Environmental justice
Environmental justice is a social movement that addresses injustice that occurs when poor or marginalized communities are harmed by hazardous waste, resource extraction, and other land uses from which they do not benefit. The movement has generated hundreds of studies showing that exposure to environmental harm is inequitably distributed. Additionally, many marginalized communities, including Black/racialized communities and the LGBTQ community, are disproportionately impacted by natural disasters.
Environmental justice is broadly defined as the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. Over time, scholars have elaborated multiple dimensions of the concept.
The movement began in the United States in the 1980s. It was heavily influenced by the American civil rights movement and focused on environmental racism within rich countries. The movement was later expanded to consider gender, LGBTQ people, international environmental injustice, and inequalities within marginalized groups. As the movement achieved some success in rich countries, environmental burdens were shifted to the Global South. The movement for environmental justice has thus become more global, with some of its aims now being articulated by the United Nations. The movement overlaps with movements for Indigenous land rights and for the human right to a healthy environment.
The goal of the environmental justice movement is to achieve agency for marginalized communities in making environmental decisions that affect their lives. The global environmental justice movement arises from local environmental conflicts in which environmental defenders frequently confront multi-national corporations in resource extraction or other industries. Local outcomes of these conflicts are increasingly influenced by trans-national environmental justice networks.
Environmental justice scholars have produced an interdisciplinary body of social science literature that includes contributions to political ecology, environmental law, and theories on justice and sustainability.
Scope
Environmental justice has evolved into a comprehensive global movement, introducing numerous concepts to political ecology, including ecological debt, environmental racism, climate justice, food sovereignty, corporate accountability, ecocide, sacrifice zones, and environmentalism of the poor. It aims, in part, to augment human rights law, which traditionally overlooked the relationship between the environment and human rights. Despite attempts to integrate environmental protection into human rights law, challenges persist, particularly concerning climate justice.Scholars such as Kyle Powys Whyte and Dina Gilio-Whitaker have extended the discourse on environmental justice concerning Indigenous peoples and settler-colonialism. Gilio-Whitaker critiques distributive justice, which assumes a capitalistic commodification of land inconsistent with many Indigenous worldviews. Whyte explores environmental justice within the context of colonialism's catastrophic environmental impacts on Indigenous peoples' traditional livelihoods and identities.
Definitions
The United States Environmental Protection Agency defines environmental justice as:Environmental justice is also discussed as environmental racism or environmental inequality.
the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations and policies. Fair treatment means that no group of people, including racial, ethnic, or socio-economic groups, should bear a disproportionate share of the negative environmental consequences resulting from industrial, municipal, and commercial operations or the execution of federal, state, local, and tribal programs and policies
Environmental justice is typically defined as distributive justice, which is the equitable distribution of environmental risks and benefits. Some definitions address procedural justice, which is the fair and meaningful participation in decision-making. Other scholars emphasise recognition justice, which is the recognition of oppression ''and difference in environmental justice communities. People's capacity to convert social goods into a flourishing community is a further criteria for a just society. However, initiatives have been taken to expand the notion of environmental justice beyond the three pillars of distribution, participation, and recognition to also include the dimensions of self-governing authority, relational ontologies, and epistemic justice.
Robert D. Bullard writes that environmental justice, as a social movement and ideological stewardship, may instead be seen as a conversation of equity. Bullard writes that equity is distilled into three board categories: procedural, geographic, and social. From his publication "Confronting Environmental Racism in the Twenty-First Century," he draws out the difference between the three within the context of environmental injustices:Procedural equity refers to the "fairness" question: the extent that rules, regulations, evaluation criteria and enforcement are applied uniformly across the board and in a non-discriminatory way. Unequal protection might result from nonscientific and undemocratic decisions, exclusionary practices, public hearings held in remote locations and at inconvenient times, and use of English-only material as the language in which to communicate and conduct hearings for non-English-speaking publics.
Geographic equity refers to the location and spatial configuration of communities and their proximity to environmental hazards, noxious facilities and locally unwanted land uses such as landfills, incinerators, sewage treatment plants, lead smelters, refineries and other noxious facilities. For example, unequal protection may result from land-use decisions that determine the location of residential amenities and disamenities. The poor and communities of colour often suffer a "triple" vulnerability of noxious facility siting, as do the unincorporated—sparsely populated communities that are not legally chartered as cities or municipalities and are therefore usually governed by distant county governments rather than having their own locally elected officials.
Social equity'' assesses the role of sociological factors on environmental decision making. Poor people and people of colour often work in the most dangerous jobs and live in the most polluted neighbourhoods, their children exposed to all kinds of environmental toxins in the playgrounds and in their homes.
Indigenous environmental justice
In non-Native communities, where toxic industries and other discriminatory practices are disproportionately occurring, residents rely on laws and statutory frameworks outlined by the EPA. They rely on distributive justice, centered around the nature of private property. Native Americans do not fall under the same statutory frameworks as they are citizens of Indigenous nations, not ethnic minorities. As individuals, they are subject to American laws. As nations, they are subject to a separate legal regime, constructed on the basis of pre-existing sovereignty acknowledged by treaty and the U.S. Constitution. Environmental justice to Indigenous persons is not understood by legal entities but rather their distinct cultural and religious doctrines.Environmental Justice for Indigenous peoples follows a model that frames issues in terms of their colonial condition and can affirm decolonization as a potential framework within environmental justice. While Indigenous peoples' lived experiences vary from place to place, David Pellow writes that there are "common realities they all share in their experience of colonization that make it possible to generalize an Indigenous methodology while recognizing specific, localized conditions". Even abstract ideas like the right to a clean environment, a human right according to the United Nations, contradicts Indigenous peoples understanding of environmental justice as it reflects the commodification of land when seen in light of property values.
Critical environmental justice
Drawing on concepts of anarchism, posthumanism, critical theory, and intersectional feminism, author David Pellow created the concept of Critical Environmental Justice. Critical EJ is a perspective intended to address a number of limitations and tensions within EJ Studies. Critical EJ calls for scholarship that builds on environmental justice studies by questioning assumptions and gaps in earlier work, embracing greater interdisciplinary, and moving towards methodologies and epistemologies including and beyond the social sciences. Critical EJ scholars believe that multiple forms of inequality drive and characterize the experience of environmental injustice.Differentiation between conventional environmental studies and Critical EJ studies is done through four distinctive "pillars". These include: intersectionality; spatial and temporal scale; working toward solutions and justice outside of the state; and as beings as indispenable.
In What is Critical Environmental Justice, Pellow explains:
Where we find rivers dammed for hydropower plants we also tend to find indigenous peoples and fisherfolk, as well as other working people, whose livelihoods and health are harmed as a result; when sea life suffers from exposure to toxins such as mercury, we find that human beings also endure the effects of mercury when they consume those animals; and the intersecting character of multiple forms of inequality is revealed when nuclear radiation or climate change affects all species and humans across all social class levels, racial/ethnic groups, genders, abilities, and ages.