ABSTRACT
Instances of environmental injustice – from Love Canal to e-waste to climate change – often have a structural component that makes problematic typical appeals to collective responsibility. In such cases there is often not a single agent, individual or collective, to hold responsible, and so backward-looking accounts of responsibility that require a suitable agent to blame will be stymied. In this chapter I explore the connections between structural injustice and collective responsibility, and argue that individuals have a shared responsibility to make changes in the institutions that, in turn, generate change in the structural component of environmental injustice. This indirect connection between individual responsibility and environmental justice demonstrates the breadth of our responsibilities in cases of environmental injustice, and provides a productive moral connection between individuals and instances of environmental injustice.
