ICTA gathers world experts in Environmental Justice

The Institute of Environmental Science and Technology (ICTA) at UAB has organised for the days 5 and 6 of July at the La Pedrera building in Barcelona, an International Seminar on Environmental Conflicts and Justice with the participation of the world's leading experts in the field. Among those attending will be Robert Bullard, who coined the concept of “Environmental Justice” and is considered one of the world's most important leaders in this field.

02/07/2012

Robert Bullard, Dean of the School of Public Affairs at Texas Southern University, coined the concept of “Environmental Justice” in the decade of the 1980s in the United States to cry out against the inequality of environmental impacts among different social classes and ethnic groups of the US. In the year 2008, he was elected one of the most important environmental leaders of the century by Newsweek. Bullard spoke on how he regretted the invisibility of this problem at the recent UN conference on Sustainable Development, Rio+20.

The seminar will serve to discuss current and future research lines on the Environmental Justice movement and will include round tables and presentations, with the participation of some twenty speakers, lecturers and researchers from Europe and North America.

One of the main speakers will be presented by UAB emeritus professor and coordinator of the European project EJOLT on environmental conflicts, Joan Martínez Alier. The inaugural speech will be given by Robert Bullard and is entitled “Environmental Justice: Strategies To Achieve Healthy And Sustainable Communities”.

Other researchers attending the seminar will be David N. Pellow and Lisa Sun-Hee Park, professors of Sociology at the University of Minnesota, who will be offering a conference on "Stumbling Towards Justice: Nativism, Environmental Privilege, and the U.S. Environmental Movement”. Professors Pellow and Park are authors of the book “The Slums of Aspen. Immigrants vs. the Environment in America’s Eden”, which narrates the work conditions of immigrants of the famous US tourist resort, highlighting the health problems and social inequalities they suffer from, as well as their exclusion from the area's natural parks.

Also worth mentioning is the attendance of Peter Newell, researcher at the University of Sussex and environmental consultants and defender of the Environmental Justice movement. Newell studies its organisation at international level as well as related issues, such as the introduction of biotechnologies in Latin America, climate change, environmental regulation in industries, etc.

Course on Environmental Conflicts
The International Seminar on Conflicts and Environmental Justice is part of a summer course on environmental conflicts taking place from 2 to 11 July, organised by the ICTA research group in Ecological Economy and Integral Evaluation (Eco2Bcn) in which 35 master's degree and doctoral students from over 15 countries are participating.

The group Eco2Bcn studies how the increase in consumption of raw materials and energy cause a growing number of environmental conflicts with less fortunate communities, suffering from margination or environmental racism by being excluded from decision-making processes in environmental issues.

Experts in Environmental Justice - from fields such as sociology, economics, political ecology, etc. - demand fair treatment for all people in terms of access to natural resources and contamination reduction duties. The vindications of this movement are structured globally and work together with the areas of Climate Justice and Water Justice. Representatives of Environmental Justice have filed complaints against not being able to participate in the recent Rio+20 environmental conference, when paradoxically enough, they were allowed to participate at the UN Earth Summit held in 1992.

International Seminar on Environmental Conflicts and Justice