Environmental Justice

Abstract

AbstractThis chapter deals with the evolving quest to attain environmental justice. It demonstrates that there are many facets and manifestations of environmental justice—a concept that sits at the junction of legal doctrine and anthropological realities. Amalgamating these two perspectives permits us to capture examples of such injustices and to analyse how law responds to them. This investigation into environmental justice adopts a three-pronged approach. The first section, ‘The meaning and origins of “environmental justice” ’, contemplates the emergence and rise of the environmental justice movement, as well as disruptions and innovations in the ontological sense of the concept itself. The second section, ‘Litigating environmental justice’, lays out concrete facets of environmental justice from a classic anthropocentric viewpoint in a schematically organized format. Four dimensions of environmental justice litigation are delineated. In the third part of the chapter, ‘Expanding environmental justice’, we consider more holistic or ecocentric applications of environmental justice, most notably Indigenous world views and the potential recognition of the rights of nature. We conclude that environmental justice is a moving target—it can mean different things to different people in different contexts, and is constantly adapting to new realities. As topics such as climate change or loss of biodiversity show, the human–nature relationship is, indeed, among the most pressing issues of our time. Environmental justice is, therefore, likely to gain even more importance in the coming decades, and further interdisciplinary research will be required to understand what that justice may entail in very concrete and variegated circumstances.