The author analyzes several manifestations of the growing `environmental justice movement', and also of `popular environmentalism' and the `environmentalism of the poor', which will be seen in the coming decades as driving forces in the process to achieve an ecologically sustainable society. He studies, in detail, many ecological distribution conflicts in history and at present, in urban and rural settings, showing how poor people often favor resource conservation. The environment is thus not so much a luxury of the rich as a necessity of the poor. The book concludes with the fundamental questions: who has the right to impose a language of valuation and who has the power to simplify complexity?

Joan Martinez-Alier combines the study of ecological conflicts and the study of environmental valuation in a totally original approach that will appeal to a wide cross-section of academics, ecologists and environmentalists.