Nature-culture relationship and ethics

What is it about?

The recent shift towards the interdisciplinary study of the human-environment relationship is largely driven by environmental justice debates.

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Why is it important?

This article will distinguish four types of environmental justice and link them to questions of neoliberalism and altruism. First, environmental justice seeks to redress the inequitable distribution of environmental burdens to vulnerable groups and economically disadvantaged populations. Second, environmental justice highlights the developed and developing countries’ unequal exposure to environmental risks and benefits. Third, temporal environmental justice refers to the issues associated with intergenerational justice or concern for future generations of humans. In all three cases, environmental justice entails the equitable distribution of burdens and benefits to different nations or social groups. By contrast, ecological justice involves biospheric egalitarianism or justice between species. This article will focus on ecological justice since the rights of non-human species lag behind social justice debates and discuss the implications of including biospheric egalitarianism in environmental justice debates

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