Environmental Justice as a Social Imperative of the Near Future

Abstract

This study aims to analyze environmental justice as a reflection of the issue of social justice. The authors analyzed the term “environmental justice,” which is directly related to “social justice.” The basis of environmental justice is the principles of a social organization projected onto the interaction between people and the environment. The authors theoretically and empirically analyzed the focal points of environmental justice using the socio-ecological method. The paper focuses on (1) the content of “environmental justice”; (2) its structural elements; (3) the content of its core; (4) comparisons between the concepts of “environmental justice” and “social justice”; (5) their subject-object relations. The authors analyzed three types of the human environment (natural, object, and social), paying close attention to the primary and fundamental social communities. Out of these three, the social environment, responsible for ecological and social crises, is analyzed more closely. The authors conducted the cause-effect analysis of environmental and social problems that lead to environmental and social injustice. Moreover, the authors consider the possibility of using the principles of environmental justice to analyze the environmental imperative.