Environmental Victims: New Risks, New Injustice

THIS EDITED VOLUME brings together literature on environment and development, human rights, social justice and workers rights, combining them to offer a discussion of “environmental justice”. It combines theory and case studies to explore the contradictions that environmental justice exposes, asserting that health-related illnesses caused by environmental sources at the community level and in the work place must be prevented, and victims must be compensated and protected. If a physically damaging violent act is considered to be an assault on social justice, then introducing environmental toxins such as lead into the atmosphere should also be viewed as a social justice issue. Environmental Victims challenges the concepts that have allowed polluters to continue introducing harmful elements into the human environment.

Williams writes that environmental law usually relates to damage caused to the physical world and, historically, has avoided human injury. Moreover, if human injury as a specific outcome is considered, it is more appropriate to draw on common law in relation to personal injury, where the principle is whether an act is deliberate or reckless. Thus, whilst a polluter might claim that the specific negative outcome of their act (say, for example, toxic dumping) was not foreseeable and thus not deliberate, under common law it could be considered reckless because it was not proven safe and, by nature, could be dangerous to others. For victims of environmental negligence, this is a crucial distinction, because compensation would be more likely if recklessness on the part of the polluter could be proven.

Part I explores the concepts involved in environmental justice and environmental
victimization. The causes of victimization are discussed, with a focus given to acts (such as polluting) and omissions (failing to provide adequate safety measures to prevent illness and injury) that create victims. Liability avoidance is also examined, including the diversionary tactics employed by industrial and other corporate enterprises to avoid providing compensation. The normative implications of a commitment to protecting people from becoming environmental victims for the principle of state sovereignty is discussed in Chapter 2. There it is argued that, although sovereignty enables states to prevent environmental victimization, there are structural reasons why they will often not do so even in formal democracies. Children's involvement in grassroots environmental activism, and their vulnerability to environmental hazards is explored at the end of Part I, with the question of how children's participation at different levels can be utilized in different social and cultural contexts, to widen the discussion surrounding environmental justice to include children.

Four case studies are highlighted in Part II. The first examines the impact of oil upon the lives of people in the small fishing community of Oloma, in the Niger Delta. Although oil is extracted from the area, causing environmental degradation and disrupting the people’s way of life, they have not been compensated. The Bhopal (India) movement's reaction to the industrial disaster there in 1984 is analyzed by one of the survivors and participants, revealing its shortcomings. The case of Bougainville, Papua New Guinea, highlights how far a nation-state will go to force an unwanted and environmentally destructive mining operation on its people, and demonstrates the nature of conflict between local populations and corporate interests, and the role of state violence in protecting corporate interests. Finally, the involuntary environmental and economic refugees fleeing to South Africa in search of fertile land and drinking water are a reminder of the diversity of environmental victims across the globe.

The third and last part of the book highlights solutions that have been developed as tools for environmental and social justice. The authors argue that to challenge the effec