Environmental Rights

Systems, Characteristics, and Environmental Justice

The environment has universally, in distinct ways, provided the basis for human existence, and formal and informal management regimes have evolved regarding access to it. Tensions emerge between groups regarding access to natural resources, and this stress is amplified when they are naturally, or made to be, “scarce.” At such times, the hierarchical structure of a given polity (or if global markets are involved, the interlinked capitalist system) may result in redistribution of resources according to the characteristics that determine power in that local system or overlapping multiple scales of systems. Such characteristics can include absolute or relative location, capital or class, connections to important political offices, gender, historical relations, linkages to other places or persons, military power, population size, or adjacency and political and economic linkages to powers outside the immediate region. Thus, environmental services become redistributed by the aforementioned systems at multiple scales to reflect these characteristics and power structures.

Injustices may occur in access to the quality or quantity of environmental services necessary for a certain group because they occupy an unfavorable position in the aforementioned hierarchies. The distribution of resources reflects the inequities in the system(s) they operate within. In addition, if the system extends beyond the local level, then it is not surprising when local people lose their environmental rights or have them stressed but are unable to work to improve their position. Thus, environmental rights are complicated by the multiscalar nature of a globalized world, the way we share it, and conflicting paradigms of development—and this can result in entrenched and systematic environmental injustice. Climate change is a high-profile example of this abstract nexus presently being played out from global to local scales.