Readings
Different Approaches to Nature
Key Terms
Some approaches to nature aim to address the fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people with respect to the development, implementation and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies. This approach is often called environmental justice.
Proponents of environmental justice view the environment as encompassing all aspects of human life: Where populations live, work, and play, pray, learn and have access to eat. It aims to redress pollution, toxicity, ensure food access as well as food sovereignty, and meet the everyday needs of populations across the world.
Environmentalism vs. Environmental Justice
The first and more common usage of the phrase environmental justice describes a focus on the distribution of environmental benefits and burdens. Some approaches make a distinction between environmental Justice and other forms of environmentalism by drawing a line between how the two approaches consider the needs within various societies and human populations. Also, some have proposed that environmentalism for a very long time gave precedence to resorting and protecting nature– and less on time on human populations. Hence, the distinctinction between the two terms.
Environment studies offers solutions to ongoing debates about who “owns” the environment, how the environment is to be “controlled” and how populations can ensure fair access to the environment. This area of study has offered new approaches to environmental law and governance, environmental policy and planning, development, sustainability, and ecology.
Environmental studies as a field has pointed out that where communities are in proximity of environmentally hazardous or degraded environments there is greater threat to human health due to toxic waste, pollution and lack of access to food and other necessities.
The link below leads to an article on how Exxon Mobile modeled and predicted global warming with ‘shocking skill and accuracy’ starting in the 1970s.
To see the article click this link: Exxon Mobile The Harvard Gazette, by Alice McCarthy
Original source citation: G. Supran et al., Assessing ExxonMobil’s global warming projections. Science 379, eabk0063 (2023). DOI: 10.1126/science.abk0063
For example, the scholarship of Robert Bullard and the YouTube video below provide examples of the parameters used by specialists in this area.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVhS2ASZoeo
On the international scene, environmental consideration have raised question about dirty technologies, dangerous chemicals or waste materials (pollution havens).
The work of Dr. Brendan Coosaet focuses on the interconnectedness of global biodiversity.
