these two main issues the metabolism and the languages of valuation when will that appear do you have any idea well here's to be finished but might be in 22 okay it's a big book it's a very thick book because we are anyway we'll see well I'm looking forward to it thanks so much for for your time and taking the time Juan and thanks as well everyone to listening until the end we'll meet you young thank you thanks a lot thanks thanks everyone