Environmental Political Philosophy

Wojciech W. Gasparski

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351297028
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The need for solutions to environmental problems is urgent. Expanded environmental research and knowledge, along with interest in environmental issues, has focused attention on the social, political, and practical aspects of environmental problems. Environmental Political Philosophy searches for common environmental goals, values, and policies in society.

An essential undercurrent in political theory about the environment is that such issues are not questions of efficiency or technology. They cannot simply be addressed through knowledge of processes and mechanics of nature, by boosting or targeting research, or by allocating of resources and development of technology. Neither can they be resolved solely by increasing civic understanding and mounting environmental campaigns or requiring endless eco-friendly actions.

A crucial element of environmental political philosophy is highlighted through the studies in this volume, which address the question of what constitutes efficient action or effective decision making. Praxiology commences with empirical orientation, but does so by maintaining the important sense that in the evaluation of actions and policies, ethical considerations must be employed in conjunction with effectiveness and efficiency.

Part 1
Changing Concepts

Environmental Justice: From Theory to Practice and Back to Theory¹

Olli Loukola
Social and Moral Philosophy
Department of Political and Economic Studies
Faculty of Social Sciences
University of Helsinki
Finland

Over hundreds of years, writers on justice in different parts of the world have attempted to provide the intellectual basis for moving from a general sense of injustice to particular reasoned diagnoses of injustice, and from there to the analyses of ways of advancing justice.

The Idea of Justice (Sen 2009, p. 5)

1. Introduction

In this essay, I will present certain observations about the background conditions involved in the analysis of the concerns for justice within the environmental field. These conditions are entangled, affecting both of the contemporary justice discourses in the field, that is, environmental justice theories and the environmental justice movement. They also explain some of the specific emphasis that marks both discourses.

As I see it, the conditions that are entangled here are the following: Firstly, there is the continuous search for a description of the current state of the environment which is attached to certain normative rules and goals which are expressed as various kinds of concerns for justice. Secondly, this search is undertaken with the purpose of outlining practical actions to be institutionalized as guidelines, principles, practices, customs, policies, or the like. Thirdly, it is understood that in order for individuals, companies, offices, institutions, or countries to be motivated to act accordingly, these actions and policies need to be supported by the best possible arguments, that is, they need to be justified, legitimized, validated, sanctioned, or authorized in some manner.

Although these three conditions are surely present in most similar instances of societal or political changes and turning points, there are certain elements in the environmental sphere, which I think makes them a special case, critically challenging our contemporary scientific and philosophical thinking and practice. We can indeed learn much from them. The first element is the three-centuries-old, but still topical, question of the place of normative elements, often expressed as the separation between facts and values, which continues to puzzle philosophers and scientists in their enquiries. The second is the special nature of environmental problems. Such problems are extremely complex in structure, involve complicated chains of causality, and are often wide-ranging or global not only in space but also in time (i.e., future generations). Most importantly, they seem dramatic and impactful to the verge of being untreatable.

In this essay, I will analyze these aspects mainly from the viewpoint of environmental justice. Some of these considerations surely apply to environmental action, some to environmental philosophy, and some only to environmental justice, though I will not analyze these issues here. Instead, the main focus of this paper is to evaluate the two-way relationship between environmental justice theories and environmental justice movement. This involves the idea that environmental justice theories can be used to analyze, distinguish, and assess the moral concerns of the environmental justice movement. At the same time, these analyses can be used to broaden the perspectives of the theories by pinpointing new, potentially relevant aspects of justice. Even though this idea seems appealing and commonsensical, a number of difficulties are still involved.

2. The Environmental Justice Movement and Environmental Justice Theories

For an astonishingly long time, it has been doubtful whether “environmental justice” actually exists in its own right as part of the field of political philosophy, and as such is involved in the theoretical enquiry of questions of justice within the spheres of the environment and nature. For the past twenty years or so, the concept has referred almost exclusively to various environmental political movements. A prime example of such usage—and of the tensions involved with the scholarly analysis and activist elements of justice—can be found in Carl Talbot’s 1997 article “Environmental Justice.” Here, the writer describes the characteristics of the environmental justice movement, but at the same time has a strong critical attitude toward what the notion should imply. Problems that are mentioned in the article, such as dumping waste and hazardous products in the Third World countries, siting of polluting industry in poor neighborhoods, and people of color becoming concentrated in occupations with high health risks are surely cases of infringements of justice. Indeed, Talbot is right in claiming that such issues are too rarely discussed in mainstream philosophical literature. There is specifically one suggestion in his article which deals with the potential basic orientation of a “new” movement of environmental justice, and which at the same time illustrates something important about the nature of the environmental justice movement:

For this new movement for environmental justice, matters of the environment are not confined to how to best manage or preserve some extra-urban “wilderness”; rather, the environment is part of a broader framework of economic, racial, and social justice. This perspective represents a significant challenge to the way mainstream environmental groups have commonly presented the environmental agenda as primarily occupied with the conservation of pristine wilderness and wildlife. The exclusion of any discussion of urban or industrial concerns in mainstream environmentalism is reflected in the histories of environmentalism, which concern themselves with the romantic champions of wild “Nature”, such as the 19th century national parks advocate John Muir and Aldo Leopold, whose “land ethic” has become so revered by much of modern environmentalism, but say nothing of struggles to improve the urban and industrial environments.²

The message that could be read from this passage is that the environmental justice movement was no longer addressing the proper concerns of justice, and reason for this was that the movement was changing, had changed, and was in need of a change. As such it is a social movement, and this is an indicative feature of the environmental justice movement as such: instead of practical harmonization in the attainment of a common goal, it is plagued by competing movements, conflicting policy recommendations, and antagonistic doctrines.

The second message of Talbot’s text and another indicative feature for the whole field is described in the popular media: “Environmental Justice is a movement . . . [which] seeks an end to environmental racism and [seeks to] prevent low-income and minority communities from an unbalanced exposure to highways, garbage dumps, and factories. The Environmental Justice movement seeks to link ‘social’ and ‘ecological’ environmental concerns, while at the same time preventing de facto racism, and classism.”³ Thus there exists today, and has in fact existed throughout the movement’s history, a pronounced goal to “link” together social and ecological environmental concerns.⁴ The environmental justice movement is a typical social and political movement in the sense that it to tries to couple existing empirical problems with goals judged worthwhile, valuable, or necessary. The debates which surround these goals are naturally intense.

The third indicative feature is that there is a strong inclination to justify these goals, as all social movements try to do. Justification is sought for a number of things, and an analysis of their nature and importance is sorely needed. Some have got to do with the empirical feasibility and efficaciousness of the proposed measures and instruments, with their inherent uncertainty and doubtfulness. Others deal with the applicability and practicality of the goals and ideals at a more general level, especially when legitimizing resulting policies, strategies, and goals. In short, environmental movements are trying to do the right things for the right reasons; in the terms used in academic enquiry, they are trying to link correct descriptions and working instruments with right goals, such as savings the world. Facts, motivations, and normative goals all play central role in this package.

These three features are typical characteristics of those social and political groups that make up the environmental justice movements, and are also the reasons, why they are not mere scholarly theories. Environmental movements have always been searching for plausible ways of legitimizing the policies, strategies, and goals they suggest and advocate. This need has amplified exceedingly over the past years for various reasons: to start with, in contemporary democratic societies all societal decisions need to be legitimized. A further reason is that the natural ally of all environmental decisions and policies over the past decades, the natural sciences, have turned out to be far less capable of supplying scientific bases for these decisions. They have not been able to provide descriptions and predictions of the state and development of nature and the environment as hoped for. Especially, the various uncertainties in scientific research have produced spin-off effects often directly undermining the goals and demands of the environmental movements. Scientific uncertainties have laid a shadow on the overall reliability of scientific knowledge, and more concretely, they have made environmental decision-making increasingly difficult. Measures and methods for determining policy options and possible actions have proved to be highly unreliable, and the various kinds of ethical, economic, and societal uncertainties accruing further complicate the picture.

All this has led the environmental movement to search for common grounds with not only the natural sciences, but increasingly often with the social sciences and philosophy. To put this simply, the environmental movement’s search for broader and more convincing perspectives to solve the various serious environmental crises of our world is not a question of merely finding straightforward technical answers. Much more is at stake in these crises.

With these developments, the role of philosophers has expanded over the past decades. The demand for expertize in dealing with normative questions enabled the outbreak of applied and practical ethics from the 1980s onwards. This was made possible by the major shift at the end of the 1970s in moral philosophy, sometimes called “the Great Expansion of Ethics,”⁵ which suggested that moral and political philosophers would be able to articulate normative and substantial assessments on contemporary practical issues and problems. Certain socially pressing moral questions such as abortion, animal rights, or euthanasia served as a marketing window of these capabilities of philosophical enquiry.

Despite these attempts by different discourses to approach each other, they are still far apart. Even though many of the problems of the environmental justice movement follow from the fact that their theoretical input is limited, not always scientific, and sometimes plainly false, there is a clear tendency to downscales the impact of theory for various reasons.⁶ Very often their analyses is merely varying and strong beliefs of a speculative nature. The movements deal with empirical cases, and their assumptions, concepts, and explanations as well as justifications are strongly dependent upon each other, and the result is that they are too often curious and/or misconceived mixtures of normative goals and descriptions of social and natural sciences. Even though this is often the case with various social movements, it seems to be particularly prevalent within the environmental movement.

Or what should one say of a claim like “elite-driven environmental programs act as a disciplining mechanism against the poor,” also to be found in Talbot’s text? With such an extremely strong claim, one would clearly need more explanations and theoretical input on a number of questions, starting with the potential truth of the whole claim: Is it really the case that environmental problems are elite-driven programs targeted against the poor? What constitutes a “disciplinary action”? Who are the elite doing that? How does such a mechanism emerge? How does it work? And how do you prove such claims? I am not saying here that these explanations are necessarily false, but that they need to be verified, and that is the task for (usually social) scientific inquiry. Thus more theoretical input is needed, and at various levels.

Moreover, it is also claimed we are dealing with issues of justice: but what kind of a breach of justice exactly is it, and on what basis? Which exactly are the injustices here and why do they take place? How and where are we to look for the roots and solutions to this contravention? What are the moral statuses of the people involved? Who are the exploiters and exploited here? What are the canons of justice in operation here? If we do not have a plausible theory of justice at our disposal, we cannot analyze these questions very far; even if we see this situation amounting to an infringement of justice at face value, we may well disagree of its nature, and what it requires of us. Indeed, the movement has not been particularly active in searching for support for their convictions from existing theories of justice.

There is therefore a need to clarify the roles of two kinds of scholarly theories here—scientific theories describing and explaining the situation, and justice theories defining, classifying, and analyzing the moral problems involved.

The scientific input in the concerns raised by the environmental justice movement usually comes from the results of “Environmental Science.” The discipline is, however, far from being a settled, accepted, and established academic enterprise, with a variety of disciplines crossing each other’s disciplinary borders. But if the scientific study of nature and the environment is in a state of confusion and change, the philosophical study of the environment is pretty much in a similar state. Environmental philosophy, the area where philosophical questions concerning nature and the environment are generally dealt with, is also an intensely debated and contested field. Although being the mainstream emphasis of environmental philosophy over the past two decades, environmental ethics never managed to produce the kinds of conclusions that would have addressed the kinds of practical concerns the environmental movement raised. This is in part due to the fact that environmental philosophy has never really been able to set its agenda independently of the practical concerns raised by the environmental movement as some other traditional fields of philosophy have been able to do in their respective fields.

But this is not just a drawback for the enterprise, since it is here, in environmental problems, that theoretical questions and practical concerns collide in a most profound manner, and this is bound to be instructive and edifying in a number of ways. This makes environmental philosophy an especially interesting field of contemporary philosophy: it i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Editorial
• Introduction
• Part 1: Changing Concepts
• Part 2: Changing Society
• Part 3: Changing Human Beings
• Notes about the Authors