The recent shift towards the interdisciplinary study of the human-environment relationship is largely driven by environmental justice debates. This article will distinguish four types of environmental justice and link them to questions of neoliberalism and altruism. First, environmental justice seeks to redress 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 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 lags behind social justice debates and discuss the implications of including biospheric egalitarianism in environmental justice debates. https://doi.org/10.1186/2194-6434-1-8 https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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Social scientists of conservation typically address sources of legitimacy of conservation policies in relation to local communities’ or indigenous land rights, highlighting social inequality and environmental injustice. This chapter reflects on the underlying ethics of environmental justice in order to differentiate between various motivations of conservation and its critique. Conservation is discussed against the backdrop of two main ethical standpoints: preservation of natural resources for human use, and protection of nature for its own sake. These motivations will be examined highlighting mainstream conservation and alternative deep ecology environmentalism. Based on this examination, this chapter untangles concerns with social and ecological justice in order to determine how environmental and human values overlap, conflict, and where the opportunity for reconciliation lies, building bridges between supporters of social justice and conservation. https://www.springer.com/gp/book/9783319713113#aboutBook LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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Biodiversity preservation is often viewed in utilitarian terms that render non-human species as ecosystem services or natural resources. The economic capture approach may be inadequate in addressing biodiversity loss because extinction of some species could conceivably come to pass without jeopardizing the survival of the humans. People might be materially sustained by a technological biora made to yield services and products required for human life. The failure to address biodiversity loss calls for an exploration of alternative paradigms. It is proposed that the failure to address biodiversity loss stems from the fact that ecocentric value holders are politically marginalized and underrepresented in the most powerful strata of society. While anthropocentric concerns with environment and private expressions of biophilia are acceptable in the wider society, the more pronounced publicly expressed deep ecology position is discouraged. “Radical environmentalists” are among the least understood of all contemporary opposition movements, not only in tactical terms, but also ethically. The article argues in favor of the inclusion of deep ecology perspective as an alternative to the current anthropocentric paradigm. https://doi.org/10.1080/1943815X.2012.742914 https://www.linkedin.com/in/helenkopnina/
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