Ethics and Justice for the Environment

Adrian Armstrong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415509039
• eBook ISBN: 9781136272639
• Topic: Volkswirtschaftslehre
• Subtopic: Entwicklungsökonomie

Examining the issues of ethics and justice as they apply to the environment, this book starts from the observation that the parallel expositions of environmental ethics and environmental justice appear to have few points of contact. Environmental justice is highly politicized and concerned with human access to the environment and the unequal exposure to environmental pollution. It grew out of the US civil rights movement, the liberal tradition of rights, and Rawls' description of justice as fairness. It is thus almost exclusively anthropocentric, and does not address the question of justice for the environment. By contrast environmental ethical studies are a wide ranging collection of approaches that are concerned with caring for the earth, and the justifications for it, but rarely consider the issue of justice. Although the two movements do not come together at the theoretical level, they do so at the grass roots activist level. An essential component of this study is thus to consider both the issues of grass roots action, and the application of the methods to actual case studies. This book finds a common ground between these two strands and so to develop a unified statement of justice for the environment that includes the insights of both approaches, particularly based on the 'capability ideas of justice' developed by Martha Nussbaum.

Part I

Justice and ethics

Common ground and differences

Introduction to Part I

Part I of this book sets the scene for the subsequent development. It thus reviews the two main strands of environmental discourse, environmental justice and environmental ethics, that are the basis of the subsequent discussions.

Chapter 1 introduces the main themes of the whole book, starting from a description of the paradigmatic example of grassroots activism at Love Canal.

Chapter 2 then describes the main themes of the environmental justice movement, and notes its reliance on Rawlsian definitions of justice. It then examines some of the criticism of this model of justice for the environment. In particular it notes the failure to include many of the post-Rawlsian developments in the theory of justice that are taken up in the subsequent parts of this book.

Because justice is thus a central concept of the whole book, Chapter 3 presents some of the main themes in the history of the philosophy of justice, discussing its origins in Greek thought, the medieval synthesis, and the restatement of justice in the Enlightenment. The view of justice that has been particularly influential in the environmental justice movement is that of John Rawls, whose work is then reviewed, as well as the developments of that work by both Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum.

Chapter 4 then presents the main themes from the study of environmental ethics, particularly as they relate to the discussions of justice. The main areas of environmental discussion are placed along an axis of the strength of the value placed in the environment, from eco-hedonism (we look after the environment because it gives us pleasure) through utilitarian valuation, the concept of an intrinsic value in the natural world (notably Leopold’s land ethic, and the deep ecology movement), the extrinsic referent of value (especially the Christian evaluation), and the identification of the Earth as itself god (notably the Gaia movement). Lastly, the chapter includes a presentation of some topics not otherwise covered: neo-Aristotelian ethics, the ecofeminist movement, and the concepts of sustainability and inter-generational justice.

The material presented in this section thus provides the background for the development of a synthesis of the two approaches to the environment, justice and ethics. It does this by developing a description of justice for the environment, which is the subject of Part II.

1 Setting the scene

Love Canal is a neighbourhood of Niagara Falls City in New York State. It is named after William T. Love, an engineer who started a project to build a canal between the upper and lower Niagara rivers. That project proposed to use the flow that would have bypassed Niagara Falls to generate electricity to power the industry and homes of a model settlement.¹ The project failed in 1910, leaving only a section of partially excavated canal. In the 1920s that empty and isolated section of canal was used as a municipal and industrial chemical dumpsite. In 1953, the chemical company that owned the site covered the dump with earth and sold the site to the city for a nominal sum, along with some information about the chemical hazards. Despite being aware of the toxic materials buried there, the city built a school on the site, and allowed homes to be built adjacent to it.² When families moved into the area, they were unaware of the history of the site for toxic disposal.

In the 1970s toxic chemicals were found leaking from the site, and local reporters identified an abnormally high number of birth defects among the children born in the area. Among the residents, Lois Gibbs ran a campaign of local awareness, largely motivated by the issues of the health of her children, and of the other children in the neighbourhood. Lois Gibbs initially approached the School Board with a request to transfer her sickly son to another school. The School Board refused, on the grounds that it could lead to a wholesale movement away from the school if other parents took similar action. Lois Gibbs then found that her neighbours had similar concerns, and after speaking to many of them realised that the whole neighbourhood was affected adversely by the toxic chemicals which were by now polluting their homes, their school and their environment. Mobilising support from among her neighbours, she established a local parents’ movement which subsequently developed into the Love Canal Homeowners Association. The initial response of the local health authorities was to deny the link between the waste and the health problems. The previous owners of the chemical company that operated the dump also denied liability. Lois Gibbs and the association she headed then began a campaign to force the local authorities to close the school and relocate the residents. That campaign, which involved contact with the then president of the United States, Jimmy Carter, was successful, and eventually the school was closed, the affected homes were bought by the city and the residents rehoused. Part of the response of the Federal Administration was to enact the Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), more commonly known as ‘Superfund’, because it established a fund to help clear up toxic pollution in places such as Love Canal. This fund has continued its work ever since, as other cases have come to light.

The key points of this story (which is told in much more detail by Lois Gibbs herself in Gibbs, 1982, and in the many articles describing the site and its problems) is that a small group of concerned local residents could, by persistent action, achieve their ends, which they saw as a matter of justice. As a result of this action, Lois Gibbs founded the Centre for Health, Environment and Justice (CHEJ) (formerly known as the Citizens’ Clearinghouse for Hazardous Waste, CCHW), which provides assistance to citizens facing similar environmental problems. Schlosberg (2007, p. 47) reports that the CHEJ has assisted over 8000 groups since its initiation in 1982, and currently receives around 1500 requests for assistance per year. The Love Canal story and its consequences is one the founding moments of a movement that grew to prominence in the United States in the late 1970s.

Love Canal was not an isolated instance. Both Schlosberg (2007) and Shrader- Frechette (2002, p. 8) identified the beginning of the environmental justice movement in the protest over the proposal to build a polychlorinated biphenyl (PCB) disposal site in Warren County, North Carolina in 1982. The site was proposed, not because it was technically the best (which it was not), but because it was thought that the poor and dispossessed population would be unable to put up any significant resistance. The area became the focus for a campaign of protests, which soon became high profile, and involved several leading figures, critically among them the leaders of the local black Baptist church. Although that particular protest was unsuccessful, the widespread protests were certainly a crucial part in the birth of the environmental justice movement (Bullard, 1993b). Shrader- Frechette (2002) reports a parallel and roughly contemporaneous case that she describes as a ‘typical situation’, in the actions of Patsy Ruth Oliver, a resident of Carver Terrace in Texarkana, Texas, who led a movement for recompense and remediation where residential properties had been built over former creosote tanks. However, compared with the Love Canal incident, this site received lower levels of protection from the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). Oliver and others concluded that since the population of Carver Terrace was African- American, this was a form of racism.

Both Lois Gibbs and Patsy Ruth Oliver are typical of the environmental justice movement, in that neither of them were activists prior to the campaigns they led. Primarily they were women concerned to protect their homes and their families. These early campaigners saw their exposure to toxins as essentially an issue of justice.³ As such, they could tap in to the active civil rights movement, which was then prominent in the United States. The two movements were often closely interrelated when it became clear that many of the communities that were affected by lack of civil rights (mainly racial minorities) were also located in areas of poor or polluted environments. The two made common cause, and so the environmental justice movement was from its very beginning a political movement, which could draw on the network and experience of civil rights activists, as well as the resources of the academic analysis underlain by well-developed political theory, notably the theories of justice.

Despite its origins in the very specific issues in the United States, it might be thought that the environmental justice movement and the broader environmental movement have similar, or at least overlapping, aims and subject matter. In particular it might seem that environmental justice could offer significant insights into the studies of environmental ethics. To an outsider, then, the terms ‘environmental justice’ and ‘environmental ethics’ might seem to cover the same material, and indeed might seem synonymous. After all, justice and ethics are both concerned with what is right. However, because of their very different origins, the link between the two areas of discourse is not so clear in practice, as both terms have acquired specialised meanings, which makes the identification less obvious. They thus offer an example of two related ‘discourse groups’ identified by Dryzek (1997).

The distinction between the two approaches is noted by Schlosberg (2007, p. vii), who asked:

Is there a major difference between the definition of environmental justice (justice on environmental issues among the human population), and ecological justice (justice between humans and the rest of the natural world)?

This question was a starting point for this book. His terminological distinction is not generally used, either in the literature or in this review, and I prefer to use the more widely acknowledged term environmental ethics for the discussions of the relationship between humans and the rest of the Earth.

Environmental ethics is a wide area of study, concerned with the way human beings react to the natural world. In it, ‘environment’ is shorthand for the whole of the natural world, with an emphasis on the need to conserve, protect, and value that world. The many different approaches to environmental ethics are primarily concerned to establish why we seek to protect the environment, and so seek to find philosophical (or religious) justification for a concern with the environment. See for example Attfield (2003), Armstrong (2009), Palmer (1997), Walker (2007), Benson (2000), Elliot (1995) and many others, some of whom will be identified in Chapter 4. It is also paralleled by a wide range of environmental action groups, as well as political pressure groups. Our concern here is however with the philosophical backgrounds, while the question of activism is discussed in Chapter 12.

Environmental justice is, in contrast, a much more focused and self-contained movement, being concerned with access to environmental goods and in particular the observations that some social groups seem to have very unequal and excessive exposure to environmental ‘bads’ (see e.g. Bullard, 1993a; Schlosberg, 2007). At its simplest, environmental justice is concerned with social access to the environment. It is thus a social approach, embedded in the study of political systems, and is thus generally anthropocentric, being concerned with the environment as a good or service available (or unavailable) to specific social groups.

Underlying the two viewpoints are two distinct and different nuances of the much over-used term ‘the environment’. Environmental justice is primarily concerned with the immediate surrounds of human beings, and therefore is concerned more with the urban environment than it is with the natural world (Sellers, 2008). Perhaps this is the more accurate use of the term ‘environment’, as it relates to the environs of human beings, their immediate places of life and work, and includes those structures that human beings build to surround themselves for their own pleasure, utility and comfort. However, in doing so it fails to extend its concern to those parts of the environment that are remote from human beings, and generally also fails to identify the concerns of even proximate ecosystems. In practice, this movement focuses its attentions on the global commons, and on the interrelationship between human beings and their own activities in polluting or despoiling that environment, and the exposure of human beings to pollution.

The wider environmental movement tends to use the term ‘environment’ to refer to the natural world, defined as the world separate from direct human influence. It thus retains an anti-anthropocentric focus, and concerns itself with the anthropogenic urban environment only very rarely. Rather, it concerns itself with wilderness areas and non-human species. It is thus close to the older term ‘nature conservation’ in its focus on the natural world.

Writing from within the environmental justice context, Dobson (1998) has chided the environmental movement with ignoring the resources available to it from the field of political theory and in particular the theories of justice. If that is true, then this review is an attempt to redress the balance.⁴ Equally, however, it has been stated (e.g. Elliot, 1995) that the extension of moral considerability to the non-human world has been a major advance in philosophical theory; an advance that has appeared to have been totally ignored by the environmental justice movement, which has remained solidly anthropocentric. These comments indicate the need for the dialogue in which this book is only one offering.

Outline

Like Gaul, this book comes in three parts. Part I reviews the ideas underlying the discussion. It presents the two concepts, identifying the characteristics of each and some critiques, before attempting to identify the areas of commonality.

In Part I, Chapter 2 thus considers the characteristics of the environmental justice movement. This section is indebted to the review of Schlosberg (2007). Critical to the discussion is the issue of what we mean by justice, and this is reviewed separately in Chapter 3, drawing on the reviews of Sagovsky (2008) and Sen (2009). Chapter 4 reviews the broad spectrum of environmental ethical viewpoints, drawing on the classification in Armstrong (2009) to structure the discussion. In doing so, it attempts to identify the ways in which the various definitions of justice can be aligned to the varying views of the environment. It also deals with some specific components of the environmental debate: the very real contribution of the ecofeminist movement, and the issues of intergenerational equity, in particular the concept of sustainability.

Part II attempts to synthesise the previous discussions by developing a statement of justice for the environment. However, it is clear from the previous reviews that an essential preliminary to any description of justice is both a vision of the world, and an understanding of human nature. This latter is necessary to counteract the narrow rationalism of the Enlightenment. A much richer understanding of human nature requires a much wider appreciation of justice. Rather than explore the wide range of alternatives, Chapter 6 goes on to develop one particular version of justice, the capabilities approach developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum (Sen, 2009; Nussbaum, 2011). This involves extending the capabilities described by Nussbaum (2011) to animals (so developing Nussbaum, 2006), and then to larger units: human societies, ecosystems, and the whole Earth. This therefore extends the ideas well beyond the limits of the neoliberal emphasis on the individual. We thus replace Nussbaum’s ‘capabilities’ with the broader concept of ‘consideranda’, those things that must be considered, in developing accounts of justice not only for human beings, but for societies, animals, ecosystems and the Earth itself. The account of justice based on the use of either capabilities for human beings or consideranda for the natural world is however incomplete if it does not offer ways of resolving conflicts between competing claims. Rather than seeking a single simple-minded overriding account of such conflict resolution, a whole toolbox of methods is identified, which can be used and applied in particular circumstances.

These discussions then need to be evaluated against their ability to give guidance in the resolution of actual problems, and Part III does this by discussing five example problems: climate change impacts and adaptations, energy, human interaction with animals, and the use of direct action in the context of road- building programmes. These discussions attempt to identify ways in which the theoretical discussions can help in understanding actual issues. It is seen that the two movements (environmental justice and general environmental ethics) come together in the centrality of praxis, and in particular in grassroots action. At the end of the day, it is not the talking, but the doing, that achieves results. It is in action that the two movements come together, as activists raise pressure, protest, and act to redress environmental wrongs. At this basic level, the practitioners of the movements come together. It is the job of the theorists to stand behind them.

2 Environmental justice

The environmental justice movement first came to prominence in the United States during the late 1970s and early 1980s (Rhodes, 2005; Brulle and Pellow, 2006) at a time when there was already an active civil rights movement (Stephens, Bullock and Scott, 2001) which focused on the needs of disadvantaged sections of the community. At the same time, it became clear that the sections of society that were disadvantaged in their access to democratic ri...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Ethics and Justice for the Environment
• Praise for Ethics and Justice for the Environment
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Part I Justice and ethics
• Part II Justice for the environment
• Part III The necessity of praxis
• Appendix: The Principles of Environmental Justice
• Notes
• References
• Index