We congratulate Joan Martínez-Alier on the Holberg Prize

From the CLACSO Working Group Political ecologies from the South/Abya-YalaWe congratulate our friend and founding member Joan Martínez-Alier on yet another recognition of his long and prolific career. This time, he has received the Holberg Prize, which recognizes exceptional academic work in the fields of arts, humanities, social sciences, law, and theology.

This award also constitutes a well-deserved confirmation that ecological economics and political ecology, fields that Joan has promoted worldwide, have become established as action-research perspectives that today bring together diverse researchers throughout the world.

Joan has been and continues to be an inspiration to us, a friend, a colleague, a mentor, a comrade who has walked our paths, given us impetus, accompanied our struggles, and fought alongside us. That is why Héctor Alimonda, founder of the first Working Groups dedicated to Political Ecology, called him "Uncle Joan," recalling that ecological economics, environmental history, and political ecology were Siamese twins.

Throughout these years we've shared, Joan has felt indignation, emotion, and shared many of the sentiments of the peoples of our Abya Yala. From the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, Joan conducted much of her research in Latin America: Peru, Cuba, and Brazil. For example, in Peru she studied agrarian reform, the struggle of communal landowners and herders against large estate owners, and helped establish what became known as the Agrarian Archive.

In the 90s, in collaboration with South American colleagues, he launched the journal Ecología Política (Icaria, 1991). The journal is notable for the ongoing participation of Latin American researchers in its various issues, with issues 51 and 60, from 2016 and 2020 respectively, dedicated entirely to Latin America. His autobiographical book, “Demà serà un altre dia: De la economía ecológica al ecologismo popular” (Tomorrow Will Be Another Day: From Ecological Economics to Popular Ecology), takes its title from the Brazilian song “Apesar de você” (Despite You) by Chico Buarque, an icon of resistance against the dictatorship that Brazil endured between 1964 and 1985. The song was banned by the military government but became an anthem of hope that they could not silence.

Because of these and other links, inspirations, networks and friendships, Joan is an intrinsic part of our GT, having a continuous presence in our debates, as recently at the IV Congress of Political Ecology in Quito, Ecuador, and the IV Latin American Congress on Environmental Conflicts, in Cali, Colombia, both in October 2022.

Joan, from the various territories of Abya Yala and the Souths of the world, we celebrate this award, for your career, your nobility and your tireless pursuit of greater environmental justice for the peoples of the world.

Thanks a lot.

March 14th 2023
CLACSO Working Groups 
Political ecologies from the South/Abya-Yala

This text expresses the position of the aforementioned Workgroup and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Steering Committee or its Executive Secretariat.