Industrial civilization yields costs and benefits. Costs include environmental degradation and hazards to health; benefits include technology and material comfort.
Environmental justice is the equitable, or ethical, distribution across the population of the costs and benefits of industrialization. Environmental injustice is the unethical distribution of the costs and benefits of industrialization based on some morally arbitrary attribute such as race, nationality, gender, or socioeconomic status. Distribution can be analyzed both domestically and globally. Defining “ethical” in the context of environmental justice is the purview of political philosophy.
Demography
Social, political, and economic dynamics result in the collocation of industrial operations and low-income residential areas (see Fig. 1) at disproportionately higher rates than middle-class and affluent communities. Evidence is abundant. Altgeld Gardens, a low-income, predominantly black community of Chicago, is ringed by...
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Keller, D.R. (2011). Environmental Justice. In: Chatterjee, D.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Justice. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4020-9160-5_100
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