Friday 1 September 2017

Ecopopulism and environmental justice in Eastern and South Europe

I had the privilege having a lecture at "Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene Symposium" held on April 24-25, 2017, at the Lory Student Center, Colorado State University, Fort Collins Colorado. According to this lecture a paper has been written about ecopopulism and environmental justice. This paper has been published at the Symposium dedicated website. The paper has az individual handle: https://hdl.handle.net/10217/183742

The abstract can be seen below and the full text is available from the Symposium page and my Academia.edu

I am dealing in this paper with the question of environmental and climate (in)justices in Eastern and South Europe (ESE). At first, I will refer the theoretical pillars of environmental justice and my statement is that there is an expanding sphere concerning environmentalism which has grounded the theory of climate justice. The environmental justice has been expanded to climate justice, because it increasingly addressed that the environmental and social conditions provide for individual and community needs and functioning and justice depends on the environmental conditions. It has been put forward here that populism could bring closer the importance of environmental and climate related disasters to the people’s everyday lives and experience. In the next part of this paper the connection of climate justice and social problems in ESE has been analyzed. The investigation elaborated here is based on a very important initiative called Environmental Justice Organizations, Liabilities and Trade (EJOLT) and its Environmental Justice Atlas. I will focus on two main environmental and climate injustice caused challenges: the first one is the situation of the Roma communities in ESE, and the second one is the emerging case of fuel or energy poverty. It has been raised here that an elitist populist regime, for instance in Hungary, how can damage the case of environmental and climate justice with instituted biopower. I will conclude this paper that we need to (re)enhance the social nature of environmental problems and this will strengthen the environmental consciousness in ESE. The relating discourse of environmental and climate justice in ESE is need to be based on environmental identities constructed on ethnical and social solidarity. Finally, we should have a look on the biopolitical structure of modern State.