Theorising environmental justice: the expanding sphere of a discourse

Abstract

Environmental justice has been a central concern in a range of disciplines, and both the concept and its coverage have expanded substantially in the past two decades. I examine this development in three key ways. First, I explore how early work on environmental justice pushed beyond many boundaries: it challenged the very notion of ‘environment’, examined the construction of injustice beyond inequity, and illustrated the potential of pluralistic conceptions of social justice. More recently, there has been a spatial expansion of the use of the term, horizontally into a broader range of issues, vertically into examinations of the global nature of environmental injustices, and conceptually to the human relationship with the non-human world. Further, I argue that recent extensions of the environmental justice frame move the discourse into a new realm – where environment and nature are understood to create the conditions for social justice.

Keywords:

• justice
• environmental justice
• climate justice

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to Derek Bell and the anonymous referees for Environmental Politics for their very helpful suggestions on an earlier version of this manuscript.

Notes

1. See, for example, United Church of Christ (1987), Bryant and Mohai (1992), and Bullard (1990).

2. And one should say among environmental academics as well, who were in the midst of the anthropocentrism/eco-centrism debate in the late 1980s when environmental justice began to grow.

3. Indeed, one of the very interesting things about the First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991 was the engagement between urban African American and rural Native American activists, which was certainly the origin of this principle. See Lee (1992).

4. On capabilities in general, see Sen (2009) and Nussbaum (2011); on the application to environmental justice, see Holland (2008) and Schlosberg (2007).

5. In addition to Sze and London, see this spatial expansion in the work of, for example, Roberts and Parks (2007), Pellow (2007), Mohai et al. (2009), and Walker (2009, 2011).

6. See Agyeman (2002), Rowan and Fridgen (2003), Bullard (2007), Jones (2009), and Gottlieb and Joshi (2010).

7. Corburn (2005), Ottinger et al. (2011).

8. Di Chiro (2008), Sze et al. (2010), Whyte (2011).

9. In order, see Williams and Mawdsley (2006), Watson and Bulkeley (2005), McCarthy (2010), Fan (2006), Page (2007), Tschakert (2009), Widener (2007), McLean (2007), Cowell et al. (2011), Harrison (2011), and Carruthers (2007).

10. In order, see Carruthers (2008), McDonald (2002), Agyeman (2010), and Agyeman and Ogneva-Himmelberger (2009).

11. We will see the same set of community-based issues post-Sandy in New York and New Jersey.

12. See the discussion of a lack of overlapping consensus in Nussbaum (2011, pp. 164–165).

13. See, for example, efforts toward just energy transition on the Navajo nation (http://www.blackmesawatercoalition.org/ourwork.html [Accessed 16 January 2013]).

14. Then again, it is clear that there is a long and deep history of what we would now call environmental justice concerns in both race-based and environmental movements – environmental justice as a concern is not new, nor was it driven solely by academic concerns. See, for example, Dorceta Taylor's (1997, 2009) comprehensive histories.