Environmental Injustice

12 Key excerpts on "Environmental Injustice"

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  From Workshop to Waste Magnet

  • Diane Sicotte(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Rutgers University Press

    (Publisher)

  5

  Within the context of the law, Kristin Shrader-Frechette has identified several different aspects of Environmental Injustice, including distributive injustice (the unequal distributions of hazards); participative injustice (unequal opportunity to participate in decisions regarding possible or known hazards); procedural injustice; lack of compensation for health or economic damage resulting from environmental hazards; and inequities to future generations.6

  In the context of governance, making less frequent inspections of hazardous facilities and taking a longer time to clean up Superfund sites in disadvantaged or minority communities have been identified as forms of Environmental Injustice.7 Others have identified Environmental Injustice with unequal vulnerability to harm in the wake of disasters.8 Finally, issues including harm from global climate change, unequal access to healthy drinking water, workers’ exposure to toxic hazards on the job, the contamination of communities and drinking water from mining and gas and oil extraction, the export of hazardous waste and industries to poorer countries, and many others have come under the rubric of environmental justice.9 Given this dizzying array of issues, places, claims of injustice, affected populations, and possible causes, it is not surprising that researchers have defined environmental justice and injustice in many different ways.10

  In the United States, a large proportion of research on Environmental Injustice has focused on the unequal and unjust distribution of environmental hazards (distributional injustice).11 Even this aspect of Environmental Injustice is far from simple, because it is closely related to participatory injustice. Participatory injustice refers to inequalities of power and knowledge that plague legal and political processes of deliberation about where noxious facilities should be located, the thoroughness and timeliness of hazardous site cleanups, and so on. In light of these inequalities, decisions resulting in unequal distributions can be said to result from the lack of recognition of social differences between groups.12 This lack of recognition then causes less valued groups to experience disrespect and exclusion from political participation, rendering them more vulnerable to unequal distributions of hazards and risks.13

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  Environmental Planning in Context

  • Iain White(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Red Globe Press

    (Publisher)

  Here we can also see how the development of the subject of environmental racism, with its heightened appreciation of difference, disadvan-tage and the environment, led us to the broader concept of envi-ronmental justice. Environmental justice As a social movement, environmental justice was slow to spread beyond the USA with its particular demographic composition, well-established civil rights movements and heightened awareness 228 Environmental Planning in Context of difference. For example, Agyeman (2000: 7) claimed that for many people in the UK: ‘environmental’ and ‘justice’ do not sit easily together. At best, their combination evokes a memory of some distant news report or documentary of how communities of colour and poor communities in the US face a disproportionate toxic risk when compared with white middle class communities, and at worst the combination fails to register a signal. Since this time, however, researchers across the globe are finding similarly strong correlations between environmental harm and the most deprived sectors of society. There is, however, a noticeable divergence in how difference may become manifest as environmen-tal injustice across cultural contexts. Initially, the focus of environmental justice research was on specific environmental exposures contained within a discrete local-ity or country. Research typically focused on issues relating to land use or waste facilities, often reflecting the concerns of ordinary citi-zens. For example, in the UK it was discovered that the distribution of Industrial Pollution Control sites were disproportionately clus-tered in deprived areas (Walker et al ., 2005). These visible, and local, spatial impacts are not the only concern, however. In a national study of air quality it was discovered that it was the poor-est communities that both receive the most pollution and emit the least (Mitchell and Dorling, 2003). The early focus of environmen-tal justice here had a substantive element.

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  Traditions and Trends in Global Environmental Politics

  International Relations and the Earth

  • Olaf Corry, Hayley Stevenson, Olaf Corry, Hayley Stevenson(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  7

  Justice discourses and the global environment

  Diverse perspectives on an uneven landscape

  Ross Gillard, Lucy Ford and Gabriela Kütting

  Introduction

  Discussions of justice in Global Environmental Politics (GEP) have taken on many different hues. Questions of equitable access to clean environments and natural resources are central to environmental justice discourses. They seek to expose the unequal distribution of environmental degradation and challenge the uneven recognition of different groups’ interests in governing environmental issues. Often couched within traditional state-centric dichotomies of ‘North/South’ or ‘developed/developing’ relations, a range of justice issues has emerged within international debates about sustainable development, global environmental governance and development entitlements.

  Sociological considerations are essential to identifying the often racial, class-based and gendered nature of Environmental Injustice; something feminist theory has developed through the concept of intersectionality (Davis 2008; Kaijser and Kronsell 2014; Lykke 2010). For example, the unequal access some groups have to knowledge and power can affect the distribution of environmental ills within and across state boundaries. Such procedural justice issues of access to power and voice raise questions about inclusivity in environmental governance, inter-generational justice, and the challenge of representing multiple concerns in complex environmental decision-making.

  Further, a deep green perspective has sought to move away from the anthropocentrism of traditional social justice discourses by challenging nature/society distinctions, relocating humans within a broadly ecocentric perspective and extending the notion of rights to the non-human world. This ecological

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  Lessons in Environmental Justice

  From Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter and Idle No More

  • Michael Mascarenhas(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • SAGE Publications, Inc

    (Publisher)

  4 Measuring Environmental Injustice Paul Mohai

  Photo 4.1 istockphoto.com/EvanTravels

  The environmental justice movement has spurred much academic interest in and policy debates about the existence of, causes for, and solutions to environmental inequalities based on racial and socioeconomic factors. The earliest research attempted to determine the existence and magnitude of such disparities. Evidence of the existence of such disparities has been enough to spur government action. Although some researchers have questioned the existence and seriousness of such disparities, systematic reviews have shown that the weight of the evidence supports the claims of the movement. Nevertheless, challenges to the claims of environmental justice activists, supported at times by contrary research evidence, have stimulated a great deal of attention to questions about the validity of the methodologies for assessing racial and socioeconomic disparities around environmentally hazardous sites. There has also been much interest in understanding how racial and socioeconomic disparities in the distribution of environmental hazards come about, and in probing the economic, health, and other quality-of-life impacts associated with living near environmentally burdened sites. I have been and am currently involved in all aspects of the research seeking answers to these questions.

  Race and Concern for the Environment: Dispelling Old Myths

  Initially I became involved as a researcher in the area of what is now termed environmental justice because of my interest in better understanding the environmental concerns and attitudes of African Americans and other people of color. This interest emerged in the late 1980s. Earlier research found that there was little empirical evidence to show that working-class people or poor people are less concerned about the environment than others (Buttel & Flinn, 1978; Mitchell, 1979; Mohai, 1985; Van Liere & Dunlap, 1980). I began wondering whether the conventional wisdom of the day, that African Americans are unconcerned, or at least less concerned about the environment than white Americans, was also unfounded. This conventional wisdom was already being questioned in the 1980s by African American scholars (Bullard, 1983; Bullard & Wright, 1986, 1987a, 1987b; Taylor, 1989). I had at my disposal data from a large national survey of environmental attitudes, based on more than 7,000 face-to-face interviews conducted by Louis Harris and Associates. Almost 600 African Americans were interviewed in this survey, making it the largest national survey of African American environmental attitudes ever conducted. In addition, I saw the potential of the annual (now biannual) General Social Survey (GSS) for comparing African American and white American concerns about the environment. From these national datasets, I demonstrated that, contrary to the conventional wisdom, African Americans express levels of concern about the environment that are as great as—if not greater than—those of their white counterparts (Mohai, 1990). Indeed, data from the GSS demonstrate that this has been a long-held trend (Figure 4.1

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  Environmental Justice in the Anthropocene

  From (Un)Just Presents to Just Futures

  • Stacia Ryder, Kathryn Powlen, Melinda Laituri, Stephanie A. Malin, Joshua Sbicca, Dimitris Stevis, Stacia Ryder, Kathryn Powlen, Melinda Laituri, Stephanie A. Malin, Joshua Sbicca, Dimitris Stevis(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Power of Maps . London: Guildford Press. Passage contains an image

  3

  Environmental justice and autocracy in Eastern Europe

  The case of Hungary Attila Antal

  Introduction

  There is an expanding discourse on environmental (in)justice as a social problem and racist issue. I will analyze the main notions of these concerns of environmental justice with a special focus on Eastern Europe. One of the earliest approaches concerning environmental justice focused on the inequity in the distribution of environmental bads (Bryant and Mohai 1992; Pellow 2004, 2007). From that standpoint “Environmental Injustice was about social injustice being manifest in a host of environmental risks and bads” (Schlosberg 2013, p. 47). These environmental problems are characterized as social injustices, which hurt not only poor people but communities of color. Environmental Injustice has been framed as eco-racism, so the main explanatory focus of environmental problems was racism. Schlosberg puts it very clearly:

  Environmental justice wasn’t simply about establishing the fact that more environmental bads and risks were being put on minority communities […] The practice, and experience, of racism has been at the heart of environmental justice discourse in the United States.

  (Schlosberg 2013, p. 39)

  The discourse of race and ethnicity are “important aspects in understanding popular environmentalism, but they may not be central in every setting where Environmental Injustices are present” (Harper et al. 2009, p. 5). Martínez-Alier (2003) cautions against applying “environmental racism” as a universal framework to all Environmental Injustices.

  Nevertheless, there is a broadening environmental justice discourse at the global level. The concept of environmental justice is a broad framework which contains “analyses of transportation, access to countryside and green space, land use and smart growth policy, water quality and distribution, energy development and jobs, brownfields refurbishment, and food justice” (Schlosberg 2013, p. 40). According to Schlosberg (2013, p. 38): “Climate change has pushed environmental justice to more broad considerations of both environment and justice.” Climate justice has become one of the main concepts of environmental justice. Several environmental problems which used to be environmental justice questions currently can be seen and interpreted in the climate justice framework.

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  Just Sustainabilities

  Development in an Unequal World

  • Robert D Bullard, Julian Agyeman, Bob Evans, Robert D Bullard, Julian Agyeman, Bob Evans, Robert Bullard(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The concept of environmental justice has developed both at national and international levels. The international community has addressed the issue of the unequal sharing of costs and benefits of environmental protection through such principles as sustainable development, intergenerational equity and common, but differentiated responsibility in managing the global environment (Costi, 1999, pp315–16). At the national level, considerable debate in the US followed the publication of studies demonstrating the discrepancies between the environmental burden suffered by economically and racially disadvantaged minorities and their exposure to greater environmental hazards, and the satisfactory level of environmental protection in areas inhabited by white middle-class communities (Weintraub, 1995, pp567–70). Despite the development of a body of literature on the subject however, the environmental justice movement within Western Europe remains relatively weak.

  Whereas numerous studies have discussed the ongoing economic and political transition in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE)1 and its impact on society (Pickles and Smith, 1998), few works have exhaustively addressed the concept of environmental justice. Elements conducive to environmsental justice may be inferred from the recognition of constitutional and political rights in CEE countries: non-discrimination on racial, social, religious, ethnic, sexual, political or other grounds, freedom of expression and of association, the right to a healthy environment and the right of access to information. CEE countries have also been eager to ratify an increasing number of international environmental and human rights instruments and to implement their key legal principles within the domestic legal system (EBRD, 1999). Most of the preconditions for the development of environmental justice, however, have not yet materialized.

  The title of the chapter reflects the dilemma confronted by CEE countries ten years on in their difficult reform path. Whereas an excessive protection of the environment might hinder the development of the economy, unsustainable economic growth could jeopardize the environment. The restructuring of the economy imposes a heavy toll on the state budget, favours the privatization of state enterprises mainly to the benefit of foreign investors and induces a culture of consumerism. The transition process also imperils the environment by an overexploitation of natural resources, an increase in the production of waste and the building of a more sophisticated road infrastructure over fertile lands, forests and other ecosystems (Beckmann, 2000).

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  Environmental Political Thought

  Interests, Values and Inclusion

  • Robert Garner(Author)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Bloomsbury Academic

    (Publisher)

  The determined lead-ership of Lois Gibbs resulted in national media coverage and the inter-vention of President Carter, who ordered that the people be relocated (Dryzek, 2013 : 213–14). Today, numerous environmental justice cam-paigns exist focusing, in particular, on the location of hazardous waste, and national organisations, such as the National Black Environmental Justice Network in the United States and the Black Environmental Net-work in the UK, have been formed. The concept of environmental justice is now applied to a wider range of issues and the national focus of environmental justice movements has been dwarfed by the question of justice on a global scale (Carmin and Agyeman, 2011 ). In this so-called second generation of environmental justice, attention was altered from a demand for ‘not in my backyard’ to ‘not in anyone’s backyard’ (Vanderheiden, 2016 : 323). The growing interconnectedness in the world of peoples and sovereign states has pro-vided a fillip for extending justice beyond national boundaries. Limiting a discussion of justice to the internal affairs of wealthy Western states seems trivial, given the staggering inequalities between different parts of the world. As a reflection of this wider concern of the environmental justice movement, climate change is seen, above all, as an issue that has a disproportionate impact on disadvantaged groups. ENVIRONMENTAL POLITICAL THOUGHT 124 Recognising the global character of justice, political theorists have sought to develop theories of justice that are global in scope. There is lit-tle agreement, however, on what our moral obligations should be to those outsiders who do not belong to our community. For some philosophers, the moral obligation on the richest to help the poorest is clear cut. For some, the sacrifices required will make many of us feel uncomfortable. At one end of the spectrum is the position represented by Peter Singer ( 1985 ) (see Box 8.3 ).

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  Introduction to Sustainability

  • Robert Brinkmann(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Thus, when considering environmental justice issues in some areas of the world, it is important to recognize the unique relationships that some groups have with the land. It is also important to note that many tribal lands are in some of the more environmentally difficult areas of the United States. Many are located in very dry or cold regions. Issues like global climate change, water withdrawal, and neighboring environmental disturbances can have disproportionate impacts than more temperate areas. Exporting environmental problems One of the major themes of environmental justice that has emerged in recent years is the notion that devel- oped countries are exporting environmental problems around the world, leading to issues of environmental justice in the receiving country. This is done in the fol- lowing ways: 1 Exporting dirty industries 2 Selling products banned in a developed country to a developing country 3 Taking advantage of overseas cheap labor that work in poor conditions to avoid paying workers a living wage in the home country 4 Exploiting resources of a country with poor environ- mental rules 5 Exporting waste, particularly hazardous waste, to other countries with lax regulation. Many of us are powerless to address these issues in our daily lives. However, new organizations that evaluate environmental justice issues have emerged. For example, the Fair Trade label has emerged in recent years to note that the labor practices for the product are just. Plus, many companies have infused environmental justice within their international corporate environ- ment and recognize that failure to act fairly in the world impacts not only the company’s bottom line profit, but also the overall ethical reputation of the corporation (Figure 11.6).

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  Environmental Justice

  Key Issues

  • Brendan Coolsaet(Author)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part I Defining and conceptualizing environmental justice 3 Distributive environmental justice Alice Kaswan Learning outcomes Gain an introductory understanding of several core distributive justice concepts. Gain an understanding of the different kinds of governmental decisions that have direct and indirect distributional consequences. Learn how policymakers and academics measure distributive justice. Consider possible remedies for distributional injustice. Introduction The drive down Interstate 880 in Oakland, California is not that different from the drive down many other industrial corridors in the United States. Industries, large and small, recycling facilities, waste storage facilities, tow yards, and other industrial and commercial uses are interspersed with patches of housing. Sometimes, there are just a few houses tucked in between industrial lots; other times, small neighbourhoods create a patchwork. Here in East Oakland, residents are invariably low-income and Latinx or African American. Or take the plight of women in coastal Bangladesh, as climate change leads to increasingly severe cyclones and flooding. Due to its geographic location, Bangladesh is among the nation’s most vulnerable to climate change and, within Bangladesh, women are disproportionately vulnerable to flooding events and post-disaster impacts. Women’s low socio-economic status reduces their autonomy and options for responding to risk, leading to higher mortality rates, and their traditional roles as caretakers and food providers are particularly stressed when disaster strikes (Hossain and Punam, 2016). These examples suggest the kinds of harms that trigger distributive justice concerns. But what is “distributive justice”? We start this chapter by exploring how distributive justice differs from other forms of justice and then identify several variants on what constitutes distributive justice. Moving beyond theory, we explore what distributive justice means on the ground

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  Unsustainable Inequalities

  Social Justice and the Environment

  • Lucas Chancel, Malcolm DeBevoise(Authors)
  • 2020(Publication Date)
  • Belknap Press

    (Publisher)

  The wealthiest, by contrast, do not store all their assets in the same place; some are deposited in banks, for example. To sum up, we have seen that in many countries the poor are over-represented in areas at greatest risk, whether from air pollution, soil contamination, flood, or drought. And yet there is no absolute corre-spondence between income levels and exposure to environmental risk. The territorial dimension of these issues is apt to obscure the effect of social inequalities: when an area is affected by pollution or struck by a devastating storm, people from all walks of life are victims in one way or another. This acts as a basic reminder that we are all concerned by environmental damage. Nevertheless there can be no question that the poor are more vul-nerable to such shocks, because they lack the means to protect them-selves against them. Once again we encounter a vicious circle in which economic, environmental, and political inequalities are mutually rein-forcing. Modern societies are characterized by an inegalitarian distribu-tion of environmental risk and of the resources necessary to withstand its worst effects. In its turn, this state of affairs inevitably strengthens preexisting social inequalities. 5 Unequal Responsibility for Pollution Having examined inequalities of access to resources and of ex-posure to risks, we must now consider a third facet of environmental inequality: the responsibility of polluters for the damages they cause. At once a problem arises. Are we to think about this inequality in the context of disparities between countries, or between industrial sectors, or between individuals? Who is responsible, for example, for the pol-lution produced in making this book? The author? The publisher? The printer and binder? The company that ships copies to the warehouse? The reader? These questions raise a number of ethical problems in their turn.

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  Sustainable Development Goals: Their Impacts on Forests and People

  • Pia Katila, Carol J. Pierce Colfer, Wil de Jong, Glenn Galloway, Pablo Pacheco, Georg Winkel(Authors)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  However, it is unclear whether SDG 10, in the way it is framed, opens room for promoting environmental justice for poor and marginalised groups through well-managed migration and remittances. In what follows, we outline the conceptual framework that informs our analyses (Section 10.2). We then provide an overall evaluation of the gaps and openings in SDG 10 and dive deeper into two clusters of issues – inequali- ties within countries (Section 10.3) and migration and remittances (Section 10.4). Section 10.5 offers a summary and concluding remarks about potential trade-offs, shortcomings and new openings. 10.2 Principles of Environmental Justice: An Approach to Evaluating SDG 10 Environmental outcomes include forest productivity, availability of natural resources, biological diversity and carbon sequestration (World Bank 2009). Human well-being encompasses economic, social and political dimensions. We focus on the human well-being outcomes related to inequality, which encompass economic, social and political dimensions. An environmental justice perspective is particularly well-suited as it acknowledges the inherent synergies, tensions and trade-offs of equality and environmental goals and the need to find a balance between the two, rather than assume win–win outcomes. Justice is broadly defined as fairness (Rawls 1999), yet what fairness means is contested (Sen 2009). Environmental justice, as a theory and a practice, has a long, rich history in the Global North, particularly in the USA (Agyeman 2005, Bullard 2005, Cole and Foster 2001). More recently, social movements, international organisations and businesses in the Global South widely use the language of justice to lend credibility to their struggles. Examples include local communities and environmental activists resisting dispossession from customary land, opposing polluting industries and strug- gling for fair distribution of natural-resource revenues.

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  Environmental Justice in the New Millennium

  Global Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity, and Human Rights

  • F. Steady(Author)
  • 2009(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  Their lived realities limit their capacity to manage environmental hazards and risks. A necessary condition for environmental justice is an ideological paradigm shift from a neoliberal model of development being pursued by Jamaica and other Caribbean countries to one that is people-cen- tered, participatory, and environmentally sustainable. As a result of the evidence presented to highlight the importance of gender analysis to the promotion of environmental justice, there is a need for countries like Jamaica to mainstream gender in all develop- ment policies, programs, and institutions. The data presented dem- onstrated the need to mainstream gender particularly in disaster risk management programs as well as in key sectors such as bauxite mining and tourism. This will ensure that the human rights of women are equally respected. The data also show that justice requires equality and fairness for locals, visitors, and investors. Scare natural resources should not be skewed to benefit one privileged group (visitors) from outside to the disadvantage of locals. The gender dimensions of environmental justice also underscore the need to ensure more equitable channels for the participation of communities, including both men and women in the decision-making process to ensure that the felt needs and concerns of every citizen are factored into development policies and programs. Partnerships pro- mote empowerment generally but specifically the empowerment of women who face a major gap in representation at the highest levels of the society. Partnerships between civil society groups, academics, Leith L. Dunn 132 the private sector, and governmental and international agencies can also be built or strengthened around common development objectives. This will ensure a more multifaceted approach to building awareness and advocacy for change and the promotion of environmental justice.

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