Global Environmental Justice

Environment Justice is both a social movement and an associated approach to analysing and understanding the connections between social injustice and environmental problems. This chapter provides an overview of how this field has evolved, from analysis of the links between racism and the location of toxic pollutants to a multi-issue and multi-scaled analysis of the ways in which social discrimination leads to patterns of injustice in which more powerful groups of people secure an unfair share of environmental resources whilst less powerful groups carry a disproportionate burden from the environmental impacts of this consumption. Such unequal distributional outcomes are linked to discrimination and asymmetries of power that exclude some groups from decision and fail to adequately recognise the worth of their worldviews, knowledge, values and interests.