Přehled o publikaci

One essential element of the Barcelona school of ecological economics is that it is purely trans-disciplinar. It is a school nestled in the political activism of its intellectuals that has gestated in dictatorial times, connected with the anti-Franco Catalan movement, in the several underground social movements, and remotely connected to the Spanish Republic and the anarchist experiment in Barcelona. These are events that Joan has so often remembered to all of us, and that can be well documented in the book of one of his doctoral students (Masjuan, 2002). For an understanding of Joan Martinez-Alier and the Barcelona school, one needs to know where they are grounded, that is, in the fertile "soil" of Iberian social movements for alternative livelihoods. The argument is that livelihoods are relevant for ecological economics, as the concept of a good life can prove. The latter is an Aristotelian oikonomic goal -remembered by Georgescu-Roegen's joie de vivre- with its connection to substantive economics as opposed to formal, neoclassical economics. The good life is a degrowth objective too, inspired by conviviality -as formulated by Ivan Illich- and by the pluriversal notion of "buen vivir", so well-known on the other side of el charco where Joan is just as much known and beloved.