Joan Martinez-Alier is an Emeritus Professor of Economics and Economic History, and senior researcher at ICTA UAB. He was awarded a Balzan prize in 2020 and the Holberg prize in 2023 as a scholar of ecological economics, political ecology and environmental justice.
He was a research fellow at St. Antony’s College, Oxford between 1963 and 1973, and 1984-85. He published Ecological economics: energy, environment, and society (1987); Varieties of environmentalism: Essays North and South (1997) with Ramachandra Guha; and The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation (2003). He co-edited the textbook Ecological Economics from the Ground Up (2013) and directed the EJOLT project (2011-15). He has co-directed about 40 doctoral theses as mentor of the Barcelona School of Ecological Economics and Political Ecology. He was co-founder (1990) and president of the International Society for Ecological Economics (2006-2007). In 2016, he was awarded an ERC Advanced Grant for the project EnvJustice. He co-directs the Atlas of Environmental Justice. His book of 2023 Land, Water, Air and Freedom: The Making of World Movements for Environmental Justice reveals the enormous “entropy hole” at the centre of the industrial economy, and traces “ecological distribution conflicts” at the frontiers of commodity extraction and waste disposal. It is a textbook on Global Comparative Political Ecology based on the EJAtlas.