Justice

Justice is one of those words that gets used so much that it is tricky to define. Most of us know what it is like to be treated unjustly in a personal or professional relationship, and can identify broader injustices in our society and others. But it is not always easy to explain what justice is, or what a truly just society would look like. In the environmental justice movement, justice tends to be envisioned in

three overlapping ways: (1) Distributive justice asserts that all members of a community should have fair and equitable access to that community’s resources; (2) participatory justice means that all members of a community should play a role in its decision-making processes; and finally, (3) the preferential option for the poor insists that special moral attention should be paid to the “least among us,” those who are poor or disadvantaged, and those who have been marginalized and oppressed. The first two principles are common to many philosophical discussions of

justice. The third is drawn from the Christian tradition, which is the primary conversation partner for this chapter. (For an account of environmental justice in conversation with religious naturalism, see Chapter 6.) However, it is important to say that no human community – grounded in philosophy, Christianity, or anything else – has ever completely and sustainably achieved all three of these goals; they are instead ideals, guiding principles that have helped people to think about justice while struggling to move closer to it. Environmental issues are always inherently also justice issues, because they

raise questions about how amenities and harms are distributed, who gets to decide, and what is happening to those most threatened. In many communities across the United States, parks and wilderness areas are most accessible to white citizens and less accessible to people of color; this is an issue of distributive justice. Globally, climate change means rising seas and more extreme weather that primarily impacts the poorest peoples of the world, while most decisions about the issue are made by the wealthiest (see Martin-Shramm 2010; Shue 2016). This raises issues of participatory justice and the preferential option. Sadly, environmental injustice is both a very old and a very current phenom-

enon. The roots of the problem can be traced back at least as far as European

colonization of the Americas, which was based upon the unjust assumption that native peoples did not have rights to the places they had occupied for millenia. Fights against this assumption continue today, as Native American activists protest oil extraction and coal exports on their lands. Other fights for environmental justice also continue, such as the struggle to ensure that every person has access to clean water, which is a challenge in U.S. cities like Flint, Michigan, plagued by lead in its water at the time of this writing, and regions like Darfur, Sudan, with its struggles against drought as the climate changes. This chapter will focus on two concrete examples of environmental injustice,

and then move to distinguish between two distinct responses to the phenomenon: environmental justice – a movement advocating the rights and participation of marginalized peoples in environmental concerns – and eco-justice – a theological and ethical ideal that harmoniously incorporates both social and ecological concerns. We will then discuss the tensions and commonalities between these two approaches to justice, and conclude with an example of one thinker who works to synthesize the two.