Connecting the “Just Environments” series to the SSRC’s former Global Environmental Change Program, Anthony Bebbington considers the ways in which scholarship on sustainability science and environmental justice can learn from and reinforce each other. Reflecting on the edited volume Earth as Transformed, a product of the Global Environmental Change Program, Bebbington notes how discussions of justice, race, and class were conspicuously absent from its analysis. Three decades after the book’s release, environmental problems abound, and those mobilizing to address these problems have at times encountered violence. By juxtaposing ongoing earth transformations and environmental violence, Bebbington demonstrates that the production of just environments demands work across scale and place from a variety of approaches.
Anthony Bebbington
Anthony Bebbington is Australia Laureate Fellow in the School of Geography at the University of Melbourne and on leave from Clark University where he is Higgins Professor of Environment and Society and was director of the Graduate School of Geography from 2010 to 2017. His research has addressed: socio-environmental conflict and extractive industries; agriculture, livelihoods, and rural development; and social movements, NGOs, and policy processes. Recent books include Subterranean Struggles: New Dynamics of Mining, Oil and Gas in Latin America (ed. with Jeffrey Bury; University of Texas Press, 2013); Social Conflict, Economic Development and Extractive Industries: Evidence from Latin America (ed.; Routledge, 2012); Movimientos sociales y la política de la pobreza en el Perú (with Martin Scurrah and Claudia Bielich; IEP/CEPES, 2011), and Governing Extractive Industries: Politics, Histories, Ideas (with Abdul-Gafaru Abdulai, Denise Humphreys Bebbington, Marja Hinfelaar, and C. Sanborn; Oxford University Press, forthcoming). He is a member of the board of directors of Oxfam America, research associate at RIMISP-Latin American Centre for Rural Development, Chile, and has been research associate at the Centro Peruano de Estudios Sociales. He is an elected member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and has held a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation fellowship.