ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the relationships amongst and between engineering and environmental justice by treating community engagement as their common ground. It first reviews the terms and theoretical contours of environmental justice (EJ) as a field of scholarship, a social movement, and a framework for redressing inequitable relationships between people and their environments. The review summarizes issues of procedural, distributive, recognition, and capabilities justice in this regard, noting that no matter the diversity and complexity of environmental injustices, they all have something to do with the ways communities seek to live in healthy ecosystems. The chapter then articulates various ways one can understand the relationships between engineering and EJ more directly. In this effort, it treats engineering as a form of trained professional expertise, a set of activities, and a way of configuring relationships through technological systems. The two fields come together through attention to community settings, while they also find connective points at different points along a technological life cycle. Some injustices are the consequence of design and development and relate best in EJ terms to whose voices are included in the process of technological design (procedural justice); some result from the implementation, use, maintenance and disposal of technologies (distributive). A final section discusses possible future directions for holding the two areas together, including engineering education, professional codes of ethics, and global contexts.
