Justice and Natural Resources: Concepts, Strategies, and Applications

By Kathryn Mutz, Gary Bryner and Gerald Torres

Just over two decades ago, research findings that environmentally hazardous facilities were more likely to be sited near poor and minority communities gave rise to the environmental justice movement. Yet inequitable distribution of the burdens of industrial facilities and pollution is only half of the problem; poor and minority communities are often denied the benefits of natural resources and can suffer disproportionate harm from decisions about their management and use.

Justice and Natural Resources is the first book devoted to exploring the concept of environmental justice in the realm of natural resources. Contributors consider how decisions about the management and use of natural resources can exacerbate social injustice and the problems of disadvantaged communities. Looking at issues that are predominantly rural and western -- many of them involving Indian reservations, public lands, and resource development activities -- it offers a new and more expansive view of environmental justice.

The book begins by delineating the key conceptual dimensions of environmental justice in the natural resource arena. Following the conceptual chapters are contributions that examine the application of environmental justice in natural resource decision-making. Chapters examine:

• how natural resource management can affect a range of stakeholders quite differently, distributing benefits to some and burdens to others
• the potential for using civil rights laws to address damage to natural and cultural resources
• the unique status of Native American environmental justice claims
• parallels between domestic and international environmental justice
• how authority under existing environmental law can be used by Federal regulators and communities to address a broad spectrum of environmental justice concerns

Justice and Natural Resources offers a concise overview of the field of environmental justice and a set of frameworks for understanding it. It expands the previously urban and industrial scope of the movement to include distribution of the burdens and access to the benefits of natural resources, broadening environmental justice to a truly nationwide concern.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Island Press
• Release date: Mar 19, 2013
• ISBN: 9781597262477

Book preview

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Introduction

Environmental justice brings together two of the most powerful social movements of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: environmentalism and civil rights. These are particularly potent movements due to the compelling moral arguments they convey and the ways in which they complement each other. This is not to say, however, that attaining the goals of either movement necessarily satisfies the other’s cause. Advocates of social justice recognize the importance of eliminating environmental hazards that affect health, reduce economic opportunity, and diminish quality of life for people of color and the poor. But policies that strengthen the political power and decision-making influence of disadvantaged communities may not improve environmental conditions, and actions taken to improve overall environmental quality may exacerbate existing inequities. Much progress has been made in reducing pollution, but progress in reducing race- and income-based disparities in environmental conditions has been limited. Minority and low-income communities continue to bear a disproportionate share of environmental burdens.

However, environmental inequity is not solely the result of the pollution burdens that first galvanized the environmental justice movement. Our natural environment also bestows many benefits on those able to use and enjoy it. Access to land and water—either for preservation or for consumptive use—can be a vital economic input and a critical determinant of a community’s quality of life. Failure to provide equitable access to the nation’s natural resources and degradation of those resources through development and use can also constitute injustice.

This book is inspired by the simple observation that the inequitable distribution of the burdens and benefits of environmental protection reaches well beyond the facility siting and pollution focus of the traditional environmental justice movement. Charges of inequity involving natural resources extraction, management, and preservation are heard increasingly throughout the nation, often emanating from the public lands and American Indian reservations of the rural West. These natural resource equity issues—as distinct from environmental issues—are typically outside the scope of traditional environmental justice inquiries, even though they often exemplify traditional environmental justice themes: namely, the inequitable distribution of harms and benefits along lines of race and class.

Expanding the concept of environmental justice to include a broad range of natural resource issues and fusing the agendas of the environmental and civil rights movements are compelling, but problematic, goals. Environmental justice is rooted in claims of rights that invoke corresponding obligations and duties that can outweigh majoritarian interests; minority rights are to be vindicated even if the majority does not wish to pay the costs or have its options limited. Further, the power of these claims of rights may be diluted by their too frequent invocation. An inflation of rights might weaken the moral power that the rights represent. Consequently, conceptualizing environmental justice in ways that expand its reach while preserving its political potency and moral claims is a daunting