Models of Justice in the Environmental Debate - Statistical Data Included

Journal of Social Issues, Fall, 2000 by Susan Clayton

Susan Clayton [*]

Justice has become important in public and private consideration of the environment, but a number of different ways of operationalizing justice can be seen. Previous literature suggests that principles stressing responsibility and the public good are more common than need and equity in thinking about environmental issues. The results from two questionnaire studies, presented here, confirm that environmental justice--responsibility to other species and to future generations, and the rights of the environment--emerges as the most highly rated consideration in resolving environmental conflicts and that this factor is distinct from traditional procedural and distributive justice factors. Highlighting the individual or the collective makes different justice principles salient but that the effect depends on one's original position.

Justice has become a significant part of the public discourse over environmental issues. Many antienvironmental organizations (classified as such by Greenpeace; Deal, 1993) make explicit reference to justice in their titles: "Institute for Justice," "Fairness to Landowners Committee"; on the other side, the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund recently changed its name to "Earthjustice Legal Defense Fund." Why has justice become an environmental issue? Three reasons can be identified. First, the relevance of justice depends on the ways in which one thinks about the resource. Justice becomes more salient, for example, under conditions in which a desired resource is scarce (Lerner, 1981). Our increasing consciousness that some resources are not renewable, within a meaningful time frame, has made us more aware of the ways in which those resources are distributed. It is also the case that the environment is a domain invested with moral significance and distinctive values for many, again raising the importance of justi ce concerns (see Kempton, Boster, & Hartley, 1995; Stern & Dietz, 1994; Van Liere & Dunlap, 1978).

Second, distributive justice is highlighted when environmental benefits or hazards are linked to group identities. Along these lines, the racial disparities in exposure to environmental toxins described by the Commission for Racial Justice in 1987 are primarily responsible for introducing the term "environmental justice" to public discourse (see Bullard, 1990; Bullard & Johnson, this issue). United Nations meetings on environmental issues may have contributed to an awareness of national inequities in consumption of environmental resources and in expectations for environmental sacrifices.

Finally, an increased awareness that humans can and do have a serious and lasting impact on the natural environment has led to an increased perception of responsibility and of moral obligations, at least among some segments of the population (Schwartz, 1975).

It is significant that environmental issues are being evaluated in terms of justice. Researchers have begun to find that perceived justice is a good predictor of environmental attitudes, often better than self-interest (e.g., Kals, 1996), and that it is an important factor in the successful resolution of an environmental conflict (e.g., Lofstedt, 1996). There are multiple definitions of justice, however, with room for a number of factors to bias the definition in a self-serving way. Although we tend to assume, when invested in a situation, that one resolution is clearly the best and fairest, other constituents may see an alternative outcome just as clearly as being superior. So there is room for disagreement, and in the minds of the relevant participants this disagreement may be phrased not as "my interests" versus "their interests" but as "the side of right and good" versus "the side of expediency, greed, and immorality." This has obvious consequences for people's willingness to compromise.

The Forms of Environmental Justice

The Justice of the Marketplace

Probably the most familiar way of thinking about distributive justice, at least in the United States, is to frame it in terms of the marketplace, suggesting that the fair way to deal with natural resources is to sell them. This definition of environmental justice is already represented in public policy. The Chicago Board of Trade now includes a market in pollution credits, which can be bought (allowing industrial plants to pollute above a specified level) or sold (by plants that pollute less than their allowed amount; Power & Rauber, 1993). Individuals also participate in marketplace justice, when cities charge them for the number of trash bags they put out to be collected or when they pay significant user fees for access to national parks.

Equality

More recently, environmental justice has been framed in terms of equality. From this perspective, the current state of affairs is unjust because some people and countries consume far more of our environmental resources than others, and some people and countries are affected by environmental pollution to a far greater extent than others. The standard use of the term "environmental justice" in current discourse arose in response to the fact that poor, rural, and Black communities in the United States are disproportionately chosen as sites for the disposal of toxic waste because their lack of political power has made them less likely to mount effective resistance (Bullard, 1990; U.S. General Accounting Office, 1983) and implies the struggle to ensure that no groups, particularly minority groups, suffer disproportionately from the effects of environmental degradation.