Search

“The ‘new conservation’ camp has the advantage of rejecting segregationist and elitist approaches, but it fails to challenge the inequalities or unsustainability of current economic systems and priorities. The ‘protectionist’ camp does challenge current economic systems, but it is essentially an upscaling of a segregationist model of protected-area conservation that is unlikely to be effective and would fail to recognise other ways of knowing and living with nature. “ (Martin 142)

“First, we need to break free from some of the mental dispositions that we are currently conditioned to think with. First and foremost, this means ceasing to think with the dominant economic ideology that makes a goal of economic growth, consumerism and individualism. It is this way of thinking that now threatens the destruction of humans and the rest of nature. Second, we need to understand and embrace the many past and current cultures ‘that promote harmonious forms of co-inhabitation among communities of diverse human and other-than-human beings’”. (Martin 143)

• “Rozzi looks at the 2009 constitution of the plurinational state of Bolivia, including the phrase ‘Suma Qamaña’. This translates as ‘living well together’. In the Aymara language, it means to inhabit, in the sense of both living in and living with, and it emphasizes the relational value of co-habitation” (Martin 143)

• “An example of a protectionist position is the ‘Half-Earth’ call for a massive expansion of protected areas (Wilson, 2016)” (Martin 142)

• “In the last twenty years, there has been a major scientific effort to quantify the benefits that humans derive from biodiversity and ecosystem services, including the influential report on The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB, 2010).” (Martin 142) 

• “The need for transformative societal change that addresses such root causes is now making it into globally agreed reports such as the UN’s 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report.” (Martin 135)

• A key point of the UN’s 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report emphasizes the necessity for “sustainable and just economies” and the safeguard of food systems as a whole. Recovery of Vietnam’s Central Provinces will require joint commitments between Vietnam and Taiwan to prioritize the preservation of environmental resources over GDP growth. Such commitments will need to incorporate more stringent regulations for manufacturing infrastructure, greater funding for supporting recovery efforts both on the part of affected ecosystems as well as fisherman communities whose operations have been suspended, and stipulations for community consultation processes in all future related manufacturing processes. 

• “A collaborative process led by the International Institute for Environment and Development has employed the environmental justice typology of distribution, procedure and recognition to develop an equity framework for assessment in protected and conserved areas (Schreckenberg et al., 2016; Franks et al., 2018). Use of this framework has now been adopted as voluntary guidance by the Convention on Biological Diversity and is being promoted by IUCN.” (Martin 142) 

Martin’s main argument centers on the importance of moving beyond the dichotomy of  anthropogenic and ecocentric framings to conceptualize methods of addressing biodiversity loss. The future of conservation, as noted by Martin, will need to embrace alternative framings of natural diversity which “deliberately integrates human and biological values into a holistic expression” (Martin 143). The importance of emphasizing “biocultural diversity”, argues Martin, serves to “decolonize” conservation via centering indigenous valuations of  “living in nature or as nature” (Martin 144) and rejecting dominant emphasis on upholding current economic systems and extreme segregationist views. While Martin does not provide an example of what a conservation scheme based on biocultural diversity could look like, he does use ideas presented in the 2009 constitution of the plurinational state of Bolivia to show that such ideas have in fact been gaining traction as an alternative means to framing conservation. 

Operations of transnational companies are affecting marginalized communities across the globe. As Kaswan had highlighted through examples of Union Carbide’s pesticide plant in India, as well as pollution associated with oil companies in Latin America, the implications of distributive environmental justice in such contexts are apparent yet difficult to address. Across international boundaries law enforcement becomes increasingly difficult, which is at the heart of the problem of my research topic. 

“The “right” scale will depend upon the nature of the harm being analyzed and purpose for which information is being gathered.” (Kaswan, p 29)

“Numerous studies, at a multiplicity of scales, analyze the distribution of a wide variety of land uses, as well as risk: what exposures, with what consequences, do people experience?” (Kaswan, p 33). 

This text builds on concepts of equality, bases for deviating from the core idea of equality, and the multiple contexts that define and shape distributive justice. Kaswan additionally advances the distributive environmental justice by outlining the different contexts, including historical land use patterns, government regulations, infrastructure, and enforcement and the implications that each of these dimensions have on contributing to distributive injustice. 

The main narrative of this text builds on foundational ideas on equality and extrapolates it further to establish how distributive environmental justice, its ideas and articulations, as well as its operationalization, has taken shape throughout the years. To outline these points, Kaswan outlines different cases of environmental disaster, and subsequent government responses, to showcase how government institutions have both upheld and endeavored to address distributive environmental inequality in the past decades.

The author, Chad Raphael, is the Faculty Associate for Sustainability across the Curriculum  at Santa Clara University and Co-Coordinator of the Environmental Justice and the Common Good Initiative. Raphael is considered a prominent scholar in political and environmental communication and has served as a consultant in designing communication campaigns for many environmental organizations. In his position as researcher and professor, Raphael remains committed to integrating his research and teaching by continually co-publishing with undergraduate students.