Introduction
Environmental justice is a relatively old concept and one whose pertinence cannot be wished away. Establishing environmental justice has given rise to a social movement with the aim of ensuring equitable allotment of both the environmental burdens and benefits through effective laws and policies. As such, complete environmental justice requires the involvement of everyone, regardless of their color, race, religion, or physical situations as the environmental issues affect everyone in equal measure. The concept operates through both the traditional and modern approaches. Thus, the aim of this essay is to prove that, theoretically and practically, the modern approach, ecological citizenship, is better than the traditional frameworks, namely liberal citizenship and civic republicanism, given that the contemporary approach employs promising strategies regarding globalization. Correspondingly, the overall aim of the essay is to understand environmental justice from the perspective of both the traditional and modern approaches.
Background
Environmental justice, also known as ecological justice, entails the fair and just treatment and productive involvement of everyone notwithstanding their race, income, or color concerning the implementation, development, and enforcement of laws, policies and regulations affecting the environment (Christoff, 1996 p.151-169). The goal of environmental justice is to ensure that every person shares in the formulation of any environmental laws in a manner that takes into consideration their rights to protection from environmental hazards and facilitates their peaceful existence in a conducive environment. Dobson (2003 p.18) notes that the definition of the environmental justice should encompass the holistic inclusion of everyone in the environmental decision-making, equitable distribution of the benefits and risks of the environment, and recognition of a community’s way of life as well as the cultural difference in the course of environmental law formulation. In this manner, the justice must facilitate the functioning and flourishing of all communities and individuals in their society without fear of environmental dangers (Schlosberg, 2004, p.517-540; 2007, p.36-42; 1999, p.145-147). Evidently, the environmental justice harmonizes both the human and non-human law with the aim of ensuring a co-existence between human beings and animals as well as conceiving justice as both human and non-human (Young, 1989, p.2). Even so, the concept of environmental justice, especially concerning non-human law has faced challenges stemming from the Western perspective of non-human law. The traditional Western perspectives of justice are human-centered because they only assign intrinsic value to human beings (Dobson, 2004 p.1-7). The assignment of the higher intrinsic value to human beings at the expense of the non-human things with the treatment of the non-human law as ‘other’ obscures the course of complete environmental justice (Young, 1989 p.2).