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Essay On Environmental Injustice

745 Words3 Pages

The concept of environmental justice was first introduced in South Africa at the Earthlife 1992 conference (Cock 2004, p.6). Defined as the ‘fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income with respect to the development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies’ (U.S Environment Protection Agency, 2012), environmental justice aims to shift the world towards environmentally friendly development and eradicate exploitation of natural resources and indigenous communities. Most importantly, it deals mainly with the environmental injustices of these relationships, and the ways and means of rectifying these wrongs and/or avoiding them in the future …show more content…

Industrialization, economic expansion, and globalization are processes that are the biggest culprits of environmental injustice. The most obvious act of injustice that links both environmental injustice and human rights abuse is the displacement of indigenous communities. A unique example of such displacement is the relocation of blacks to different segregated townships. This relocation of such a large group of people put a strain on the environment as the numbers were over and above the areas carrying capacity. These townships are heavily polluted, quality of life is extremely low and land degradation is rife. The inhabitants right to an “environment that is not harmful to their health and well-being” and the right to “ecologically sustainable development” is violated.
Environmental ethics, on the other hand, is the area of applied ethics that discusses, reflects and reasons on normative measures (values, rules, norms, criteria) for dealing with non-human natural entities in a responsible way (Karafyllis 2013, p.292). In particular, it refers to the value that mankind places on protecting, conserving, and efficiently using resources that the earth provides. Simply put, environmental ethics poses the question - what, if any, moral obligation does man have to the preservation and care of the non-human

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