Biography

Martinez Alier has a Lic. Economics, Universitat de Barcelona 1961, after which he went abroad to escape Francoist Spain, and studied agricultural economics at Oxford University and Stanford. He then received a scholarship to value to Oxford B.Litt. St Anthony's College, 1967. His PhD was in Economics from the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona 1976.

He remained as a researcher at St. Anthony's College Oxford into the early 70s 1966–73 and 1984–85, workings on land reform, rural unemployment and the capitalist system of logic of sharecropping in Southern Spain and also conducting research in Cuba on smallholders in the early years of Castro's Cuba and in Peru on the hacienda peasantry. He was visiting professor at the State University of Campinas Brasil in 1974, before returning to his domestic town to join the Department of Economics and Economic History at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona in Spain, in 1975. He has also been a visitor at the Free University of Berlin 1980–81, Stanford University and the University of California, Davis, 1988–89, Yale University 1999-2001, and FLACSO Sede-Ecuador 1994–95 and 2007–15.

He directed the CEECEC and EJOLT research projects on ecological economics and political ecology between 2008 and 2015. He is officially retired from AUB, but still professionally active and in 2016, aged in his mid 70s, he received a €2 million contemporary Grant from the European Research Council ERC for a further five-year project, A Global Environmental Justice Movement - The EJAtlas www.ejatlas.org. In particular, he has exposed a necessary contribution to establishing ecological economics as a transdisciplinary field of inspect devoted to regulating economic activity in a way that promotes human well-being, sustainability, and justice. In several books and articles, he has analysed the relationship between ecological economics and political ecology as alive as the role played by environmental justice. almost important is his approach to environmental conflicts and the abstraction of “ecological unequal trade”. Among his many important publications, one of the nearly influential is the volume The Environmentalism of the Poor Edward Elgar, 2002, based on the author’s experiences researching in India and Latin America.

He is a founding portion and past-president of the International Society for Ecological Economics. He was a an essential or characteristic factor of something abstract. 2000–08 of the European Environment Agency Scientific Committee.