Environmental Justice, Ecological Debt and Environmental Space
chain reaction #92, summer 2004-5
Environmental
Justice, Ecological Debt and Environmental Space: a framework for
change?
What is the political framework for environmental campaigning in Australia? Is it just about sustainable land management, cleaner production, the need to protect our last remaining old growth forests? Or is it also something else – about justice, solidarity and our place in the world?
In the early 21st century, it appears that corporate-defined concepts dominate much of the debate around 'sustainability'. If we want this to change, we will have to reclaim the debate with more radical ideas; like ecological debt, environmental space and environmental justice. We introduce these underlying concepts as a framework that can help inform any environmental activism, from local restoration work to international campaigning.
There is considerable debate about what a sustainable future might look like. This has lead Friends of the Earth to use the concept of 'environmental space with equity', based on the understanding that all people have a right to equal access to resources. The idea of environmental space is simple, yet radical in its implications. It tells us something we all know - that there are limits to the rate at which we can exploit the Earth's resources, and that we must make substantial cuts in resource use in countries like Australia if we are to share fairly with other parts of the world.
Environmental Space is the total global amount of environmental resources, such as energy, non-renewable raw materials, agricultural land, forests and their carbon absorption capacity, that humankind can use without reducing the access of future generations to the same. Environmental Space is limited and broadly quantifiable. However, to be truly fair, any equitable distribution of resources needs to take both past and future into account: by 'past' we mean the historical legacy of colonialism, which has meant that a small proportion of the world's population (the 'North': the USA, Canada, Western Europe, Japan, New Zealand and Australia) has consumed, and continues to consume, an entirely disproportionate proportion of the world's resources (we are around 23 per cent of the human population, consuming around 80 per cent of resources). This has created the ecological debt. By 'future' we mean the fact that human generations will come after us and there is an onus on us to leave the world in at least as good condition as it was when we arrived on it. We also need to leave space for non-human nature, for other species, to flourish and continue to evolve.
The North lives, to a large degree, from land which is 'appropriated' from elsewhere in the world. Land set aside for food production, fibre and other materials, ends up as exports to the North. For instance, the people of the Netherlands use the ecological functions of an area of land which is 15 times larger than their country to meet their material needs. Australia obviously has a more complex ecological debt because of the fact that it exports so much food and raw materials. While there is considerable support for the cancellation of economic debt (through initiatives like the Jubilee campaign), there is, as yet, very little debate about the enormous debt owed by the North to the South.
Each
person in the world has the same right (although no obligation) to
use an equal amount of global environmental space: that is, a fair
share of the Earth's resources. There is no reason why people from
the countries of the North should have more access to the Earth's
natural resources than those from the South. Apart from being
unfairly distributed, current levels of resource consumption
(including the use of the atmosphere for absorbing CO2 emissions) are
far beyond the Earth's capacities, and have been for at least 30
years (1). The key implication of the equity principle is that the
use of resources in rich countries must be cut back significantly,
whereas in many developing countries there is scope to increase
resource use to ensure a dignified life for all.
How would environmental space 'work'?
Environmental
space with equity is inherently focussed on justice. It is not just a
tool for measuring impacts. 'Fair shares' are worked out by dividing
the sustainable global availability of key resources such as energy
or productive land by the expected world population at a given target
year. Nations can then set practical targets for either increasing or
reducing their consumption of each resource (2). In these terms,
achieving sustainability means that each country uses more-or-less
the same amount of natural resources relative to its population
size.
As long as rich nations continue to over consume, the
people of the developing countries can also claim that right. But
if the peoples of the South exercise this right and achieve similar
absolute consumption levels, then world consumption will exceed
environmental limits even further than at present. A fundamental
element in achieving equitable resource distribution is to
acknowledgement there are limits to the Earth's resources.
Environmental Justice, Ecological Debt and Sustainability: a new alliance?
In recent
years, two fundamental concepts have helped renew the debate about
the transition towards sustainability, thus allowing greater
interconnection between the social and environmental movements.
These are environmental justice and ecological debt.
The
concept of environmental justice emerged from the struggles of
African American communities in the United States. Informed by their
experiences in the civil rights battles of the '60s, people began to
notice at first intuitively and then later more systematically that
the most polluting and environmentally damaging industries were
concentrated in predominantly Black, Native, and Latino regions and
neighbourhoods. Such environmental racism
illustrated the correlation between social and environmental
inequality, causing the most marginalised sectors of society to
receive a disproportionate share of the environmental impact created
by the socio-economic system. Although it was the economically
dominant classes that were largely responsible for this impact, they
were largely protected from the degradation that came with their
consumption. Waste and other threats from industrial processes were
released to the collective space, for instance, the atmosphere, and
those areas occupied by the non Anglo-Saxon and working class sectors
of society.
Previously,
movements concerned about human rights and those focussed on
conservation were largely occupying
parallel but separate political spaces. Use
of the term environmental justice allowed the environmental debate to
be framed in terms of rights and justice and not solely in terms of
conservation. The central premise was that all people are equally
entitled to a healthy environment, and that any structure or process
that deliberately targeted the most disadvantaged populations for
environmental risk and degradation was unfair. Such degradation,
where unavoidable, should be distributed equally through all sectors
of society. In this way, the movement against environmental
destruction and degradation evolved and increasingly became an arena
for the struggle for democracy and the affirming of universal human
rights.
Environmental Justice is necessary for
socio-environmental sustainability
Although the concept
of environmental justice originated in the United States, it has been
adopted and redefined by social movements all around the planet. It
has an extraordinary potential for politically renewing
environmentalism and making it more relevant to the struggle for
social transformation. Struggles for agrarian and urban reform, for
the promotion of a "policy of dignity" (which implies, for
example, a basic 'basket' of food, water, shelter, energy, and green
spaces), the fight to defend the collective space against the
encroachment of privatisation: all these efforts gain a much more
explicit and coherent environmental context when seen through the
'lens' of environmental justice. The defence
of the environment, in acquiring stronger social perspectives finds
itself part of, rather than separate to,
the movements for justice.
Ecological debt and
development
The concept of ecological debt was launched by
parts of the Latin American environmental movement of the 80's as a
way of critiquing the discussion around the financial, or external
debt. The basic idea was that the marginalisation of humanity that
was happening in terms of inequitable consumption and the degradation
of the Earth's natural resources could not be treated independently
of the ecological inequalities inherent in and developed by the
global systems of the last few centuries, which in turn lead to some
countries being financially indebted to others. A small minority of
high consumers are concentrated in the countries whose financial
institutions are the financial debt creditors, yet they are
ecological debtors to the rest of the world's population. The
explanation for this has two components. Firstly, the majority of
this inequity is the historical result of colonialism and
imperialism, which generated a legacy of disproportionate consumption
of the Earth's human and natural resources in favour
of certain regions, to the detriment of others. In and of itself,
this liability already constitutes a debt, even though its details
are not easily quantified.
Secondly, the disparity of
consumption patterns in the contemporary world results in a small
part of the population occupying a disproportional amount of the
planet's environmental space, producing, for example, the global
warming which threatens the rest of the human population, especially
the poorest communities who are least to blame for this problem. In
this sense, the ecological debt is not only a legacy from the past
but also, an ethical deficiency that expands daily.
It is not
difficult to perceive the political potential of the alliance of
these two concepts. After all, the ecological debt is created by the
effects of preserving an unjust global environmental situation, where
a minority has appropriated the majority of the Earth's resources and
exports the negative consequences of planetary degradation to the
poor majority. Environmental injustice at the global and national
levels generate internal and international ecological debts which
must then be paid off in some way. The concept of environmental
injustice critically analyses the roots of
contemporary environmental unsustainability at its various levels and
ties it to the over-consumption caused by the unfair and
disproportionate appropriation of the basic materials for survival.
The concept of ecological debt puts forward the ethical imperative
that this injustice must be faced and overcome, given that it is only
the payment of that political and moral debt that will enable human
development in every region of the planet that is just, balanced, and
sustainable. Global unsustainability is thus confronted by promoting
environmental justice and the political and financial repayment of
the ecological debt.
To be sustainable, we must equitably
redistribute the planet's resources. To do this, it is essential to
identify patterns of consumption and production that are
environmentally sustainable and appropriate to the balanced and
equitable development of humanity as a whole. This implies the need
for ethical personal consumption and the creation of a set of
guidelines for ethical and sustainable consumption patterns. This
could work as a great incentive to promote sustainable technologies
and practices. To put Gandhi's famous quote in a modern context:
'the Earth provides enough to satisfy everyone's
need, but not everyone's greed.'
--
Adapted from materials produced by Friends of the Earth Europe and the Workgroup on a Solidarity Socio-Economy (WSSE).
For further information on environmental space, see:
http://www.foeeurope.org/sustainability/
For further information on ecological debt, see:
ENRED
(the European Network for the recognition of the Ecological Debt);
http://www.enredeurope.org/principal.htm
Ecological debt campaign (Ecuador)
http://www.deudaecologica.org/
Christian Aid (UK)
http://www.christian-aid.org.uk/
(1)see the Living Planet report: http://www.panda.org/livingplanet/
(2) for details on how environmental space can be quantified, see:
http://www.foeeurope.org/sustainability/foeapproach/equity/t-frame-equity.htm
