Environmental Justice

Agyeman, Schlosberg, Craven & Matthews core arguments

• EJ scholarship has grown significantly over the past few decades; it is now multimethodological, multiscalar, and global. Specifically, they focus on:

• Practice and materiality

• Community, identity, and attachment

• Human and nonhuman assemblages and just sustainabilities

What Is Justice?

Moral and ethical fairness. Some related terms:

• Equity

• Impartiality

• Morality

In sociology, “justice” generally refers

to the fair division of resources, opportunities, and privileges

Types of Justice

Distributional Justice, Procedural Justice, Recognitional Justice

Distributional Justice

Focuses on the fair and equitable allocation of societal resources, wealth, opportunities, and burdens.

• The original core question of EJ scholarship.

Procedural Justice

Emphasizes fairness, transparency, and neutrality in the processes and decision-making systems used to resolve disputes or allocate outcomes.

Recognitional Justice

Concerned with whether a community’s identity, knowledge, and experience are acknowledged and respected in decision-making.

Environmental Justice and other types

Environmental racism, Environmental injustice, Environmental justice

Environmental racism

Any policy, practice, or directives that differentially affects or disadvantages (whether intended or unintended) individuals, groups, or communities based on race or color

Environmental injustice

A situation in which a particular social group is disproportionately affected by environmental hazards

Environmental justice

• The fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies

The EJ Framework

The right to accurate information from authorities concerning environmental risks

• Public hearings

• Democratic participation in decision-making regarding the future of any threatened community

• Compensation for injured parties from those who inflict harm on them

• Expressions of solidarity with survivors of environmental injustices

• A call to abolish environmental racism/injustice

Agyeman bridges traditional environmentalism, with?

Traditional environmentalism(which ignored social equity) with early environmental justice (which was purely reactive to toxic "bads"). Together, these fields merge into three core themes defining modern environmental sociology

Emerging themes in EJ (Agyeman et al.)

Practice and Materiality, Community, Identity, and Attachment, Human and Nonhuman Assemblages,

example of Emerging themes in EJ (Agyeman et al.)

Urban Green Equity: Moving beyond elite, rural conservation parks to ensure that low-income urban communities and communities of color have equitable access to green spaces, community gardens, and clean parks (merging conservation with civil rights).

just sustainabilities (Agyeman et al.)

Broader concerns about sustainability and the integrity of the nonhuman world

• Recognizing the relationship between environment and justice as complex and interrelated:

• A poor environment is not only a symptom of existing injustice; rather, a functioning

environment provides the necessary conditions to achieve social justice.

Just sustainabilities argues that you cannot have true:

environmental sustainability without social equity, and vice versa.

example of just sustainabilities (Agyeman et al.)

Climate Justice & Renewable Energy Access: Ensuring that the transition away from fossil fuels includes low-income communities—such as providing community solar programs or weatherization grants that lower energy bills for households burdened by high energy costs.