Environmental Injustice

This chapter shows how environmental justice relates to recognition, fair resource distribution, representation, and participatory parity. Examples are drawn from studies of marine sustainability. I recommend ecosystem interests, multispecies justice, and just sustainability as concepts expanding the paradigm. I review Fraser&s;s explanation for environmental crises, the excesses of neoliberal capitalism. I report on Jane Addams and her profiles of injustices related to poisons, garbage, inadequate plumbing, and polluted air. I examine the community as a pivotal system and summarize Park&s;s human ecology approach for explaining inequalities. I offer a sketch of ecosystems theory, its assumptions, and its strategy for pinpointing pivotal systems. I suggest a pathways approach: links between differential exposure by position and place to risk, protectors, creative agency, resiliency, vulnerability, and well-being. I examine the subprocesses of injustice, marginalizing and excluding. I use the metaphor of driving to illustrate hazardous intersections and perilous paths. The focal population is the residents of Chester, Pennsylvania – mostly poor persons of color – suffering harm because of pollution from the incineration of trash shipped from wealthy white communities. Copenhagen is presented as a city aiming to realize the possibilities of justice and sustainability.