David Schlosberg — Defining Environmental Justice: Theories, Movements, and Nature

185 published claims from this book.

• A capability list must be specified contextually, not fixed in advance
• A duty to restraint can insert sustainability into liberal justice
• A green public sphere cultivates disagreement to provoke engagement beyond tolerance
• A plural justice frame strengthens rather than dilutes movement cohesion
• A shared justice vocabulary can unify environmental and ecological justice movements
• A single environmental conflict instantiates all four justice dimensions for humans and nature
• Activist analyses of toxic waste protests are mediated by class, race, and ethnicity
• Advisory committees can coopt movements by serving as substitutes for direct action
• Advisory participation that yields no policy power reads as inauthentic cooptation
• Assuming recognition within distributional theory fails empirically to address real injustice
• Autonomy alone is insufficient and must join other justice capabilities
• Baxter argues singular justice theories avoid arbitrariness and inconsistency
• Broadening participation validates diverse cultural ways of knowing the land
• Capability approaches locate injustice in limited capacities, not denied goods.
• Class and unequal political power also drive where environmental harms land
• Climate change converts distributive inequity into a human rights claim
• Climate change instantiates all three forms of status misrecognition of nature
• Collaborative justice institutions fail to scale beyond the local or regional level
• Collective identity and dignified recognition define social movements like environmental justice
• Community autonomy over local space is proposed as the essence of environmental justice
• Community partnerships in research shift participation beyond informed consent into shared knowledge creation
• Cosmopolitan ecological-justice institutions can shrink rather than extend local participatory inclusion
• Deliberation must engage both scientific evidence and multiple interpretations of nature
• Deliberative inclusion in civil society lacks force without state institutionalization
• Demands for authentic participation arise from disenfranchisement and misrecognition experience.
• Denying recognition to traditional food systems produces food insecurity
• Disrespectful treatment of elders in environmental disputes motivates activist demands for recognition
• Distributing a primary good does not restore a system’s capability to function
• Distribution alone is incomplete because recognition, participation, and capability gaps also cause injustice.
• Distribution and recognition each resist subsumption into the other’s frame
• Distribution remains the most cited dimension of environmental justice despite broader definitions
• Distributional equity cannot be achieved without prior recognition and participation
• Distributive environmental justice requires equal treatment across race, class, and education.
• Distributive variations have dominated justice theory for decades
• Distributive-only justice theory fails to address recognition and capability concerns
• Dobson reduces all environmental injustice to maldistribution of goods and bads
• Ecological justice extends all four justice components to nonhuman nature
• Ecological justice theory must pluralize into recognition and capability discourses
• Ecological reflexivity opens democratic decision-making to excluded environmental viewpoints
• Ecological-space distribution can serve social and ecological justice at once.
• Ecological-space taxation measures resource use plus waste absorption.
• EJ discourse simultaneously spans distribution, recognition, participation, and capability.
• EJ recognition demands are inseparable from participation and self-determination
• Environmental defenders’ erasure of indigenous peoples constitutes a recognition injustice
• Environmental degradation of a place is experienced as an attack on community identity
• Environmental degradation of sacred land constitutes a recognition injustice
• Environmental inequality is a sociohistorical process spanning production and consumption
• Environmental injustice includes both disproportionate risk and exclusion from decisions
• Environmental injustice persists without racist intent because bias is structurally embedded
• Environmental injustice spans burdens, enforcement, and unequal access to environmental goods.
• Environmental justice comprises recognition and participation as well as distribution
• Environmental justice discourse centers maldistribution over recognition or participation
• Environmental justice discourse forms a shared toolbox, not one universal definition.
• Environmental justice groups organize already-existing communities that insist on recognition
• Environmental justice groups pursue community functioning beyond distributional equality
• Environmental justice movement misrecognition operates at both personal and community levels.
• Environmental justice movements are inherently plural and network-based, not singular in principle or structure
• Environmental justice movements are the natural testbed for agonistic pluralist ideals
• Environmental justice unites material and postmaterial demands within one political movement.
• Environmental policy has pioneered the broadest public-participation innovations in government
• Environmental racism comprises siting, enforcement, and exclusion of people of color from decisions
• Even failed political struggles confer social recognition as agents.
• Excluding nature from justice reflects one cultural cosmology over others
• Extending community to nature under-theorizes the recognition required
• Extending moral consideration to nature need not imply equality with humans
• Failed advisory processes permanently suppress future civic engagement in communities
• Federal environmental justice institutions were built to institutionalize community participation procedures
• Few academics apply recognition theory within environmental justice scholarship
• Fixed capability lists chosen without public reasoning become paternalistic.
• Food security movements oppose displacement from land into vulnerable cash economies
• Food sovereignty enshrines a nation’s right to produce food respecting local cultural diversity.
• Founding environmental justice definitions center community capacity and functioning
• Fraser distinguishes three institutional forms of misrecognition independent of victims’ feelings
• Fraser reframes misrecognition as institutional status subordination rather than psychological harm
• Fraser’s status model lets recognition apply to nature without psychological claims
• Fraser’s three status forms map cleanly onto harms suffered by nature
• Future-generation justice extends scope to humans but not to nature as a subject.
• Global EJ movements frame collectives rather than individuals as justice subjects
• Global environmental justice movements define justice as distribution plus recognition, participation, and capabilities.
• Global environmental justice movements target misrecognition, exclusion, and incapacity alongside inequity
• Global justice critique extends maldistribution to natural resources and environmental harms.
• Global South environmental justice operates embedded in broader social-justice movements, not standalone
• Globalization critiques center the inequitable distribution of both goods and bads
• Globalization’s homogenization destroys cultural meaning, making diversity preservation a recognition claim
• Group misrecognition produces distributive injustice through social structures and institutions.
• Group-driven recognition struggles retool liberal self-rule at the level of the group
• Indigenous and Chicana women frame toxic contamination as systematic genocide
• Indigenous communities frame environmental harms as threats to cultural survival, not ecology
• Indigenous movements frame environmental injustice primarily as misrecognition, not inequity
• Individual capabilities are often only realized within groups
• Industry and government rebut environmental racism claims by denying any racist intent
• Injustice is experienced simultaneously across distribution, recognition, participation, and functioning.
• Institutionalized disrespect blocks participation as fully as unequal resource distribution does
• Interest-based accounts of justice to nature fail to cover rivers, mountains, and clouds
• Justice can attach to viable populations of species rather than to individuals
• Justice comprises interlinked distribution, recognition, participation, and capability
• Justice criteria vary with how social goods are valued, not by universal principle
• Justice dimensions are inseparable and mutually reinforcing, not competing alternatives.
• Justice dimensions are inseparable in global environmental movement discourse
• Justice is trivalent because participation depends on both distribution and recognition
• Justice requires addressing recognition and distribution as distinct yet linked injustices.
• Justice requires both redistribution and recognition because collectivities are bivalent
• Justice requires participation parity alongside distribution and recognition.
• Justice theory expanded because real movements first broadened justice’s meaning
• Justice theory extends beyond distribution to recognition, capability, and participation
• Justice theory must extend capabilities to groups, not just individuals
• Justice theory must target institutionalized domination and oppression, not just distribution
• Justice to nature can rest on shared qualities without erasing difference
• Liberal individualist extension fails to value ecosystems and species
• Liberal justice can fold environmental goods into distribution only after triage by public agreement.
• Liberal proceduralism is the most popular conception of justice in political theory
• Liberalism is not actually impartial in theory or practice
• Listening to nature’s nonverbal signals is as rational as listening to people
• Low and Gleeson’s own distributive principles secretly rest on recognition of nature
• Maldistribution cannot be cured without prior social and structural recognition
• Misdistribution stems from prior failures of social and cultural recognition.
• Misrecognition and political exclusion structurally block poor communities’ participation in environmental decisions
• Misrecognition constitutes oppression by imprisoning people in distorted identities
• Misrecognition creates structural obstacles that block political participation
• Misrecognition is a cultural and institutional injustice rooted in representation and communication.
• Misrecognition of identities drives environmental justice groups to demand recognition.
• Modernity’s exclusion of nature from justice created its sustainability crisis
• Movement definitions of justice often extend past distributive accounts
• Movement literature invoked justice dimensions piecemeal without systematic definition
• Nature communicates disruption through observable physical signals
• Nature’s agency need not be expressed through reason and speech
• Nature’s misrecognition is socially constructed and socially correctable
• Navajo uranium miners faced disproportionate contamination and disease burdens
• No single all-inclusive theory of environmental and ecological justice is required
• One integrated justice discourse can serve both human and ecological struggles
• Open docket design can counter the Internet’s affinity for like-minded echo chambers
• Participation of nature is represented through human legal representatives, not direct voice
• Participatory justice links individual empowerment to collective achievement rather than liberal individualism
• Pluralist engagement rests on agonistic respect plus critical responsiveness
• Political theorists have reduced justice almost exclusively to distribution
• Procedural justice requires every governed person to have an effective voice in decisions
• Procedural participation functions as the hinge joining recognition to distribution
• Proxies for nonhumans extend an established liberal practice of representation
• Publicly developed and temporary capability lists escape paternalism.
• Race is the strongest predictor of hazardous waste facility siting in the US
• Rawlsian justice as fairness is fundamentally a theory of just distribution
• Recognition and participation demands usually coexist with, not replace, equity claims in movements
• Recognition cannot be distributed like goods because extending it costs nothing
• Recognition justice and distributional equity are not antithetical despite left academic complaints
• Recognition justice extends beyond state remedies into social and cultural realms
• Recognition justice theory was built from real-world movements, not abstract reasoning
• Recognition must be taken seriously alongside redistribution in any contemporary justice theory
• Recognition of nature via shared qualities need not claim equality
• Recognition theory supplements rather than replaces distributional justice
• Recognition-based conflict theory extends rather than replaces distributional models
• Recognition-based justice inherently demands structural and institutional critique, not merely internal self-realization
• Resolving conflict must not be conflated with erasing diversity
• Respect for nature can rest on human self-interest in integrity, not intrinsic value
• Rulemaking is the only online deliberation form that regularly yields actual policy change
• Scientific uncertainty reflects political context, not deficient understanding
• Seattle 1999 protests globalized critique of the Washington consensus
• Sharing injustice stories across distance forges empathy and recognition that close moral distance
• Similarity-based recognition need not continue human rational supremacy
• Singular universal justice definitions exclude real justice claims
• Social movements arise from lived disrespect, disempowerment, and capability destruction.
• Society can escape nature’s compulsions by properly recalling its own nature.
• South nations and publics are denied meaningful participation in WTO, IMF, World Bank decisions
• Southern nations were marginalized in WTO decisions that shaped their economies
• Species damage arises from ecosystem loss, not individual animal harm
• States structurally subordinate environmental protection to economic growth imperatives
• Stripping nature of value licensed its exploitation without moral restraint
• Taxing resource extraction alone can hurt the poor it is meant to help.
• Taylor’s recognition theory founders when demands for difference challenge universal identity
• The 1982 Warren County PCB protest launched the environmental racism movement.
• The 1999 Seattle WTO protests united ideologically diverse movements under plural justice
• The antitoxics movement expanded from Love Canal to many pollution issues.
• The environmental justice movement’s founding principles integrated justice dimensions from its earliest moments.
• The philosophical-scientific worldview blocks environmental ethics from valuing insentient nature
• The same justice framework can bridge human and nonhuman realms
• Theory should listen to and learn from movement articulations rather than dismiss them
• Thickening Rawls’ veil of ignorance to include nonhumans founders on imagined irrationality.
• Token advisory processes can serve as pretense for predetermined siting decisions
• Token participation fails to satisfy movement demands for integrated justice
• Traditional ecological knowledge rests on the same empirical method as modern science
• Transnational activist networks influence global discourse without seeking formal institutional power
• Treating goods as static obscures the social relations that produce unjust distributions.
• Unity across difference requires integrating, not absorbing, diverse positions
• Unwanted environmental risk exposure constitutes a denial of recognition
• Ways of life are threatened because they are devalued, an issue of recognition
• Well-being is better measured by achieved functionings than by happiness or wealth.