From the Ground Up: Environmental Struggles and Transformations to Sustainability

Today, communities across the world are struggling to defend their land, water, forests, and livelihoods in effort to avoid catastrophic climate change and destruction of life-sustaining ecosystems. These communities not only resist extractive industries and environmentally damaging activities such as mining, dams, tree plantation, thermal power plants, and large infrastructure projects but also offer alternatives. Having similar claims and sense of environmental justice, activist groups often reach beyond their immediate vicinity to form regional and global environmental justice networks. In an attempt to collect and map these seemingly disparate cases, the Global Atlas of Environmental Justice (EJAtlas – www.ejatlas.org) was launched in 2014 as an online inventory of the environmental justice struggles around the world. The ACKnowl-EJ project (www.acknowlej.org), funded by the International Science Council, builds on this Atlas by emphasizing the transformative nature of movements against “extractivism” from the ground up, based on the assumption that therein lies the greatest potential action and agency for dealing with environmental and social crises today. This event, co-organized by the Istanbul Policy Center–Sabancı University–Stiftung Mercator Initiative and ACKnowl-EJ project aims to investigate how academics and activists can learn and produce knowledge toward a just transformation to sustainability from the ground up.

English-Turkish simultaneous translation will be available.

Program:
16:30–17:00 Registration & Coffee

17:00–17:45 Framing Talks
Leah Temper, McGill University, Canada, ACKnowl-EJ project and EJAtlas Coordinator
“Acknowl-EJ project, EJAtlas and EJ struggles around the world”
Patrick Bond, University of the Witwatersrand, South Africa
“Social Movements for Climate Justice during the Decline of Global Governance”

17:45–19:00 Reflections from the field: An activist dialogue
Cemil Aksu, Turkey, and Jana Nakhal, Lebanon
Facilitator: Cem Iskender Aydın
2018/19 Mercator-IPC Fellow