Notes on Joan Martinez-Allier, “Mining Conflicts, Environmental Justice, and Valuation”

In Just Sustainabilities: Development in an Unequal World, eds. Julian Agyeman, Robert D. Bullard and Bob Evans (London: Earthscan, 2003)

This article contains some highly detailed accounts of a wide variety of primarily mining conflicts and the environmental movements for social justice that have responded to them. Its sweep is staggering: it discusses mining operations and the protests against their expansion going all the way back to the 1880s, as well as ones that were still ongoing at the time of writing in the early 2000s. I will talk about only a few of them in any detail, because Martinez-Allier’s point concerns what’s common to almost all of them.

The first core idea is that there exists a particular kind of social conflict, which we can call ecological distribution conflicts. These are conflicts over environmental entitlements, the burdens of pollution, the sharing of uncertain environmental risks, and the loss of access to natural resources and environmental services.

Eternity, Memory, and Individuation in Part V of Spinoza’s Ethics

This morning I presented a paper with that title at the Sive Natura International Young Spinoza Scholars’ conference. Many thanks to Filippo Del Lucchese for organizing it. As usual I was very happy to have Eric Aldieri in the Q+A.

The paper is here.

Labor, Gender, and Globalization

This is a lecture I prepared for a course on international business ethics, discussing the gendered division of labor in industrial production in global south countries, which focuses with the authors of Social Justice in the Globalization of Production on the particular case of Bangladesh. I’m sharing it as a break from our regularly-scheduled Spinoza- and Kant-themed programming.

Today’s readings continue to deepen our materialist analysis of the contemporary circuits of globalized commodity production, with chapters 3, 4 and 5 of Islam and Hossain’s Social Justice in the Globalization of Production, subtitled Labor, Gender, and the Environmental Nexus. The chapters we are looking at don’t focus on the environmental aspect, which they deal with in other parts of the book and which we’ll talk about in a few weeks. Instead, they hone in on the relationship between gender and labor rights, especially in the third world or global south, where the effects of globalization have been most significant.