Abstract
In their own battles and strategy meetings since the early 1980s, EJOs (environmental justice organizations) and their networks have introduced several concepts to political ecology that have also been taken up by academics and policy makers. In this paper, we explain the contexts in which such notions have arisen, providing definitions of a wide array of concepts and slogans related to environmental inequities and sustainability, and explore the connections and relations between them. These concepts include: environmental justice, ecological debt, popular epidemiology, environmental racism, climate justice, environmentalism of the poor, water justice, biopiracy, food sovereignty, "green deserts", "peasant agriculture cools downs the Earth", land grabbing, Ogonization and Yasunization, resource caps, corporate accountability, ecocide, and indigenous territorial rights, among others. We examine how activists have coined these notions and built demands around them, and how academic research has in turn further applied them and supplied other related concepts, working in a mutually reinforcing way with EJOs. We argue that these processes and dynamics build an activist-led and co-produced social sustainability science, furthering both academic scholarship and activism on environmental justice.Keywords: Political ecology, environmental justice organizations, environmentalism of the poor, ecological debt, activist knowledge
Highlights
We review a set of concepts of political ecology that have origins outside academia
There is usually a period of five to ten years between the time when a new concept is introduced by civil society at the cutting edge of the global environmental justice movement, and the time when the same concept becomes an object of mainstream research in the academic literature dealing with social sustainability
In EJOLT we navigate between science and activism in the fields of ecological economics and political ecology
Summary
We review a set of concepts of political ecology that have origins outside academia They have been produced by civil society organizations and often by one specific form of NGO, the EJOs (environmental justice organizations) that are leading the global environmental justice movement. EJOs are organizations that constitute networks; sometimes they are formed by members of a community organized ad hoc as a platform or as a coordinating committee for a specific cause, and sometimes they are permanent groups with lives stretching over twenty or more years On their own, or sometimes with the help of sympathetic academics, the EJOs have introduced or adopted powerful concepts and principles to analyze and to cope with environmental conflicts. Civil society organizations and academics indirectly strengthen each other's "mission" through an iterative process of examining and analyzing events, claims, strategies, and conflicts
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